Maduro Fights Back With Targeted Killings and Media Blackout

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Bloomberg

Facing mounting pressure to step down as Venezuela’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro has begun a ruthless crackdown, terrorizing poor neighborhoods with deadly nighttime raids and blocking rivals’ efforts to spread their message on social media.

 

 

Since protests against Maduro began last week, the socialist regime has regularly sent the police’s elite Special Action Force racing into Caracas slums on personnel carriers and motorcycles. Its masked members, all in black, attack demonstrators with weapons including tear gas, guns and even grenades. They settle long-standing scores and rob residents’ homes, eyewitnesses say. At least 35 people have died amid the demonstrations, adding to scores of deaths in two years of unrest.

Inside Venezuela, the violence is hidden. The regime has drowned out forces seeking to topple it, using rolling internet blackouts and gag orders that have largely stopped the free flow of information.

 

 

Defensive Action

Though Maduro on Tuesday prevented the country’s self-proclaimed interim president, Juan Guaido, from leaving Venezuela, he has left him free to make pronouncements, speak with foreign leaders and hold daytime rallies like a massive march planned for Wednesday. Outside the international eye, the information blackouts and killings are a vigorous attempt to extinguish the biggest threat since he took office in 2013, beginning a career of mismanagement that left this once-wealthy nation sanctioned and starving.

 

 

“Maduro won’t let go of power easily,” Jesus Gonzalez, a motorcycle taxi driver in the vast Petare slum, said Tuesday. “He doesn’t mind pumping anyone who protests against him full of lead."

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Maduro the mobster...