Huge crowds have gone back on to the streets of Venezuela’s cities to continue their campaign against President Nicolás Maduro’s alleged attempt to steal last week’s election and denounce his intensifying crackdown on opposition supporters.
Maduro said 2,000 people had been arrested and would face “maximum punishment”.
Tens of thousands of dissenters packed an avenue in the heart of the capital, Caracas, to hear María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who claims her candidate for the presidency, Edmundo González, was the true winner of the 28 July vote.
“Today is a very important day. After six days of brutal repression they thought they would silence us, frighten us and paralyse us … [But] we are going to go all the way,” Machado told a sea of supporters, many of them waving Venezuela’s tricolour flag or holding placards denouncing Maduro’s authoritarian regime.
“We are not afraid!” the crowd chanted back.
González’s claim to victory has been recognised by countries including the US, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru. Meanwhile the leftwing governments of Brazil and Colombia have yet to accept Maduro’s win despite their historical ties to the political movement he inherited after Hugo Chávez’s 2013 death. China and Russia have backed Maduro.
On Saturday lunchtime, caraqueños of all ages and from all walks of life hit the streets to demand an end to Maduro’s 11-year presidency, during which the oil-rich South American country has become increasingly authoritarian and slipped into a devastating economic and humanitarian crisis that forced millions to flee abroad.
They did so despite a crackdown by security forces in which hundreds of people have been arrested on terrorism charges and at least 11 killed.
“This morning I woke up to the news that they had taken my best friend because they went out to buy ice,” said one 28-year-old protester who asked not to be named for fear of suffering the same fate.
“Before I came out today my daughter threw herself on top of me and made me promise that I would come home,” added the woman, as thousands of people marched through the Las Mercedes district to see Machado speak.
Many protesters fretted about a round-up of targets being carried out by a widely feared counterintelligence unit that has been baptised Operation Tun Tun (Knock-Knock).
“It’s like a horror movie. It’s a nightmare,” said Andreina Canelón, a 24-year-old who was at Saturday’s march.
One demonstrator held a poster reading: “They are killing us.”
Canelón’s sister, Angélica, said opposition supporters would not be cowed. “The people are done – they are done with their bullshit – and they are ready to go until the very end,” the 28-year-old graduate vowed as Machado addressed the throng from the bonnet of a sound truck.
Maduro has called his opponents “terrorists” and “traitors” claiming they are part of a criminal far-right conspiracy against his supposedly leftist rule.
Angélica rejected that portrayal of the situation in Venezuela. “This is not about left and right. No. This is about a country and its right to be free. Nothing more,” she said.
For Tahyde Colmenares, who was also at the protest, the election was about seeing her family again. “All of my children and my grandchildren are out of the country,” the 78-year-old said, weeping as she described how they had fled Venezuela’s economic meltdown for the US and Brazil.
“I don’t know if they will come back to live here [if Maduro leaves power] but at least they will visit,” she said, claiming her tears were tears of joy prompted by the hope Machado’s campaign had instilled in her. “She represents freedom, progress and the happiness of so many Venezuelan men and women being able to come home.”
Maduro, who has refused to release proof of his supposed victory, organised his own protest on Saturday afternoon in an attempt to project strength, calling it “the mother of all marches”.
“There was no fraud. It’s a farce,” said one pro-Maduro marcher, 57-year-old Reinaldo Guevara, who manages a government-owned concrete plant.
Also among the thousands of government supporters was Albelys Gómez, 57, who said the opposition would have to accept Maduro’s win.
Addressing supporters at the presidential palace, Maduro said his forces had captured 2,000 people who would be sent to high-security jails and subjected to “maximum punishment”.
But as he spoke, Maduro faced fresh calls to release the vote tallies from the electronic voting machines used in the election, this time from Argentina’s former leftwing president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
“I am asking – not just for the sake of the people of Venezuela, or the opposition, or democracy – but for the very legacy of Hugo Chávez – that the tallies be published,” Fernández de Kirchner said at an event in Mexico.
In the week since the election, Maduro has struck a defiant tone and offered no hint that he is prepared to step down leaving observers fearful that the standoff could lead to violence in the coming weeks. Opposition leaders have called on the military to abandon Maduro but so far there has been no hint of that happening or of any other challenge to the president emerging from within his administration.
“It’s been 25 years since Chávez was first elected [and] there’s now such a network of interests built around Chavismo’s control of the state, and effectively criminal activity, that people just aren’t prepared to walk away from power,” said Tom Shannon, a veteran US diplomat who has been involved in Venezuela since the 1990s and knows many of the movement’s key players.
“And it appears that they’re prepared to endure significant international pressure and isolation in order to protect themselves and what they consider to be their economic interests,” Shannon added, warning: “We’re in a tricky moment … there’s going to be significant repression, I think.”