| ArnoldRimmer said: At first I was a bit surprised that the few users here saying to live in Venezuela pretty much all seem to be supporting the protests, as I've read an article quoting numbers that a private market research bureau just released. According to their survey, not even every fourth Venezuelan (23%) believes the current protests to be wise or that replacing Maduro would even bring positive change. And almost 75% believe that if even Maduro should be replaced, this should be done the "democratic way" - by public vote, not by violent protest from armed groups. I guess this can be explained by unrepresentative/small sample size. It seems that similar to the Iranian protests a few years ago, the protesters are not representative of the whole population, but usually belong to a more or less specific population group. In Iran for example, the protesters were almost exclusively from relatively wealthy urban (upper) middle class youths. The situation in Venezuela seems to be quite similar. So considering that video games are probably still too expensive for typical, relatively poor Venezuelan families, I assume that the Venezuelans posting here tend to be from relatively wealthy middle-class families as well, and are thus likely to feel similar to the protesters. Anyway, I hope this Capriles guy does not come to power. From what I've read, he seems to be a pretty bad politician who would do just about anything to come to power. |
that is not true, in fact it was Capriles the one who did not agreed to call people to the streets, it was leopoldo lopez who did that. (and he call to pacific protests, even if he would have not done that, it was bound to happen eventually, just last year, there were around 5000 protests nationwide, most of them related to reinvindications or because of the social crisis, insecurity, scarcity of basic goods, one of the biggest inflations of the world, etc)
Is true that most people do not support the protests if the approach is that Maduro abandon the power. But the majority (I mean the people with the opposition) thinks that the protests should continue if they have an specific approach, like the ones I mentioned before. The opposition has always said that the way to get out of this government is the constitutional way or at least the principal leader, which is Capriles. The constitution establishes that we have the right to protest if they are pacific of course.
The problem is that most of the manifestations that have occurred the last days, nationwide, are spontaneous. Is just the society going out to the streets because they are mad. Mad with the government because of all that have happened the last few days (the dead students, the armed groups, the brutal repression, the tortures, etc) and of course their call is to throw down this regime. But I don’t think that’s the answer, it doesn’t help at all if that happens.
The other thing is that the country is totally polarized, a big part of the population supports the government, but another big part are against it. Is like half and half. And that’s a very complicated situation, you see part of society protesting, but another part is just calm going to their works like nothing’s happening. We have become and intolerant society and that doesn’t help with the radicalization of the manifestations.
most of the opposition is middle and upper class people, I think that’s true, but there’s part of the lower class that do not support this government or they are being affected by the economic and social crisis but not necessarily are against it. And we have seen that in the protests, a lot of the lower class neighborhoods have joined the protests and that was very surprising. Also the manifestations did not begin with the opposition leader leopoldo lopez call to go out to the streets, the protests began before February 12, in the state of Tachira (that state that was militarized). Because the students started to protest there. In that area there has almost been like a month of protests. And then the students call expanded nationwide. Some of the opposition leaders joined to that call, and of course they move more people.
The events of February 12 provoked the radicalizations of the protests because of what happened that day.
