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.

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