Manhunt underway in Venezuela for anti-Maduro military rebels

A manhunt is underway for armed rebels who launched an anti-government attack on a military base in Venezuela Sunday, in the latest outbreak of violence to strike the faltering country.

About 20 dissident soldiers and civilians, led by a former National Guard captain, entered a military base near Valencia (roughly 120 kilometers west of the capital Caracas) before dawn, making a beeline for a weapons cache, authorities said. Two of the rebels were killed in a firefight, eight were arrested, and the rest escaped with weapons.

The rebel group issued its demands via social media with a video message, recorded ahead of the assault, that called for a transitional government to be established immediately, to stop President Nicolas Maduro’s increasingly dictatorial actions.

“This is not a coup d’etat,” the group’s leader says in the video. “This is a civic and military action to re-establish constitutional order. But more than that, it is to save the country from total destruction.”

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Valencia Sunday in a show of support for the uprising, but they were quickly dispersed by security forces, Reuters reported. In televised remarks Sunday, Maduro vowed to capture the “mercenaries” responsible for the raid. “Today, we had to beat terrorism with bullets,” he said during his weekly TV show.

Diego Moya-Ocampos, senior analyst for the Americas at IHS Country Risk, said the attack highlighted the growing discontent among the mid-ranks of the country’s security forces, whose superiors have repeatedly pledged loyalty to Maduro despite widespread public opposition to his agenda and a deepening economic crisis. The incident comes six weeks after a rogue police officer attacked key government buildings in a helicopter, having issued a similar call via social media for an uprising.

Moya-Ocampos said that further acts of armed insurrection were likely, given the deteriorating political and economic situation, and the fact that there were no elections on the horizon to give Venezuelans the opportunity to change the direction of their unpopular government.

“What we are seeing is that increasingly the mid-ranks are likely to stage events of this nature, with the support of violent grassroots opposition groups,” he said. “Then, obviously, the risk of civil war increases significantly.”

More than 120 people have been killed in political violence since widespread protests began in April.

The attack came less than a week after Maduro installed a powerful pro-government body called the National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution, amid widespread domestic and international condemnation.

In its first action, the assembly dismissed Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz Saturday and ordered her to stand trial — confirming widespread fears that the new body would be used to target government opponents.

Ortega, who has vowed to investigate allegations of fraud in the vote for the National Constituent Assembly, defied her sacking Sunday, and said that she would remain as the attorney general.