COMPLAINT LIST
Although their movement is smaller than those in Brazil, Ukraine and the Middle East, the protesters in Venezuela share a similarly amorphous list of grievances and causes.
Some want Maduro out now. All complain about crime, inflation and shortages of basic goods. Demands to free detainees, especially hardline opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, have become an increasingly loud cry on the streets.
“Look what they’re doing to us,” said student Pedro Romero, showing an injury on his leg from a gas canister in the Caracas clashes. “That’s how they treat the future of this country.”
As dusk fell, protesters moved to the capital’s Plaza Altamira and fighting continued with security forces.
Some demonstrators broke windows and vandalized a local office block, hauling chairs and desks outside to sit in the street as piles of rubbish burned behind them.
The protests have wrong-footed the moderate leadership of Venezuela’s opposition coalition, including two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, who lost to Maduro by just 1.5 percentage points in last year’s vote.
His strategy had been to work patiently in grassroots communities while waiting for the next electoral opportunity, parliamentary elections in 2015, but now firebrand opposition leaders and students are taking the lead.
Other Latin American nations, though deeply worried, have taken a relatively low-key approach to Venezuela’s crisis.
Leftist allies have backed Maduro’s right to defend himself against “coup plotters” while more conservative governments have urged dialogue but in moderate terms.
Maduro broke diplomatic ties with Panama after it pushed for a meeting of the Organization of American States to discuss Venezuela. Caracas views the OAS as a U.S. pawn.
Foreign ministers from South America’s Unasur group of governments met in Chile on Wednesday to discuss Venezuela.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Venezuela’s neighbors should take the lead in helping mediate the situation, and rejected Maduro’s repeated accusations that Washington was deliberately stirring up trouble against him.
“We’ve become an excuse. We’re a card they play,” Kerry told a U.S. House of Representatives committee. “And I regret that, because we’ve very much opened up and reached out in an effort to say, ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’.”
Oil exports, which provide 95 percent of Venezuela’s revenues, remain unaffected by the crisis.
(Additional reporting by Girish Gupta and Eyanir Chinea in Caracas, Fabian Cambero in Santiago and Jim Loney in Washington; Editing by James Dalgleish and David Gregorio)
Article Appeared @http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/12/us-venezuela-protests-idUSBREA2B1FN20140312