THE sound of banging pots began well before dawn. Out on the streets on February 24th the barricades were going up across the south and east of Caracas, the capital city. Tree-trunks, blocks of concrete, burning tyres and smouldering rubbish brought traffic to a halt. In some areas demonstrators slicked the road surface with oil or spread spikes to keep government forces away.

It was the same picture in other big cities across Venezuela this week (see map). With impressive co-ordination, opposition radicals were sending a message to President Nicolás Maduro: beatings, bullets and tear-gas will not deter us. “Look, this is a sacrifice [we’re making],” says a barricade-builder in San Cristóbal in the south-western border state of Táchira, where the protests began three weeks ago and tensions are highest. “It doesn’t matter if it takes a month, two months, three months. We have to get rid of this government.”

The protests started because of anger over violent crime, inflation and shortages of food, medicines and other basic goods. But the authorities’ harsh treatment of demonstrators has fuelled the rage. Over a dozen people have been killed since the regime’s response turned violent on February 12th; half were shot in the head. Most of the deaths have been at the hands of security forces or civilian gunmen backing the government: on February 26th the authorities announced that seven members of the intelligence services have been charged with murder. The Venezuelan Penal Forum, a human-rights group, says it has documented 18 cases of torture among the hundreds of detainees. Over 500 complaints about abuses remain to be investigated. Dozens of amateur videos show an excessive use of force on the streets.

Moderate leaders of the opposition Democratic Unity (MUD) alliance are struggling to control the radicals, whose figurehead, Leopoldo López, has been in custody since February 18th. On February 22nd Henrique Capriles, a former presidential candidate, told a mass rally in the capital that there were “millions of reasons to protest” but that for protesters to barricade themselves in their own districts played into the government’s hands. That call has fallen on deaf ears.

There are signs of fracture within government ranks, too. The official line of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is that the opposition is trying to mount a “fascist coup”; a “truth commission” has been proposed to investigate “violence promoted by far-right groups”. But Mr Capriles’s calls for the authorities to cease repression and to free political prisoners were echoed on February 24th by José Gregorio Vielma Mora, a member of the PSUV and governor of Táchira state. Mr Vielma acknowledged abuses and said the economic crisis was behind the protests.

Although he later retracted these comments (presumably under pressure from the government), his words were the first public evidence of tensions within the regime. They were all the more significant because the governor, a retired military officer, took part in the 1992 coup attempt by the late Hugo Chávez, founder and “eternal leader” of the PSUV, and is highly regarded by many former comrades.

Meanwhile, the country’s economic woes worsen. In an effort to blunt the impact of the protests, Mr Maduro decreed that this Carnival weekend (which coincides with the so-called “Caracazo” of 1989, when economic hardship led to days of looting and a massacre by the army) would begin on February 27th, two days earlier than scheduled. With many offices and stores already closed because of the protests, an extended holiday will exacerbate pervasive shortages.

“You can’t get anything here,” says Bettsi Carolina Quintero, an inhabitant of San Cristóbal. “No milk, no flour, no rice, no cooking oil—not even detergent.” Shopping in the city these days involves knocking on closed store doors, such is the fear of violence and looting. The central government has reacted to the crisis in Táchira by sending in army troops and using Russian-built Sukhoi warplanes to buzz demonstrators. “I feel as if this were a war zone,” says Ms Quintero.

With limited dollar reserves to buy the imported food on which Venezuela depends, and the country over $10 billion in debt to foreign suppliers, the government this week fiddled with its complex foreign-exchange system yet again. Firms and private individuals will now be able to buy and sell dollars through intermediaries, using either cash or government bonds. Introducing more flexibility into the exchange rate should ease the shortage of dollars, but it is also likely to drive up inflation as a falling bolívar increases the cost of imports. Extreme economic hardship is just around the corner in Venezuela, and with it the likelihood that anger against the regime will spread.