According to the authorities, eight of the victims were electrocuted to death when they came into contact with a high-voltage cable during the looting of a bakery. The rest were shot.
Opposition members say they have no intention of slowing protests demanding new elections and criticizing a government they deem a dictatorship responsible for triple-digit inflation, rising crime and food shortages.
On Thursday, a spokesperson of the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD, or Unidad) coalition announced that over 220 people were injured on the second day of this week's protests.
The nearly three-hour ordeal saw 28 newborn babies evacuated and transferred to another hospital.
There were conflicting explanations about the reason. "I denounce before the global community that armed gangs hired by the opposition attacked a maternity hospital with 54 children", Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez tweeted, noting that President Nicolas Maduro had ordered the hospital's evacuation.
The two sides blame each other for the unrest. In Petare, a working-class section in eastern Caracas, a protester was shot dead at the entrance to the city's largest barrio, said Carlos Ocariz, district mayor.
"When the political leadership gives the order to open fire on its own people, that's a very strong signal of cowardice and weakness", he said.
Residents described terrifying scenes on Thursday night and early Friday in the Caracas neighbourhoods hit by riots and looting.
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As residents and workers cleaned up the destruction on Friday, groups of people, including children, scavenged for food amid the wreckage.
Unlike demonstrations in recent days, the rallies in Caracas, Maracaibo, Barquisimeto and San Cristobal passed with no major violence reported between protesters and police.
Senior opposition leader Henrique Capriles fired back that the government's "savage repression" was causing the violence.
Opposition leaders marched with their arms wrapped around each other into western Caracas Saturday, vowing to continue protesting until new elections are granted. They also intend to erect roadblocks on Monday to grind the country's traffic to a halt. It said 334 remained in jail Thursday. But his opponents denied the claim, saying the only way forward was to call elections. The government last year abruptly postponed regional elections that the opposition was heavily favoured to win and it cut off a petition drive aimed at forcing a referendum seeking Maduro's removal before elections scheduled for late next year.
The OPEC nation's economy has been in free-fall since the collapse of oil prices in 2014.
Anti-government protests resurged in Venezuela after the Supreme Court decided in March to strip power from the opposition-controlled National Assembly.
The court partly backtracked after an global outcry, but tension only increased when the authorities slapped a political ban on Capriles on April 7.
"This wounded and failed opposition is trying to generate chaos in key areas of the city and convince the world that we're in some sort of civil war, the same playbook used for Syria, for Libya and for Iraq", said Socialist Party official Freddy Bernal in an internet broadcast. The ruling was later reversed after critics both in the country and overseas said it would lead the country towards dictatorship.





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