Venezuela’s opposition prepared to march in silence this weekend to honour a dozen people killed in three weeks of protests demanding that the government of President Nicolas Maduro hold delayed elections and address a growing economic crisis.
Twelve people have been killed in a renewed wave of demonstrations this month in incidents primarily involving security forces or armed civilians.
Another eight were electrocuted in a looting incident that took place following a protest.
Opposition leaders blame a heavy-handed crackdown by security forces, who have arrested hundreds of people and on several occasions flooded hospitals and clinics with tear gas.
Ruling Socialist Party officials say the demonstrations, in which protesters throw rocks at police and block streets with burning debris, are violent disruptions of public order meant to overthrow the government.
Vice-President Tareck El Aissami accused the opposition of sponsoring a “spiral of terrorism” to trigger a coup.
Senior opposition leader Henrique Capriles fired back that the government’s “savage repression” was causing the violence.
This weekend’s protest, however, was to be a silent one out of respect for those who died.
“(The demonstration) today shall be a thundering and historic silence that beats on the conscience of the oppressor,” wrote opposition legislator Miguel Pizarro via Twitter.
Marches are planned for cities around the country and in the capital Caracas, where the opposition will gather in 20 different places and march to the headquarters of the country’s Catholic archdiocese.
After the weekend show of silent defiance, the centre-right opposition plans to return to a more confrontational strategy tomorrow, when it is calling for Venezuelans to block roads in a bid to grind the country to a halt.
Anger over the OPEC nation’s triple-digit inflation and Soviet-style product shortages boiled over after the government-leaning Supreme Court last month briefly assumed the powers of Congress, triggering accusations that Maduro was building a dictatorship.
The court walked back the measure after international condemnation, but Maduro’s government further fuelled the protests by barring Capriles, the opposition’s most popular politician, from holding office for 15 years.
The opposition says the elections council should call elections for governors that were supposed to be held last year, and accuse the council of indefinitely delaying them because the Ruling Socialist party would likely lose in many states.
The next presidential elections are scheduled for late 2018.
Demonstrations have generally started with daytime marches that are broken up by National Guard troops.
They usually devolve from there into confused melees between troops and protesters that stretch well into the evening.
The last week has seen an increase in late-night looting in working class areas.
Unrest that began late on Thursday night in the Caracas neighbourhood of El Valle left 11 people dead from either electrocution or gunfire.
The OPEC nation’s economy has been in free-fall since the collapse of oil prices in 2014.
Protesters blame Maduro – heir of the “Bolivarian revolution” launched by the late Hugo Chavez in 1999 – for an economic crisis marked by shortages of food, medicine and basic goods.
Maduro says the protests against him are part of a US-backed coup plot.
Pressure on the socialist president has been mounting since 2014, as falling prices for Venezuela’s crucial oil exports have sent the once-booming economy into a tailspin.
According to pollster Venebarometro, seven in 10 Venezuelans disapprove of Maduro, whose term does not end until 2019.
Residents described terrifying scenes on Thursday night and early Friday in the Caracas neighbourhoods hit by riots and looting.
“It was like a war,” said Carlos Yanez, a resident of the southwestern district of El Valle. “The police were firing tear gas, armed civilians were shooting guns at buildings.”
Videos shot by residents showed people throwing bottles out their windows at the gunmen in the streets below, shouting “Murderers!”
As residents and workers cleaned up the destruction on Friday, groups of people, including children, scavenged for food amid the wreckage.
Prosecutors said that they had opened an investigation.
In recent days, unrest has erupted in the flashpoint western city of San Cristobal and several other cities.

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