Venezuela's Tiananmen Square?

Hyperbole?  Okay, just a little bit.  But the Maduro regime's crackdown on student protest camps has familiar echoes. See this news account: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-08/venezuela-national-guard-raids-student-protest-camps.html 

By the way, these camps are in middle-class eastern Caracas, the heart of opposition country.  Chavez used to leave protests alone that limited themselves to that part of the city.  Now Maduro is going after them everywhere.  The Venezuelan students--who see their future vastly limited by the cronyism and economic stagnation of Bolivarian revolution--are the fighting element of the opposition.  They haven't given up. 

Maduro has a much more limted toolkit than Chavez, so he has to resort to overt suppression.  Notice that the body count has been a lot higher than under Chavez.

By the way, for a good blog on Venezuela, see http://devilsexcrement.com/