Skip to main content

Venezuelan ex-minister claims "famine" to justify invasion and regime change

SOLIDARITY campaigners attacked a former Venezuelan minister’s unprecedented call for foreign military invasion to end a claimed “famine” yesterday.
Britain’s Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) slammed Ricardo Hausmann for his article entitled “D-Day Venezuela”, published on Tuesday by the Czech-based Project Syndicate website — funded by regime-change NGO kingpin George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
The Harvard University professor and former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank claimed Venezuela’s economic woes — which the government blames on a US-directed economic war and black market spivs — had created a “famine.”
The United Socialist Party (PSUV) government has moved to reduce the problems poor Venezuelans have in buying food by supplying monthly subsidised food parcels to all households at a price equivalent to a few pounds.
Mr Hausmann equated the situation to that in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1944-45, when around 20,000 people died of malnutrition.
He said the failure of the allied Operation Market Garden — which aimed to advance into Germany itself — had left the Dutch at the mercy of the Nazis.
“Today’s Venezuelan famine is already worse,” he claimed, without providing evidence of deaths by starvation. “How many lives must be shattered before salvation comes?”
In November US troops joined the Brazilian and other regional armies for military manoeuvres near Venezuela’s border simulating the creation of a “humanitarian corridor.”
Mr Hausmann also repeated discredited media claims the government had barred the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) from elections.
Venezuela Solidarity Campaign Secretary Francisco Dominguez said: “Sections of Venezuela’s extreme right wing, realising that the economic war has failed to persuade Venezuelans to stop supporting the Bolivarian government and faced with the utter electoral collapse of the MUD have opted to campaign for military intervention.”
He said their aim was to “torpedo the ongoing dialogue between the government and the opposition in the Dominican Republic and prevent the coming presidential election in Venezuela.”
“Mr Hausmann’s call for military intervention against a Latin American nation should be unequivocally and totally rejected by everybody in the UK and everywhere else,” Mr Dominguez said.
Mr Hausmann was minister of planning from 1992-93 in the second government of president Carlos Andres Perez, who was impeached for embezzling 250 million bolivars of government funds.
The scandal was exposed by veteran leftwing journalist Jose Vicente Rangel, a supporter of the PSUV governments of late President Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro.

Most popular

The mystery of the Guanches

The origins and language of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands remain a mystery, writes Dr Sabina Goralski Filonov Translation by James Tweedie The guanches, the aboriginals of the Canary Islands whose origin, lost in the mists of time, still arouses intense and passionate debate and great controversy about their origins and the how the seven Canary Islands were populated – which according to some studies occurred between 10,000 and 8,000 years BC. Literally, the word ‘Guan’ means man or person and ‘Chenech’ or ‘Chinet’ is applied to the island of Tenerife, thus meaning a man or inhabitant of Tenerife – although according to Núñez de la Peña, the Spanish named them the Guanchos during the conquest of the islands. But with the passage of time, experts in the subject are questioning whether the word Guanche was used to designate the primitive inhabitants of all the islands in the pre-Hispanic period.  The term ‘Guanche’ has also ceased to be applied to the di...

Homeless dogs’ home fights for compensation

Dingo Dogs owner Phil Nelson at his since-demolished home. DOGS’ home owner Phil Nelson has vowed to take legal action following his eviction from his Dingo Dogs animal sanctuary in August. by James Tweedie Indian-born Mr Nelson, along with former girlfriend and Dingo Dogs treasurer Leigh Crouch were left homeless by the court-ordered eviction and have been sharing a small hut in the mountains near Las Chafiras with ten dogs and three cats ever since. Mr Nelson’s dispute with his former landlord began in September 2004, after he officially registered his rented hillside finca as an animal sanctuary.  It was a requirement of his registration that he keep proper financial records, including receipts for payment of rent. Mr Nelson says that despite having a rental contract and paying his rent “as regular as clockwork” for years, his landlord never gave him a receipt even after he began asking for one every month in 2004.  In May 2005, after his landlord ha...

Venezuela condemns MUD silence over terror attack

Venezuela’s foreign minister condemned the opposition and their foreign backers for their silence over Tuesday’s helicopter attack on the capital. At a press conference on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Samuel Moncada said Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition leader Henry Ramos’ only comment on social media was that the attack was “useless.” “Firstly that does not condemn it,” Mr Moncada said. “Secondly it appears he was condemning it because it didn’t have the desired effect, that is to say, that it would blow up the building.” And he asked why fellow Mud leader Henrique Capriles lacked the “moral courage to... repudiate a terrorist act.” The newly-appointed minster and former ambassador to Britain accused fellow members of the Washington-based Organisation of American States of “feigning ignorance” and so protecting the culprits. And he accused sections of the media of portraying the culprit — Police investigator and one-time action film star Oscar Perez — as a “Rambo ...

No 'day in court' for Zuma as supporters take Durban

The trial of South Africa's ex-president Jacob Zuma was postponed for two months on Friday pending his legal challenge to the resurrection of decade-old corruption charges. Outside the Durban High Court, thousands of Mr Zuma's supporters from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and other organisations brought the Indian Ocean port city to a standstill. Zuma supporters rally around a stage set up outside the Durban High Court The ANC Women's League, Youth League and Umkhonto we Sizwe Veterans' Association were present, along with the Black land First Campaign, National Interfaith Council of South Africa, the Commission for Religious Affairs. Revellers wore ANC t-shirts and other merchandise in defiance of warnings by Police Minister Bheki Cele Former minister Des van Rooyen and Eastern Cape ANC leader Andile Lungisa accompanied Mr Zuma to the doors of the court. Inside he sat smiling a few feet apart from Christine Guerrier, a representative of Fre...

The Labour-Snatchers

WHAT do you call an event that would see a country lose a third of its population? A catastrophe? An apocalypse? In Europe they call it “Union.” According to the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the “free movement of labour” between European Union member states will see that fraction of some countries' populations emigrate in the next 40 years. A recent IIASA study, reported on Friday by the EU Observer website, says Romania and Croatia's populations will fall by 30 percent by 2060, and Lithuania's by 38 percent. By contrast, eight years of the West's proxy war on Syria, when much of the country was overrun by terrorists who behead followers of other religious sects, has seen between 12 and 23 percent of the population flee the country. The 1983-85 Ethiopian famine killed about 1.2 million people and drove another 400,000 out of the country, about five per cent of the population at the time. Another 41 years of EU...