Venezuelan party launches bill to oust president

A small group of Venezuelan opposition lawmakers launched a bill Tuesday proposing to oust President Nicolas Maduro, the latest anti-government offensive in the oil-rich country's tense political standoff. The leftist Radical Cause party said it presented a proposed constitutional amendment to cut Maduro's mandate short by two years and call a general election by the end of this year. Radical Cause is a minority member of the opposition MUD coalition, which took control of the legislature last month after voters fed up with economic hardship turned on Maduro in elections. The resulting political standoff has raised fears of violence in the South American country, where 43 people died in anti-government riots in 2014. The party proposed to change the constitution to reduce presidential terms from six to four years with immediate effect and put a limit on re-election, its secretary Andres Velasquez told reporters. "Venezuela is going through an extreme, irreversible crisis and those who brought us to these depths show no signs of fixing things," Velasquez said, after formally presenting the bill to the leaders of the National Assembly legislature for debate. Constitutional law expert Juan Manuel Rafalli told AFP that if the assembly passed the reform it would then have to be endorsed by a popular vote. Maduro's current mandate runs until 2019 so if the reform went through he would be required to leave office in April 2017. Radical Cause has four deputies in the 167-seat assembly, where the MUD overall has a three-fifths majority. The MUD is a broad coalition dominated by big center-right parties. "One thing that everyone agrees on is that Nicolas Maduro cannot continue at the head of the government because of the risk that poses to the stability of the country," Velasquez said. Senior MUD leaders had already promised to devise a way within six months to oust Maduro, possibly through a new constitution or a referendum. It was unclear whether they would back the Radical Cause move or propose their own means of cutting short his term. "A referendum is very tedious. That method was designed to be very difficult to use," the MUD's executive secretary Jesus Torrealba told AFP. "The most practical way to do it would be through an amendment or a reform."