Venezuelans March in Caracas to Demand Release of Jailed Opposition Leaders Latin American Herald Tribune May 30, 2015
CARACAS – Thousands of people demonstrated Saturday in Caracas in support of jailed opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez and Daniel Ceballos, both on a hunger strike to demand their release and the scheduling of this year’s legislative elections.
The demonstrators, most of them wearing white, marched down one of the principal streets of the Venezuelan capital with banners and slogans calling for Lopez and Ceballos to be freed along with other political prisoners like the metropolitan mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, while slamming the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
Taking part in the march were the wives of those three jailed opposition leaders – Lilian Tintori, Patricia Gutierrez and Mitzy Capriles – as well as several leaders from Leopoldo Lopez’s Voluntad Popular (VP) party, and other opposition politicos like Maria Corina Machado.
National VP coordinator Freddy Guevara and the mayor of the El Hatillo municipality outside Caracas, David Smolansky, joined another two opposition councilors in shaving their heads. They were doing it in support of Patricia Gutierrez, who did the same recently in support of her husband, jailed since last July 26 in the central city of San Juan de los Morros.
“Today we have to work together, without hatred, without resentment, to reconstruct a democracy that no longer exists because only in a dictatorship do people go through what we’re suffering today, only a dictatorship holds a mayor prisoner,” the wife of Ceballos said as the march came to a close.
Leopoldo Lopez’s wife Lilian Tintori said she will call a “national day of fasting” that brings the opposition together on a hunger strike to demand, among other things, his release.
“We’re going to call for a national day of fasting, just one day and we’ll announce it in the coming hours, out of solidarity and for the love of our country,” Tintori said after the opposition march in east Caracas called by her husband from prison.
Among the requests of opposition prisoners was the demand that “political prisoners” be freed, an end to repression and censorship, and setting the date for legislative elections, on condition that they be carried out under the scrutiny of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU).
Joining Lopez and Ceballos on the hunger strike were the also jailed Alexander Tirado and Raul Baduel, who stopped eating last Tuesday, and another six Venezuelan students who stationed themselves two days ago inside a church in the Venezuelan capital.
Both Lopez and Ceballos have been behind bars for more than a year, accused of crimes related to their alleged responsibility for the violence that broke out during the anti-government protest of 2014, which took an official toll of 43 dead.
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