Venezuela's poor join protests as turmoil grips Chávez's revolution

[freshwest]

20. Very troubling words from the link:

...In the Altavista area of Puerto Ordaz, in Bolivar state, witnesses said national guard troops fired rubber bullets and teargas to break up a student protest camp, and stood by as about 60 plainclothes government supporters on motorbikes opened fire at protesters. "The tanks, the guard and the motorizados were all shooting at the students. There are several wounded," said Ines Duran, who had been providing food and water to the students. "They have the weapons, we only have sticks and rocks..."

In Caracas, the focus of the unrest has been the streets of the affluent Chacao municipality, where night after night people have gathered to protest against shortages of basic goods, price inflation of more than 50% in a year and street crime that has cost more than 100,000 lives since the late president Chávez took office 15 years ago, ushering in a period of "Bolivarian revolution" that his successor, Nicolás Maduro, continues...


Trying to gauge what such figures mean in proportion to Caracas:

The population of Caracas on February 22nd 2014 is approximately 1,482,623. (Extrapolated from a population of 2,762,259 in 2001 and a population of 1,815,679 on December 12th 2010.)

http://www.evi.com/q/what_is_the_population_of_caracas

I've lived in cities of those sizes, more or less. The rate of death from violence and not natural causes would be considered an extreme emergency. Those are odd figures. but the number of deaths is an average over 15 years of over half-a-dozen death a day, and there may have been less in former years. A thread here on DU said that 50 people day were being killed. By crime or Maduro's forces, IDK.

Which is in stark contrast to the next paragraph at link:

The government has won successive elections on this platform, most recently in municipal polls late last year.

So, who is voting for him? And why is the rate of crime so high? I don't want to appear naive, but there is something terribly wrong going on in Venezuela.

Only MADem has explained it without going OTT. Many posters look at this strictly from their ideological leanings but I want to see what the solution is.

The description of Maduro's solution sounds ominous:

...Maduro has called the street actions "a fascist plan" and has vowed to eradicate them "as one eradicates an infection"...

Can't believe that they are all fascists, even if they are against the 'revolution.' I may be wrong, but some appear to be protesting the violence from criminals and Maduro's squads, described in a very disturbing way here:

The opposition blames the government for denying people a right to protest, and accuses the ruling camp of escalating the violence through the use of armed militia-like groups, or colectivos, trained by Cubans to control and intimidate demonstrators.

Shooting unarmed people from motorcycles cannot be called a sign of a democratic government. I'm unfamiliar with both sides of the Cuban revolution. We only hear from those who came to the USA and hate Castro, and those who think Cuba's UHC and revolution was a great thing.

And that their problems were due to American embargo, but other nations are not participating in that, and find nothing wrong in Cuba.

This sounds very, very dirty.