Venezuela protests spread to neighboring countries

As a second day of widespread protest rips their home nation, Venezuelans who have fled for freedom or to avoid starvation are gathering outside Venezuelan embassies on April 20, to add their voices to the cry for change.

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is violent, oppressive, incompetent, and corrupt, the protesters said.

It is hard to argue against them. The once-wealthy nation is now facing severe food shortages, lack medicine, and inflation has ruined the economy.

Worse, its crime rate is among the worst in the world, with violent crimes like kidnapping and murder leading the way. Some sources said Venezuela has the highest murder rate of any city in the world not in a war zone.

Meanwhile Maduro is jailing his opposition, filling the prisons with political prisoners.

Demonstrators and a soldier died in protests on April 19.

At the protest in Bogotá, Colombia,  Colombian former President Alvaro Uribe called for the army to stand down, “The Venezuelan soldiers and Venezuelan police should defy the orders of the dictatorship, and put the brakes on any type of action which attacks the Venezuelan people, and notify the dictatorship that the Venezuelan army is not there to repress the Venezuelan people in the name of the dictatorship, but rather to defend the path, which allows Venezuela to return to enjoying democracy.”

Most of the protesters outside Venezuela left because the alternative was starvation.

“When that government leaves, I just want to go back to my family,” said student Anais Romero.

“I left my parents, everything over there because of a  miserable, corrupt government that doesn’t let us be happy.

“There are no freedoms in Venezuela. There is no democracy. That is false, false, false,” he said.

President Maduro blames the United States for his country’s problems.

He said the United States wants to destabilize Venezuela.