Rival Factions in Strike Underscore the Fissures in Post-Chávez Venezuela

After the work stoppage spread, most union leaders took up the cause.

But a faction opposed the strike and closed ranks behind Mr. Maduro and Sidor’s bosses, setting up a political struggle within the union and an unusually public divide among pro-Chávez forces.

That set the stage for Friday’s battle of the loudspeakers. Around 6 a.m., following the routine of recent days, union leaders of the pro-strike forces gave speeches broadcast over loudspeakers while hundreds of workers milled about.

But on this day the dissident faction set up its own speakers some 30 feet away. With the volume cranked to earsplitting levels they preached against the strike.

One worker, Hugo Navarro, 29, stood in between, as if dazed.

“You can’t understand any of it,” he said.

At one point the antistrike contingent played a recording of Mr. Chávez singing the national anthem, as its adherents belted out the tune.

As soon as the recording ended the pro-strike unionists, who far outnumbered their opponents, broke into their own full-throated rendition.

Just as it seemed things might calm down, a truck drove up carrying Carlos Osorio, a retired general and a former confidant of Mr. Chávez who is the top government minister in the region and the president of the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana, a kind of government holding company that controls Sidor and other state-run companies.

The truck contained an array of black speakers much bigger than those already deployed by the rival factions. Mr. Osorio climbed onto the roof of the vehicle and tried to address the crowd.

But, in another tellingly Venezuelan moment, there was a technical glitch and the speakers produced only a muffled sound.

“Can you hear me?” Mr. Osorio said over and over as the strikers taunted him.

Mr. Osorio eventually made his way to the small stage used by the strikers, where he took a microphone.

“All of us who are here are here thanks to Chávez,” he said.

He urged the strikers to go back to work. The company was prepared to pay some additional benefits, he said, but he refused to meet the strikers’ main demand for a recalculation of bonuses, insisting that they had been paid properly in the past.

The strikers responded with hoots and chants. “We’re Chávistas but we want our money!” they shouted.

The union leaders took back the microphone and berated Mr. Osorio. They pledged their allegiance to Mr. Chávez’s memory and his revolution, but they vowed that the strike would go on.

In the end the episode may have served as a kind of machismo-fueled courtship ritual. Before Mr. Osorio left, the two sides agreed to restart talks, which continued through the weekend.

On Friday night Mr. Maduro, speaking on live television from Caracas, again took up the theme of the expelled diplomats.

“They went with their suitcase full of dollars to buy off union leaders at Sidor, to keep Sidor shut down,” he claimed.

Calling the strike illegal, he warned that if it continued much longer he would take “drastic measures.”

His words highlighted the distance between the presidential palace and the plant gate. “That guy doesn’t know the reality here,” said Eduardo Brito, 28, a forklift