Also last night, in Los Nuevos Teques in Miranda state, four people where injured in a confrontation with the National guard. One of them received a bullet wound, and three others were injured with buckshot.
The governor of Tachira state (Jose Vielma Mora) announced this morning the arrival of 42 trucks carrying rice, sugar, cooking oil and 90 tonnes of flour into the state. He said that he was developing a security plan to deliver the supplies to different markets around the state while avoiding looting. He also said that groups of men on motorcycles have been forcing businesses in San Cristobal to close, and that he was looking into complaints of a shortage of motor oil in the state.
And keeping up with yesterday’s theme, a representative from the Red Medicos for la Salud (The Doctors for Health Network?) pointed out that there are currently over 100,000 Venezuelans on waiting lists for medical attention. This number is due to the fact that, according to the article, there is “a shortage of surgical equipment, medicine, plus failing hospital infrastructure”.
Yesterday, during a meeting with representatives from different medical groups, vice-minister of Health Juana Contreras said, “We have a crisis in the health sector, we have admitted this and we are working to resolve it. There are many problems in the public institutions in our country and the state is determined to approach [the issues]”.
Here a shot from the medical demonstrations yesterday, showing a man in white (presumably a medical worker) getting batoned by the National Guard:
Things have heated up a little bit since this morning, particularly in Merida, Barquisimeto and San Cristobal, where there have been confrontations starting in the mid-afternoon between demonstrators and the National Guard. Here are a couple of pictures:
From Altamira. The flag shown in the picture is Simon Bolivar’s “Guerra a Muerte” (literally “War to the death”, or “Fight to the death”), used during a time during Venezuela’s War of Independence against Spain:
This picture is from a confrontation in Merida just a little while ago:
And this one is also from Merida, showing protesters attempting to stand in the way of a National Guard truck:
This is a barricade in Altamira from around 3:10 PM Caracas time:
And this one shows youths in Barquisimeto, I believe, posing with a National Guard riot shield. The body armor the guy on the left is wearing partially reads “Venezuelan Students”:
General (Ret.) Angel Vivas is still doing his thing in Caracas. He tweeted this about 25 minutes ago:
It reads: “FANB [National Bolivarian Armed Forces] helicopter conducted reconnaissance in the Prados del Este zone [in Caracas] it flew very low over my house. They’re planning something in La Habana.”
It looks like things in Merida got more than a little hot, with at least a couple of people injured with buckshot. There are pictures of the injured here.
Here are a couple of videos:
This one was published yesterday, and is allegedly from Merida. It shows a group of hooded demonstrators throwing molotov cocktails at a National Guard truck driving by:
Another video, taken at another time in the same location showing possibly the same group of people, again throwing molotov cocktails at a National Guard truck:
At the beginning of the video above, there’s a bit of a disagreement between the man recording and another man in the crowd. The man recording is yelling “Bajen mas cerca!”, which means, “Move down, get closer!”. Another man is yelling, “No, no! Al aire, al aire!”, which means “Up in the air! Up in the air!”, as in “No, don’t go down and get closer, just throw them up higher in the air”
And here is another video, this one from Caracas (I believe). It shows demonstrators pushing back a line of National Guard troops.
I’ve translated some of what the crowd and the woman recording the video are saying below:
- Right at the start, the woman recording says: “We’re not afraid anymore! For Venezuela!” The crowd chants, “El pueblo esta en la calle, y no tenemos miedo!” “the people are in the streets, and we’re not afraid!
- At 1:05, the crowd chants, “Fuera! Fuera!”, meaning “Go out!” or “leave!”
- At 1:37, the crowd chants, “Nos roban, nos matan, y ustedes no hacen nada!” (“They rob us, they kills us, and you don’t do anything!”), and “Y no, y no, y no me da la gana! Una dictadura igualita a la Cubana!” (Literally, “I don’t want, I don’t want, a dictatorship just like the one in Cuba!”)
- At 2:45, the crowd chants, “El pueblo arrecho reclama su derecho (“The people, pissed off, demand their rights!”)
- At 3:25, the woman recording says, “This isn’t just my fight. It’s your as well, Venezuelan brother. We have to fight for our country.”
- At 4;55, “Fuera! Fuera! Fuera!” again.
- At 5:15 someone says, “Pero que se disuelvan y ya”, meaning, “Why don’t [the National Guard] just dissolve [the formation]?”.
- At 5:25, the crowd goes wild because the National Guard and Bolivarian Police start getting on trucks to leave the area.
- At around 6:00, the woman recording approaches one of the trucks and yells, “That’s what they have to do… if they don’t want to help, let them go to Cuba!” and someone near her yells, “The people rule here!” Someone yells, “We’re all the same! We’re all the same!”
- Starting at 6:55, the crowd starts chanting, “El Pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” (The people, united, will never be defeated!)
The president of the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello’s Fedaration of Students, Carlos Vargas, has called for a march tomorrow in Caracas, leaving Plaza Altamira at 10:00 AM with the Defensoria del Pueblo’s office as its destination. The Defensora del Pueblo, Gabriela Ramirez, got into some hot water recently when she tried to define torture as only taking place if it’s committed in the act of attempting to obtain a confession. The march has been called in response to the actions of security forces against protesters.
Carlos also said:
“We don’t want lame justice. We want them to tell us who the perpetrators of this violence are, and we want them imprisoned, because that’s the justice that a democratic state should implement, one that respects the rights of its citizens, one that protects those rights and promotes them.”
Tomorrow is an important day, since it was on February 12 that the first “big” demonstrations began to take place, and the protests became nation-wide. Whether or not people turn out tomorrow in the same or greater numbers as they have in the past – and as they did on February 12 – might determine the immediate future of this round of protests.
In Venezuela 