Two students were fatally shot in Venezuela on Monday night while protesting the government of President Nicolas Maduro, bringing the total killed there to 22 since protests began in early February.
Gisela Rubilar from Chile, 47, was killed in Mérida while clearing a barricade implemented by anti-government protesters, Reuters reported.
See also: Protests Sweep Venezuela: Answers to 6 Key Questions
"She was ambushed by extreme right-wing groups ... She was vilely murdered with a shot in the eye," said Alexis Ramirez, the governor of Mérida state. According to preliminary information, she was shot in the early hours on March 9 while "removing rubbish blocking the road next to her house in Merida,” Venezuela’s State Prosecutor’s Office added in a statement.
Outgoing Chilean President Sebastian Pinera issued a statement of his own, according to The Globe and Mail: "We’ve asked the Venezuelan government to investigate and give us all the information about the circumstances and cause of this death."
Elsewhere in Venezuela, in San Cristóbal, a student leader was fatally shot in the chest while manning a street barricade during a nighttime protest. Eyewitnesses to the attack told the BBC that Daniel Tinoco, 24, was attacked by armed men riding motorcycles. A local TV reporter told the AP that Timoco, a mechanical engineering student at the Experimental University of Tachira (UNET), was "one of the students who was always out on Carabobo Avenue (manning barricades) giving interviews. He was really enthusiastic."
Daniel Ceballos, the mayor of San Cristóbal, confirmed the death on Twitter.
Confirman el lamentable fallecimiento del Estudiante #UNET Daniel Tinoco, fue alcanzado x una bala en AvCarabobo #SC #Tachira
— Daniel Ceballos (@Daniel_Ceballos) March 11, 2014
Students, women and doctors alike have been protesting the government of Maduro since early February. Fed up with the rise in crime, a sluggish economy and wide shortages in food and medicine, they have taken to the streets in demonstrations that have grown increasingly violent.
Opposition leaders have been jailed and paramilitaries deployed while some say the government is stronger than ever. In a widely-shared op-ed in the New York Times on Monday, "Venezuela Goes Mad," Rafael Osio Cabrices writes: “The riots do not portend a Venezuelan Spring. For the government they are a welcome deflection of public attention from a faltering economy and rising crime. They may even invigorate this flaccid dictatorship.”
At a recent rally in Caracas, the defiant Venezuelan president — now facing his fifth week of street protests — told supporters, “We have faced a coup and neutralized it.”
"What would happen in the United States if a group said they were going to start something in the United States so that President Obama leaves, resigns, to change the constitutional government of the United States?" Maduro asked in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour last week. "Surely, the state would react, would use all the force that the law gives it to re-establish order and to put those who are against the Constitution where they belong."
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