Latin America
Related: About this forumReuters: Venezuelan 'resistance' movement struggles to bruise Maduro
Thu Apr 2, 2015 12:06pm EDT
Venezuelan 'resistance' movement struggles to bruise Maduro
VALENCIA/MERIDA, Venezuela | By Andrew Cawthorne and Girish Gupta
(Reuters) - Housewives stash bottles and fuel for Molotov cocktails. Activists run a network of safe houses. Masked youths block roads. A rifle-wielding dissident general makes a call to arms.
From clandestine meetings to guerrilla-style broadcasts, an amorphous and quixotic "resistance" movement has emerged across Venezuela aspiring to force President Nicolas Maduro from power and end 16 years of socialist rule in the OPEC nation. The most hardcore still sporadically barricade streets with burning trash and pelt security forces with stones, or occasionally torch a government vehicle, especially in the western Andean regions they nickname "the Wild West".
Some admit trying to connect with active and retired soldiers in the hope of a coup against Maduro.
"We want to bring down the government. There's no other way out," said one housewife in her fifties who helps coordinate the self-styled resistance in the central city of Valencia, a hotbed of protests last year that led to 43 deaths nationwide.
She hurled stones at police, ferried students around and stored materials to make petrol bombs and spiked tubes known as "Miguelitos" that are laid on roads to puncture police vehicles. Upset at the failure of those protests, she tries to help keep the movement alive by organizing secret meetings and forging contacts with former military officials.
More:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/02/us-venezuela-radicals-insight-idUSKBN0MT1P520150402
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)2002 Redux?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Venezuelan_coup_d%27état_attempt
Let's hope Obama can block any current reiteration of this 2002 CIA-backed
Coup attempt on Hugo Chavez.
Judi Lynn
(160,212 posts)He's the one the fascists in Venezuela called an "ape," and every racist name in the book. Even in the media. They mocked his manner of speaking, everything about him. He knew he had to move the country ahead as quickly as he possibly could to overcome the great barriers thrown in the way of the vast poor population by the fascist oligarchs all those long, long years of racist, unbridled greed and repression.
He was right, all along.
I have to watch this video again. We need to be reminded what kind of person he was, and what scum the fascists were to hate him.
What a guy. He knew things were going to get rough, but believed the people were worth it.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)from their Central American or Southern-Cone counterparts and that might be a big part of it
after Washington said "hand over Matta or we leak the names of 5 narco-colonels" a right-wing student union started a riot that ended up burning part of the US Embassy while the Army kept firefighters from arriving for two hours
even with a dirty Army the names were released and the hardliners kicked out