Reuters/Caracas

Student demonstrators began gathering again in various cities after blocking roads and burning tires into the night to denounce repression of protests as well as a litany of complaints against Maduro from crime to shortages.

Despite a presidential ban on protests, about 200 people converged yesterday morning in Caracas’ Plaza Altamira, a heartland of opposition protests in the past. “We’re going to stay out in the streets for the same reasons as Thursday and the day before: inflation, insecurity and a repressive state that refuses to release our colleagues,” student Marcos Matta, 22, said.

Maduro, a 51-year-old former union activist and bus driver, accuses his foes of seeking a coup against him similar to one that briefly toppled his predecessor Hugo Chavez in 2002.

However, there is no sign the street demonstrations threaten to oust him, nor that the military, whose role was crucial to Chavez’s 36-hour unseating, will turn against Maduro.

In a speech late on Thursday night, the president called supporters onto the streets today, but insisted no more protest rallies would be allowed.

“This is not Ukraine,” Maduro said, in reference to months of anti-government protests there in which six people have died.

Opposition activists say 91 Venezuelan protesters remained in jail yesterday, awaiting trial on charges of violence. The government puts the figure at about 70. Hardline opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, whom the government is calling the “face of fascism” and the intellectual author of the violence, remained in his Caracas home yesterday despite a judge’s arrest warrant for him, party colleagues said.

He denies the accusations, saying peaceful protests have been infiltrated by provocateurs and attacked by militantly pro-government gangs known locally as “colectivos”.

The 42-year-old US-educated economist and leader of the Popular Will party taunted Maduro via Twitter: “@NicolasMaduro: don’t you have the guts to arrest me? Or are you waiting for orders from Havana? I tell you, the truth is on our side.”

Maduro’s foes paint him as a stooge of Cuba’s communist government who lacks Chavez’s charisma and is leading the economy to ruin by sticking with failed socialist policies. It was not immediately evident why police had not acted on the arrest warrant to visit Lopez’s home, though such action could fuel further protests given the South American nation’s current tense climate.