Interpresse Service-IPS (Humberto Marquez): As Jose Luis reached the bus stop, he saw a crowd of furious local residents smashing shop fronts, cars and telephone booths. Without giving it much thought, he threw himself into the mob that broke into a small supermarket, triggering the worst social uprising and biggest massacre in the last 100 years in Venezuela.

It was the morning of Monday, February 27, 1989 in Guarenas, a dormitory city 30 km east of Caracas, where people enraged by a sudden hike in bus fares went beyond simply protesting in the streets and began to riot and loot stores. "I was 17. I joined in, to be part of the chaos and the rage of people against everyone who was speculating," recalled Jose Luis, who is now an established mechanic. "But people then began to loot when they realised that provisions were going to be scarce, and that the police would just take whatever we didn’t carry off," he told IPS.

The rioting spread from Guarenas and other outlying districts to the centre of Caracas, as it overlapped with demonstrations by students and workers. The heavy television coverage of the protests that Monday morning acted as a call for disgruntled Venezuelans to take to the streets.  The rioting and subsequent crackdown lasted a week. The clampdown on the protesters and looters was harsh after Tuesday the 28th, as the military was called out on the streets in several major cities and a curfew was set -- measures that had not been used in Venezuela in several generations.

The end result: hundreds of people killed, around 2,000 injured and more than 150 million dollars in damages to shops and businesses.

The "Caracazo", the name given to the week of violence, is seen as a turning point in Venezuelan society, which had been caught up in an illusion of social harmony, according to sociologists and other analysts. The bloody incident marked the start of a shift in the political scene, which saw the waning of the influence of the country’s traditional parties and trade unions.  "It was the biggest 20th century massacre in Venezuela. No other popular movement has led to so many deaths," sociologist Tulio Hernandez told IPS.

The Committee of Families of the Victims (COFAVIC) that emerged after the Caracazo has documented more than 500 people killed in the greater Caracas area.  Social and political scientists describe the Caracazo as an eruption of rage after more than a decade of deteriorating living conditions in Venezuela.

The last straw was an abrupt rise in bus fares, adopted in the wake of an increase in gas prices announced just after President Carlos Andres Perez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993) took office on February 2, 1989.  Unable to afford the new bus fares and facing serious difficulties in making it to their jobs in the second half of the month, commuters from outlying areas around Caracas were the first to erupt in anger, followed by thousands of people in slum neighbourhoods, vandals, and even police officers themselves.

Perez, a social democrat, had raised gasoline prices as part of a broad package of structural adjustment measures agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  His long-time rival, two times president Rafael Caldera (1969-1974 and 1994-1999), a Christian democrat, stated in 1992 that "the poor smashed the glass front of the IMF building with rocks. Hungry people cannot be asked to defe