In response to the 17 February Guardian article How a first-time film-maker alerted the world to Venezuela’s student protests:
Anyone confused about who is perpetrating violence currently in Venezuela should watch the freely available video ‘April:Between Peace and Rage.’ In April 2013 Venezuela’s opposition narrowly lost the Presidential elections which democratically elected currently President Nicolas Maduro. They subsequently cried fraud and took to the streets for two days of violence which left 13 dead.
In a vicious attack on democratic freedom, snarling mobs surrounded buildings of the National Electoral Council (CNE), whose president, Tibisay Lucena, had her house attacked whilst Eva Golinger, editor of the chavista Correo del Orinoco newspaper, was assaulted while out with her year-old baby. Opposition supporters armed with pistols and smoke bombs burned down PSUV buildings, trashed subsidised food stores and public schools, smashed up no fewer than 20 Cuban-run free health clinics and attacked housing projects and the public transport system.
The opposition’s accusations of electoral fraud were exposed as empty posturing when the results of a two-month audit of 100% of the votes found a 99.98% correspondence between paper and electronic votes.
What we are seeing now in Venezuela is a repeat of the same tactics, with violent masked groups claiming to be students, barricading streets, setting fire to rubbish and cars, pelting civilians with rocks and molotov cocktails and then crying innocence when the Bolivarian National Guard confront them.
Sam McGill editor of www.vivavenezuela.co.uk
