Venezuela News 2014: 2 More Protesters Shot Dead In Mérida, San Cristóbal

The number of people killed in connection with opposition-led protests in Venezuela reached 22 on Monday after two people were shot to death in the Venezuelan cities of Mérida and San Cristóbal. Daniel Tinoco, a 24-year-old student at the Universidad del Táchira in San Cristóbal whom a local TV reporter described to the Associated Press as one of the faces of the student opposition, was killed after being shot in the chest by unidentified assailants during protests on Sunday night, according to El Universal. Two other protestors were also wounded by gunfire but survived.

San Cristóbal Mayor Daniel Ceballos, who belongs to an opposition party and has protested the presence of the National Guard and federal police in the city he governs, denounced what he described as continued repression of peaceful protestors by those forces. “Where the government sees a barricade, where it sees paramilitaries, actually there’s citizens, women, men, families who are defending themselves from armed groups,” he said.

In the Andean city of Mérida, Gisela Rubilar Figueroa, a 47-year-old Chilean mother of four and sympathizer of the Nicolás Maduro-led government, was clearing the road of an opposition barricade after protests on Sunday evening when she was ambushed and shot in the left eye by assailants alleged to be opposition protestors, according to El Universal.

The paper notes that Rubilar Figueroa had received her bachelors’ degree from the Universidad de Los Andes in December. Reuters reports that she was a mother of four and a member of the governing socialist party who had lived in Mérida for six years, where she also worked as an artisan. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said that an investigation into her death had yielded the identification of her killers, saying, “We're on their trail. Rest assured, Chile and Latin America, we are going to capture the assassins of this compatriot and they will pay for this horrendous crime."