Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 32
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The family of a Houston-based Citgo oil executive convicted and ordered to prison in Venezuela alongside five others appealed directly to President Nicolás Maduro on Friday for mercy. In an open letter, relatives of José Pereira, 63, wrote to Maduro that he has a long list of health problems that need medical attention. They ask for Maduro to free him — and the other five — so they can return home to their families in the United States. "Our purpose for this letter is not to enter into legal tirades about the case,"...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — With gas lines across Venezuela growing, a controversial shipping magnate has stepped in to prevent the country from running out of fuel amid the coronavirus pandemic, The Associated Press has learned. The fuel shortage, in the nation that sits atop the world largest crude reserves, is the latest threat to Nicolas Maduro's rule at a time he is under intense U.S. pressure to resign. Wilmer Ruperti's Maroil Trading Inc. billed state-owned oil monopoly PDVSA 12 million euros last month for the purchase of up to 250,000 ba...
CABIMAS, Venezuela (AP) — Nobody lives as closely with the environmental fallout of Venezuela's collapsing oil industry as the fishermen who scratch out an existence on the blackened, sticky shores of Lake Maracaibo. The once prized source of vast wealth has turned into a polluted wasteland, with crude oozing from hundreds of rusting platforms and cracked pipelines that crisscross the briny tidal bay. Much of it coats the fishermen's daily catch of blue crab that has to be scrubbed clean before it's shipped to market in the United States and e...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The United States often takes a leading role in calling out the world's most dangerous places, warning its people about the risks of traveling to countries that are at war, under terrorist threats, experiencing civil unrest or displaying significant anti-American sentiment. The latest mass shootings have triggered a sharp role reversal, with three countries warning their citizens about the risks of traveling to the U.S. Venezuela, Uruguay and Japan issued warnings to varying degrees following the deaths of 31 people o...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro oversaw a grand military parade to mark the country's independence day Friday, reveling in his might as commander in chief as the embattled socialist leader comes under mounting criticism for using brutal tactics to crush his opponents. Maduro applauded and pumped his fist as soldiers marched past, tanks rolled by and fighter jets streaked overhead at a Caracas military base. A unit of camouflaged special forces, guns drawn, shouted their loyalty as they paraded by the pr...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó on Saturday said he's instructed his political envoy in Washington to immediately open relations with the U.S. military in a bid to bring more pressure on President Nicolás Maduro to resign. The leader said he's asked Carlos Vecchio, who the U.S. recognizes as Venezuela's ambassador, to open "direct communications" toward possible military "coordination." The remarks, at the end of a rally Saturday, mark one of his strongest public pleas yet for greater U.S. involvement in the...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelans heeded opposition leader Juan Guaidó's call to fill streets around the nation Wednesday but security forces showed no sign of answering his cry for a widespread military uprising, instead dispersing crowds with tear gas as the political crisis threatened to deepen. Thousands cheered Guaidó in Caracas as he rolled up his sleeves and called on Venezuelans to remain out in force and prepare for a general strike, a day after his bold attempt to spark a mass military defection against President Nicolas Mad...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Opposition leader Juan Guaidó took a bold step to revive his movement to seize power in Venezuela, taking to the streets Tuesday to call for a military uprising that drew quick support from the Trump administration and fierce resistance from forces loyal to socialist Nicolas Maduro. The violent street battles that erupted in parts of Caracas were the most serious challenge yet to Maduro's rule. And while the rebellion seemed to have garnered only limited military support, at least one high-ranking official an...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A previously little-known Venezuelan congressman, Juan Guaidó, leaped to the front stage of Venezuela's political conflict early this year by declaring himself interim president in a bid to force the removal of President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro loyalists so far have stopped short of arresting Guaidó, but that may not last long. A pro-government assembly voted this week to strip Guaidó of the immunity enjoyed by congressmen, paving the way for him to be prosecuted and potentially jailed for allegedly violating the cons...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The U.S. said late Monday that it is pulling its last remaining diplomats from Venezuela, saying their continued presence at the country's embassy in Caracas had become a "constraint" on U.S. policy as the Trump administration aggressively looks to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro. The announcement came from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a tweet shortly before midnight comes as Venezuela struggles to restore electricity following four days of blackouts around the country. The U.S. has led an international e...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela's worst power and communications outage on Friday deepened a sense of isolation and decay, endangering hospital patients, forcing schools and businesses to close and cutting people off from their families, friends and the outside world. While electricity returned to some parts of Caracas nearly 24 hours after lights, phones and the internet stopped working, the blackout was another harsh blow to a country paralyzed by economic and political turmoil. Many of the few shops that were open were only accepting c...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Opposition leader Juan Guaido said Tuesday that he will try to run caravans of badly needed food and medicine into Venezuela but won't start for nearly two weeks, a timeline that threatens to deflate momentum toward unseating entrenched President Nicolas Maduro. Surrounded by thousands of cheering supporters, Guiado set Feb. 23 as the date for bringing in the badly needed U.S. assistance that has been warehoused on the Colombian border since last week, but he provided few details. The 11-day wait was sure to be a disap...
PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela (AP) — Nieves Ribullen, a Venezuelan oil worker sick of struggling to get by as his country falls apart, is betting it all on far-away Iraq's Kurdish region to give his family a better life. Over the years he's watched dozens of co-workers abandon poverty wages and dangerous working conditions at the rundown complex of refineries in Punto Fijo on Venezuela's Caribbean coast for jobs in far-flung places like Kuwait, Angola and Chile. Now it's his turn. Leaving his wife and three children behind, he'll soon ship out to I...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Momentum is growing for Venezuela's opposition movement led by lawmaker Juan Guaido, who has called supporters back into the streets for nationwide protests Saturday, escalating pressure on embattled President Nicolas Maduro to step down. A defiant Maduro's socialist government has called on its own loyalists to flood the streets waving flags to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Bolivarian revolution launched by the late Hugo Chavez. The dueling demonstrations will play out amid a political standoff in its s...
LIMA, Peru (AP) — A dozen Latin American governments and Canada delivered a blistering rebuke to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Friday, questioning the legitimacy of his soon-to-begin second term and urging him to hand over power as the only path to restoring democracy in his crisis-wracked South American country. The sharp criticism came at a meeting in Peru's capital of foreign ministers from countries including Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, all of which have been weighing how to confront the increasingly authoritarian Maduro w...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — German freelance journalist Billy Six has circled the globe with a hand-held video camera asking people living through wars and strife to tell their stories. But when he turned his lens to Venezuela, documenting the economic collapse and mass migration from the socialist country, he wounded up in jail on charges that his family says include spying — accusations they reject as false. "He never touched a weapon, never joined in any demonstrations," his father, Edward Six, told The Associated Press. "He just was on the st...
MARACAIBO, Venezuela (AP) — A month-long blackout in Jennifer Naranjo's neighborhood in the Venezuelan port city of Maracaibo leaves her anxious. She's eight months pregnant and passes hot, sleepless nights with no air conditioning, swatting away mosquitoes, worried about her unborn daughter's future. "I dream about getting ahead for my baby," said Naranjo, whose husband left in January to find work in Chile. "In Venezuela, the situation gets worse every day." Blackouts are nothing new under two decades of socialist rule in Venezuela. But they'...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — An influential U.S. senator pressed for fair elections and the release of a jailed American during his private meeting with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the senator said Saturday before departing the turbulent country. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, told The Associated Press that he urged Maduro to uphold democratic rights ahead of Venezuela's upcoming presidential election, but doubts any changes will be forthcoming His four-day trip made at Venezuela's invitation included a visit with Joshua Holt...
VALENCIA, Venezuela (AP) — It wasn't long after Daniel Marquez's family showed up at the Venezuelan police station jail where he'd been locked up for nearly a year awaiting trial when black smoke began billowing from the building. Guards ordered them to flee, forcing them and other inmate relatives to watch in horror from afar as the flames quickly grew. One day later, Marquez's family took his blackened remains home in a simple wooden coffin, their despair as wide as the questions surrounding the blaze Wednesday that killed 68 people in one o...
VALENCIA, Venezuela (AP) — They died together when flames tore through an overcrowded police station jail in Venezuela. Now many of them are buried beside each other, too. Weeping relatives lowered caskets of many of the 68 people officials say were killed in one of the nation's worst jail fires into a freshly dug mass tomb on Friday. Cemetery workers said they expected to bury about half of those killed in three-deep graves, each separated by a layer of hastily constructed cinderblock. Simple white crosses with their handwritten names, d...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The head of Venezuela's government-controlled assembly on Thursday accused the top U.S. diplomat in Caracas of promoting a coup and threatened to take "corresponding diplomatic measures" against him but stopped short of saying he would be expelled. National Constituent Assembly president Delcy Rodriguez issued a series of tweets targeting U.S. charge d'affaires Todd Robinson. They follow the release of an interview he gave a local online publication critical of the Venezuelan government. Relations have long been t...
PUERTO CABELLO, Venezuela (AP) — The cab of Carlos Del Pino's big rig gave him a nerve-rattling front-row seat to a surge in mob attacks on Venezuela's neighborhood markets, cattle ranches and food delivery trucks like his. Shortly after pulling away from the docks at Puerto Cabello, the country's biggest port, he witnessed 20 people swarm a truck ahead of him and in a frenzy fill up their sacks with the corn it was carrying to a food-processing plant. The driver was held at gunpoint. "It fills you with terror," Del Pino said. He has hauled c...
CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela (AP) — Juan Carlos Goite has to be creative, finding spare parts stripped from one broken-down locomotive to repair another in a desperate attempt to keep a once-thriving iron ore mining company running. Dressed in a hard hat and oil-stained work clothes, the mechanic paces a dimly lit workshop strewn with salvaged train parts like motors, metal plates and hoses looking for the right piece. In cash-strapped Venezuela, there's no money to buy spare parts. Years of neglect and corrupt management have left in decay C...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — With his country spiraling into a desperate financial crisis, Venezuela's president has proposed restructuring its massive debt, leaving international investors wondering Friday whether they'll be paid and some residents expressing doubt the socialist leader can improve their lives. President Nicolas Maduro announced Thursday that the state-run oil company will make good on a $1.1 billion payment, then begin "refinancing and a restructuring" its debts. The country owes global creditors an estimated $120 billion, a...
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — In the close-knit community of climbers who flock from around the world to cling to the mountainside precipices at Yosemite National Park, climbers were awed but undeterred by successive rock falls that sent tons of granite plunging to the ground, killing one and injuring two over two days. "It's kind of an inherently dangerous sport," Hayden Jamieson, 24, of Mammoth Lakes, California, said Friday, as he prepared to head up the nose of El Capitan early Saturday with his climbing partner. Jamieson said he fe...
