Setbacks for Venezuela opposition drive against president

Venezuela's opposition has suffered a major blow after authorities halted their drive to recall leftist President Nicolas Maduro and reportedly ordered top opposition leaders not to leave the crisis-torn country.

Henrique Capriles, a former presidential candidate and governor of the state of Miranda, said on Twitter late Thursday that he and seven others had received court orders barring them from travel outside the country.

The government was taking the country into a "very dangerous scenario" and an even greater crisis, he warned on Twitter.

The opposition had been gearing up for a massive three-day drive next week to collect signatures from millions of voters demanding a recall referendum in the crisis-stricken country.

It was supposed to be the last hurdle in a multi-stage process to meet the constitutional requirements for a recall vote.

But on Thursday, pro-Maduro governors in four states informed the National Election Council that local criminal court judges had annulled the results of an earlier petition drive because of alleged fraud.

Soon after, the council suspended the recall process, saying it was acting in compliance with the courts.

"Let us hope that those responsible will now be sought out and detained and go to prison for the deception they have committed," Maduro's number two Diosdado Cabello said in a speech.

Maduro also accused the opposition of "a gigantic fraud," in a speech before leaving on a tour of the Middle East. "Their cheating is coming out," he said.

- Travel bans -

Among those barred from leaving the country was Jesus Torrealba, the head of Democratic Unity Roundtable, or MUD, the main opposition coalition, according to Capriles.

Capriles posted a photo of the court order on his Twitter account.

Torrealba had no immediate comment on the travel ban, but earlier had said consultations were under way among all sectors on the opposition's next move.

"They cannot postpone the change that the country is demanding," he said.

The MUD has been confident that it could collect signatures from the required 20 percent of the electorate -- some four million voters -- in the three days that the National Electoral Council had given it to do so.

Public support for Maduro has crumbled under the pressure of a crippling recession, soaring inflation and widespread shortages of food and medicine.

Pollster Datanalisis found in a recent survey that 76.5 percent of Venezuelans disapprove of Maduro's performance, and 62.3 percent would vote to recall him.

The socialist president, who succeeded the late Hugo Chavez in 2015 and whose term ends in 2019, has vowed to hold on to power in the South American oil exporter.

The MUD says Maduro and his allies control the courts and electoral authorities and are using them to cling to power.

The government has filed some 8,600 legal challenges to the signatures collected in the first round, alleging that they included people who were dead, under age or convicted felons.

Electoral authorities had warned that if the first-round petition was annulled in any state, that key stage in the referendum process would be void.

But the chances of Maduro being removed by referendum this year already looked impossibly slim. The electoral authorities have said a referendum could not take place before mid-January.

Under constitutional rules, if voters do not remove Maduro from office by January 10, his hand-picked vice president will finish his term, which ends in 2019.

Source: AFP