The authoritarian socialist warned that he would respond with force, and his defense minister pledged the armed forces’ “most absolute loyalty” to him. On Tuesday morning, masked men in black forced opposition leader Freddy Superlano and two members of his team into a vehicle in Caracas and drove them away.
On Monday, crowds marched to the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, blocking streets, banging pots and pans and demanding the end of the socialist state founded by Hugo Chávez a quarter-century ago.
Across the country, protesters burned billboards of Maduro and destroyed statues of Chávez.
Police responded with tear gas and some gunfire. At least 132 people were arrested and six killed nationwide, the rights group Foro Penal reported.
Forty-eight soldiers and police officers were wounded and one soldier killed, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López said, in what he called “violent actions promoted by the Venezuelan extreme right” during a “media coup d’état” supported by North American imperialism.”
The apparently spontaneous demonstrations appeared to stand apart from the several waves of civil unrest aimed at the Venezuelan government over the years in that many were led by people from working-class neighborhoods that historically have been strongholds of support for Chavez, Maduro and their movement, called chavismo.
“The whole mountain is coming down. Nobody wants it anymore,” said Deivis Limis, 40. He said he had walked along a highway for more than four hours from his neighborhood of Caucaguita to join jcrowds in the capital.
“We aren’t protesting, we’re asking for our votes. He lost a clear loss. He has to leave,” Limis said. “We can’t continue in this yoke that he has on us.”
María Corina Machado, the most prominent and popular opposition leader, called on Venezuelans to join her outside the United Nations mission here Tuesday morning to “defend González’s victory.”
Maduro ordered security forces to quell the protests in a “maximum mobilization.”
“We’ve seen this movie before,” he said in televised remarks. “We know how to face these situations and how to defeat the violent ones.”
Maduro is under investigation by the International Criminal Court, the first probe of its kind in Latin America, into claims that his security forces participated in the torture and extrajudicial killings of dissidents during street uprisings against him in 2017.
