Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused his US counterpart Donald Trump of wanting to impose “white supremacy” on the country following his “Nazi-like speech” in Miami on February 18.
Maduro warned that Washington is leading a coup attempt against the democratically elected Bolivarian government to take control of its vast oil reserves. He said Trump’s rhetoric about humanitarian aid is just a show.
Trump insists that Maduro is blocking humanitarian aid from entering Venezuela and the US has started to send supplies to Colombia.
However, the last time neoconservative veteran and now US Venezuelan envoy Elliott Abrams oversaw a similar programme in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the “aid deliveries” turned out to be arms sent to the US-backed Contra death squads seeking to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government.
The US is refusing to lift sanctions that have been described by a UN special rapporteur as a “crime against humanity”, but Venezuela has received support from the United Nations and recently received 300 tons of aid from Russia.
In February, 933 tons of medical supplies arrived from Cuba, China, Russia, Palestine and Turkey, among others.
Despite this, self-styled “people’s billionaire” Richard Branson has organised a “Live Aid-style” concert on the Venezuelan border on February 23, as he ratchets up the pressure for regime change.
Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters slammed the jamboree. “Even if you listen to their shtick, it has nothing to do with humanitarian aid at all. It has to do with Richard Branson — and I’m not surprised by this — having bought the US saying: ‘We have decided to take over Venezuela, for whatever our reasons may be.’
Waters tweeted on February 18: “The Red Cross and the UN, unequivocally agree, don’t politicize aid. Leave the Venezuelan people alone to exercise their legal right to self determination.
“But it has nothing to do with the needs of the Venezuelan people, it has nothing to do with democracy, it has nothing to do with freedom and it has nothing to do with aid.
“I have friends who are in Caracas right now. There is, so far, no civil war, no mayhem, no murder, no apparent dictatorship, no mass imprisonment of opposition, no suppression of the press. None of that is going on — even though that is the narrative that is being sold to the rest of us.”
A pro-Maduro counter-concert is to be held in Venezuela.
In Trump’s address to Venezuelan expats at the Florida International University he attacked socialism as “an ideology based on ignorance”.
But Maduro accused Trump of “a tired rhetoric, questioning the right of our free country to adopt the ideas of human, Christian socialism, with an almost Nazi-styled speech to stunt different ideologies”.
[Reprinted from Morning Star online.]