Venezuela’s jailed protest leader urged supporters on Friday to keep demonstrating peacefully against President Nicolas Maduro despite violence that has killed at least six people and rocked the OPEC member nation.
“I’m fine, I ask you not to give up, I won’t,” Leopoldo Lopez told his followers in a handwritten note passed to his wife at Caracas’ Ramo Verde prison and then posted on the Internet.
The 42-year-old Lopez, a Harvard-educated economist and one of the few surviving relatives of Venezuelan independence hero Simon Bolivar, spearheaded protests against the socialist government that began at the start of February. . .