200 Injured in Venezuela as Rioters Protest Prices

CARACAS, Venezuela —  Angry mobs across Venezuela set fire to cars and buses, battled police and guardsmen and looted hundreds of stores Monday to protest stiff increases in gasoline prices and transportation fares.

The riots injured at least 200 people in Caracas and the Guarenas shantytown 30 miles east of the capital, a police report said. There was also an unconfirmed report of a fatality.

Rioting broke out in at least seven cities and towns, and independent reports estimated damage nationwide to be in the millions of dollars.

“It is a popular uprising. There are riots everywhere. They are all furious,” Police Inspector Jose Lara Montilla, who commanded a police unit in downtown Caracas, told a reporter. All 6,000 police officers in Caracas were mobilized, said Alex Martinez, deputy police commissioner.

Sackings continued in downtown Caracas at nightfall, and public transportation ground to a halt, leaving about 100,000 commuters stranded, officials said

A 32-year-old pregnant woman was fatally shot in Guarenas, according to a reporter for the newspaper La Voz de Guarenas, quoting police sources.

Television showed rioting in Maracaibo, San Cristobal, Valencia and Puerto La Cruz, among other cities.

By all accounts, the violence occurring during the new administration of Social Democratic President Carlos Andres Perez was the worst that this usually peaceful nation has suffered in decades.

Interior Minister Alejandro Izaguirre warned in a nationally televised address that the government will not tolerate further public disorder, and he defended the price increases that triggered the unrest.

The increases were “not capricious but mandated by necessity, “ he said. “The government was compelled to dictate economic measures given the seriousness of an unprecedented economic crisis.”

Venezuela’s economy, prosperous during the 1970s, is now trapped in a deep recession because of persistently weak oil prices and a $33-billion foreign debt.