CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela’s increasingly embattled president called Monday for a new constitution as an intensifying protest movement entered a second month amid clashes between police and demonstrators.
After hundreds of thousands took to the streets again to call for his ouster, President Nicolas Maduro announced that he was calling for a citizens assembly and a new constitution for the economically flailing South American nation. He said the move was needed to restore peace and stop his political opponents from trying to carry out a coup.
Opposition leaders immediately objected, charging that Maduro was seeking to further erode Venezuela’s constitutional order.
Earlier in the day, anti-Maduro protests tried to march on government buildings in downtown Caracas, but police blocked their — just as authorities have done more than a dozen times in four weeks of near-daily protests. Officers launched tear gas and chased people away from main thoroughfares as the peaceful march turned into chaos.
Opposition lawmaker Jose Olivares was hit in the head with a tear gas canister and was led away with blood streaming down his face. Some demonstrators threw stones and gasoline bombs and dragged trash into the streets to make barricades.
A separate government-sponsored march celebrating May Day went off without incident in the city.
Between the two demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people filled central roads and highways of the city.
At least 29 people have died in the unrest of the past month and hundreds have been injured.
People of all ages and class backgrounds are participating in the protests. The unrest started in reaction to an attempt to nullify the opposition controlled-congress, but has become a vehicle for people to vent their fury at widespread shortages of food and other basic goods, violence on a par with a war zone, and triple-digit inflation. Maduro accuses his opponents of conspiring to overthrow him and undermine the country’s struggling economy.
Protesters have begun showing up for demonstrations with medical masks and bandanas to protect from the clouds of tear gas that police often deploy without warning. Gas masks are hard to find in the shortage-plagued economy, and the government is limiting people bringing them in from abroad.
Many protesters vowed Monday to keep pressuring the government.
“We’re ready to take the streets for a month or however long is needed for this government to understand that it must go,” said Sergio Hernandez, a computer technology worker.
Authorities set up checkpoints that snarled traffic on main highways and closed the city’s subway system, in what opposition leader Henrique Capriles called a futile attempt to hamper the anti-government march.
“The truth is out and no one can stop it,” Capriles said.
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Hannah Dreier on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hannahdreier . Her work can be found at https://www.ap.org/explore/venezuela-undone .
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