The color red sets off alarm bells these days in this western Venezuelan city, where anti-government protests sparked nationwide demonstrations that have endured since early February. Save for the red stripe on the Venezuelan flag, which also has yellow and blue, here anything of that color looks suspiciously allusive to the late president Hugo Chávez, who popularized red among his supporters as the official color of his self-styled “Bolivarian” revolution.

The army has been sent into toilet paper factories, fights for basic foodstuffs have resulted in several deaths and new, multi-million dollar oil tankers are sitting idle in dock. And, despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela’s socialist government can’t quite manage to keep the lights on.