Venezuela’s bishops have delivered a letter to Pope Francis calling their government a dictatorship and including a list of those killed in a crackdown on protesters.
The meeting of the Pope and six bishops representing the country’s episcopate came at the bishops’ request.
Their letter said the political crisis was not a standoff between right and left but a “fight between a government which has turned into a dictatorship, an inward-looking which serves only its own interests, and an entire people which is crying out for freedom and desperately seeking, at the risk of its youngest lives, bread, medicine, security, work and fair elections”.
