Street clashes turn deadly as Venezuela’s power struggle deepens

CARACAS, Venezuela — At least 11 people — including one soldier — have died and about 750 more have been arrested as a result of protests in Venezuela following the highly contentious presidential election over the weekend, according to government officials, rights groups and relatives of the victims.

The nation’s autocratic leader, President Nicolás Maduro, was declared the winner of another six-year term, but his government has refused to release the full results and many countries, including the United States, have said the vote was marred by widespread irregularities.

Both sides of the country’s political divide called on followers to take to the streets, which resulted in deadly clashes Monday. The demonstrations continued Tuesday, signaling that the crisis was far from over.

By midmorning Tuesday, hundreds of people had gathered outside the United Nations office in Caracas, the capital, denouncing Maduro’s being declared the winner, handily beating a former diplomat, Edmundo González.

“We are totally united,” said Robert Castellanos, 46, a chef who was an election monitor in his district, where he said González had received three times as many votes as the president. “This has been the biggest fraud in the history of Latin America.”

Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly and the head of Maduro’s campaign, also called for massive marches Tuesday from traditional government strongholds to Miraflores, the presidential palace.

“We are going to Miraflores to defend our right to life, our right to freedom, and, above all, our right to choose and to defend the result of the election,” he said.

Protests that broke out in Caracas and in other parts of Venezuela on Monday appeared to have turned deadly.

Foro Penal, a human rights organization, said in a preliminary count that at least six people died amid the protests throughout the country. Families who were gathered at the medical examiner’s office in Caracas reported at least four more people who were shot at protests, who were not in the human rights group’s count.

One soldier died after being shot in the neck, and 48 police officers and soldiers were injured, the Ministry of Defense said. The ministry said hundreds of electoral centers, elections council offices and machines were vandalized in acts of sabotage by the “extreme right.”

González called for the police and armed forces to respect the constitution.

“Unfortunately, in the past hours, we’ve received reports of people killed, dozens of injured and detained,” González said in a video posted on Instagram. “To the security forces and armed forces, we insist that you respect the will Venezuelans expressed on the 28 of July and stop the repression of peaceful protests.”

An opposition politician was arrested Tuesday in Sebucán, east of Caracas, his supporters announced. Videos shared on social media showed Freddy Superlano, a former presidential candidate, being taken away by masked armed men.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced Tuesday that 749 people had been arrested on charges that included terrorism and incitement to hatred.

He described the unrest as the seeds of a “civil war.”

“We have had a kind of unrest, a country in flames,” Saab said.

The marches Tuesday followed a day of tense and spontaneous protests that took place in the capital. Large groups of young men fanned out from neighborhoods where the government had long enjoyed strong support to demand Maduro’s ouster after 11 years in power. As they marched through the streets, they tore down his campaign signs and set them on fire.

Several statues of Maduro’s mentor, former President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, were toppled. Maduro quickly ordered new ones built.

Election authorities announced that Maduro had won Sunday’s presidential election by a margin of 7 percentage points. But the government has yet to publish precinct-by-precinct vote counts results and is facing increasing international pressure to do so.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado released data that she said showed González winning in a landslide.

Venezuela suspended flights to Panama and the Dominican Republic after those countries questioned the official election results. Venezuela’s foreign minister announced that the country was expelling diplomatic missions from seven Latin American countries that had condemned the official election results.

Maduro said he was relaxed about the fallout from the election and the claims of fraud, and had “slept like a baby” Sunday night.

“The regime slept anxiously while we did not sleep, because we were very busy,” Machado said, explaining that the opposition was occupied scanning hundreds of pages of election results and building a website to show who had really won the election.

Using paper tallies that political party monitors receive after the count from each voting station, Machado released her own results. The opposition has about 73% of the tallies from Sunday’s vote, she said, which showed that González received more than 3.5 million more votes than Maduro.

Though some people reported having used the website the opposition had created to check election results, the site kept crashing under the weight of voters trying to check their precinct results.

On the government side, Ivanova Rodríguez, a spokesperson for Venezuela’s elections council, when asked when results would be made publicly available, said: “In progress.”

The mass demonstrations raise the possibility of clashes like those Venezuela has seen several times before under Maduro, when anti-government protests were violently suppressed by security forces.

But this time, the protests took a surprising turn when low-income people who live in the hills surrounding the capital, which were traditionally government strongholds, joined opposition rallies.

“We have never seen anything like this before, where people of all social statuses are on the same side,” said Miguel Reyes, 70, who joined Machado’s rally Tuesday. “We’re all in this together.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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