Venezuelan authorities are cutting off the Internet to a university city and blocking selected websites and a "walkie-talkie" service widely used by protesters, according to the Associated Press.
Beatriz Font, a local TV reporter in San Cristobal, capital of the western border state of Tachira, said Thursday night that she could hear gunshots as tear-gas-firing police broke up protests just as they had the night before when Internet service was cut, the AP reported.
Net-savvy activists reported a serious nationwide degradation Thursday in Internet service provided by CANTV, which handles about 90 percent of the country's traffic, the AP reported.
"We're still without Internet. And some people don't have water or electricity either," Font said, according to the AP.
San Cristobal, home to one private and three public universities, is where the current wave of anti-government demonstrations began on February 2, according to the AP.
All across Venezuela since protests accelerated last week, activists have posted online YouTube videos of riot police and national guard breaking them up. Sometimes, the security forces are accompanied by pistol-packing motorcycle gangs of Chavista loyalists that the opposition also blames for killings and other abuses, the AP reported.
Late Thursday evening, the United States company Zello told the AP that Venezuela's state-run telecoms company, CANTV, had blocked access to the push-to-talk "walkie-talkie" app for smart phones and computers that has been a hugely popular organizing tool for protesters from Egypt to Ukraine, the AP reported. In one day this week, Zello reported more than 150,000 downloads in Venezuela.
The protesters are fed up with a catalog of woes that include rampant inflation, food shortages and one of the world's highest murder rates, the AP reported.
The socialist government cemented its near-monopoly on broadcast media Chavez's 14-year-rule, and social media have been crucial for young opposition activists as they organize and exchange information on deaths, injuries and arrests, according to the AP.
President Nicolas Maduro had ordered NTN24.com, run by the eponymous Colombia-based regional news network, removed from air last week after it broadcast video of a student killed by a gunshot to the head in Caracas, according to the AP.
Other sites like pastebin.com, bulletin boards that cyber activists use to anonymously share information, were also being blocked, the AP reported.
Programmer and cyber activist Jose Luis Rivas, is from San Cristobal but did not give his location fearing persecution and said the Internet went out in most of the city of 600,000 about midnight Wednesday, according to the AP.
Cutting the Internet deprived people of their only access to uncensored information and Rivas said people told him "they felt fear because they were no longer informed," the AP reported.
Conatel, the government telecommunications regulator, and the Ministry of Information, said they were not authorized to discuss the matter, but Conatel's director, William Castillo, tweeted Thursday that social networks were being "invaded by cybercriminals who are attacking accounts and manipulating information," the AP reported.
According to international director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Danny O'Brien said cutting off Internet is not smart political strategy, according to the AP.
"I think the important lesson people should learn from these Internet blackouts is that they just throw fuel on the flames of civil unrest," O'Brien said, the AP reported.
