Venezuela's socialist dictatorship Sent Provided 14 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian aid to Lebanon as a gesture to Israel's self-defense operations following the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023.
Venezuela, under dictator Nicolas Maduro, has vocally supported Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iran's terrorist state against Israel, holding “anti-Zionist” rallies and accusing Israel of “genocide.” The package, described as humanitarian aid, follows an expansion of Israel's self-defense operations in Lebanon over the past two months, targeting leaders of Hezbollah, with whom Maduro has maintained close ties for decades. .
Considering Venezuela's status as one of the world's poorest countries, transporting 14 tons of humanitarian aid from Venezuela was an eye-catching international display. Once the richest state in Latin America, election When socialist tyrant Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, oil resources were depleted as socialists plundered coffers, forced the most educated citizens into prison or exile, and ignored maintaining the top industries. This country, which was rich in resources, rapidly deteriorated. Venezuela's gross domestic product (GDP) fell 73 percent in the past 10 years.
Due to the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, 8 million Venezuelans fleeing the country – a migration crisis rivaled only by the war-torn nations of Syria and Ukraine – and recently the study This suggests that at least half of Venezuelans live in poverty. Maduro's government stopped tracking poverty data in 2015, at a time when the country was in deep crisis and involuntary weight loss was widespread, commonly referred to as the “Maduro diet.”
At the time of writing, it was unclear whether the “aid” Maduro sent to Lebanon came from supplies originally reserved for Venezuelans.
VTV, the national propaganda broadcaster, reported On Saturday, President Maduro's top diplomat, Ivan Gil, announced that he was overseeing the shipment of 14 tons of food, medicine and other aid to Lebanon and Syria “for the benefit of peoples under attack by Israeli Zionism.” did.
“As a sign of solidarity and support for our brotherly peoples, Venezuela remains steadfast in its determination to support the countries of the Middle East in their struggle for peace and national self-determination,” Gil said in a post on a communications application. telegram. Tatiana Pugh, Gil's Middle East subordinate, reportedly said Venezuela's help was needed to fight the “genocide” allegedly committed by Israel.
“A large amount of food, medicine and essential goods sent by the Bolivarian people and government have arrived in Damascus for our Lebanese brothers and sisters affected by the bombings of the terrorist state Israel,” Gil said. declared.
The approval of general humanitarian aid is a sudden change for the Venezuelan dictatorship. At the height of the country's humanitarian crisis, some of Maduro's henchmen falsely claimed that Venezuelans had been poisoned and discouraged them from accepting humanitarian aid from other countries, especially the United States.
In 2019, when President Donald Trump's administration shipped large quantities of food to the Colombia-Venezuela border, Maduro's Vice President Delcy Rodríguez said, “What we are concerned about as a people is that humanitarian aid is being contaminated. It's laced with poison,” he scandalously claimed. “It's carcinogenic. Several scientific studies have proven that the United States is trying to poison its population with chemicals. You could call them biological weapons.”
In reality, the “aid” Maduro is providing his people is often contaminated food that is unsafe to eat. The regime feeds the poor and manipulates their behavior through an aid distribution system known as Local Committees of Supply and Production (CLAP, its Spanish acronym). CLAP boxes are highly subsidized packages that often contain cooking oil, rice, flour, and other basic foodstuffs. Hungry Venezuelans often vie for favor with the government and get priority access to bins that often contain rotten food, such as rice with bugs, expired canned sardines, and other dangerous items. It has been known for many years that
Gil did not say whether the food sent to Lebanon came from Maduro's CLAP boxes.
The United Nations recently Estimation More than 80 percent of Venezuelans currently live in poverty, and more than half (53 percent) live in extreme poverty and cannot afford basic food each month. Research conducted in March by Andres Bello Catholic University (UCAB) in Venezuela Found Similarly, in 2023, more than half of Venezuelans lived in poverty, and about half lived in “multidimensional poverty,” including lack of access to health care and education.
The move to express “solidarity” with Lebanon's Hezbollah, a target of Israeli operations, follows decades of attempts by President Chávez and then President Maduro to forge closer ties with the jihadist terror group. . In 2015, Spanish journalist Emily Blasco reported that Chávez sent Maduro, then Venezuela's foreign minister, to Damascus, Syria, in 2007 to meet with Hezbollah's supreme leader Hassan Nasrallah, and that he was accused of “drug trafficking, money laundering, [and] Distribution of weapons and issuance of passports to terrorists. ” The distribution of genuine Venezuelan passports to Hezbollah terrorists with no clear ties to Venezuela was reportedly carried out through a Hezbollah terrorist known as Ghazi Nasr al-Din.
A former employee of Venezuela's passport distribution agency says that by 2017, Venezuela had distributed at least 10,000 passports to Syrians, Iranians, and other Middle Eastern nationals who were deemed completely ineligible to obtain a Venezuelan passport. It was revealed that it had been published. It is unclear how many of them were members of Hezbollah or other Iranian-backed jihadist terrorist groups.
Hassan Nasrallah was killed in late September as a result of an Israeli airstrike on a Hezbollah base in Lebanon.
