A Venezuelan policeman died after he was shot in the neck in clashes with anti-government demonstrators in Caracas angered by pre-dawn raids on their protest camps.
Authorities demolished the camps and detained 243 people in the surprise early morning raids, striking at the remaining bastions of a months-long and at times deadly movement led by students against the leftist administration of President Nicolas Maduro.
Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres said the sites were “being used by more violent groups to commit terrorist acts.”
But hours later, groups of youths were back out on the streets of the capital, where they were met by tear gas and rubber bullets.
Authorities declined to identify the Bolivarian National Police officer who was shot dead, while Yoryi Carvajal, police chief of the Caracas district of Chacao, said another police officer was shot and wounded in the same incident.
Two more were “wounded by blunt objects,” Carvajal said.
At least 42 people have died and more than 700 have been injured since students and other opponents of the socialist government took to the country’s streets in February to protest rampant crime, runaway inflation and shortages of basic goods.
Over the past month, the protest movement has largely been concentrated in Occupy-style encampments in Caracas, with the main one set up in a tony neighborhood opposite the office of the United Nations Development Program.
That site — which consisted of hundreds of tents and blocked three of six lanes of a major thoroughfare — was ravaged in the raid.
“Very few young people were able to escape the onslaught,” said lawyer and human rights activist Elenis Rodriguez.
Rodriguez Torres said police seized drugs, weapons, explosives, mortars, grenades and gas canisters during their operation — “everything you would use to confront the security forces on a daily basis.”
Student leader Juan Requesens vowed the demonstrators would not be deterred.
“The students will pursue their fight for rights,” he said.
– Key hearing delayed –
The police raids came just hours before a hearing for jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez was postponed.
Lopez “has again been transferred to the Ramo Verde military prison,” said a statement from his Popular Will party.
The announcement did not specify a new court date.
“What are they afraid of? Of the truth? They know I should be freed,” the party, via Twitter, quoted Lopez as saying.
The Harvard-educated economist has been in custody at a military jail since February 18 for allegedly inciting deadly violence during the protests. He was arrested in the midst of a massive opposition rally.
The arrests of Lopez and other opposition leaders have stoked the demonstrations, and their release was one of the conditions set by the opposition in talks aimed at ending the crisis.
In Washington, Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson said the Venezuelan government’s actions “do not support the efforts at the dialogue table.”
Jacobson also told a Senate hearing the US was still considering sanctions against those responsible for human rights violations and “will use those when we think the time is right.”
The opposition-government talks have suffered stops and starts since they began, with some sessions postponed at the last minute.
A round of negotiations planned for this week has been postponed until next week.
– Force ‘not solving problems’ –
Maduro, narrowly elected last year to succeed late longtime leader Hugo Chavez, has described the protests as a coup attempt in the oil-rich OPEC nation that has seen inflation of near 60 percent.
People often stand in line for hours outside supermarkets and consider themselves lucky if they leave with basics such as sugar, milk or toilet paper.
Most economic experts blame the South American country’s problems on a decade of rigid currency and price controls, as well rising debt, dependence on imports and stagnant economic growth.
The “use of brute force to limit freedom of expression stimulates more aggressive and dangerous protests that make dialogue more difficult,” political analyst Luis Vicente Leon told AFP.
“You can crush your opponent, but you are not solving the problems.”