Venezuela state internet provider blocks volunteer aid page

CARACAS: Venezuela´s state internet provider CANTV has blocked a web page where volunteers sign up to answer National Assembly president Juan Guaido´s call to help bring in desperately needed humanitarian aid, the opposition said on Monday.

Guaido says he wants one million volunteers by Saturday, the deadline day he has set to bring in the aid piling up at the border with Colombia and aiming to alleviate food and medicine shortages.

Last week the opposition hit out at CANTV for redirecting the volunteers webpage to another almost identical looking site to prevent more people from signing up to self-declared acting president Guaido´s cause.

"Already there´s been this fake webpage and, now, they prefer to simply block the internet," Hasler Iglesias, a member of Guaido´s Voluntad Popular party, told AFP. In tests carried out by AFP, the volunteer website was not accessible through CANTV but was by using other server providers. Already, 600,000 people have signed up as volunteers. Venezuela is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis and Guaido says 300,000 people could die without the aid.