Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro said this week that Venezuelan refugees are leaving the country with thousands of dollars in their pockets but ultimately end up as “slaves” working in other, more prosperous countries.
“The Venezuelans who left, they did it because they sold one or two cars and left with dollars in their pockets, it is not true that they left out of necessity, they left because they have been deceived,” Maduro said in a televised address on Wednesday. “Look at the fiasco of the Venezuelans who went abroad, they left a country as free beings to work as slaves in Peru.”
“They sold them a package with an included ticket and they arrived in Lima, in Quito, in Colombia and after six months they had stolen them, it hurts me a lot that they lost everything here and ended up as slaves,” he continued.
Maduro provided no individual examples of Venezuelans that suffered this fate or any evidence to support his claims.
His comments are the latest response to the magnitude of the ongoing Venezuelan migration crisis as thousands of people flee the country every day in need of food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance. His regime has also repeatedly refused humanitarian assistance for the country, claiming there is no need for such help.
Despite downplaying the severity of the migration crisis, leading regime officials including Diosdado Cabello are pleading with the Venezuelan diaspora to return home and enjoy the fruits of the economy, where inflation is expected to reach one million percent by the end of the year. The United States is one of many countries helping to finance humanitarian work to help migrants arriving in Colombia and Brazil.
“Come here with the people … here we have responsible government and our president has already ordered the plan to return to the country, come here for Venezuela, here there is work and there are opportunities for everything and everyone,” Cabello said on Monday.
Cabello also sought to take advantage of the xenophobic backlash launched against some Venezuelan migrants, with some border town communities in Brazil and Colombia actively mistreating them while holding anti-migrant protests. Many people have ended up sleeping in slums or makeshift camps, surviving off food donations and trying to earn cash by washing car windows at traffic lights.
“This is where there are opportunities and fair treatment, here you have your family, here you have your parents, your brothers, here you are not going to be mistreated,” he declared.
Cabello has also claimed that many of shocking images of Venezuelans in desperate search of help are staged by the United States, Colombia, and hostile forces.
“It’s a great plan, I have pointed it out before, everything seems ready for lights, camera action,” he explained, “Hollywood types seek to make Venezuela the villain in the film and that they are preparing the good Rambo that will fix ‘their’ evils.”
The country’s Minister of Communication Jorge Rodríguez has claimed that departing Venezuelans “will return” to their homeland to help rebuild the country’s shattered economy under a new socialist vision.
“Fortunately, the conclusion is that Venezuelans will return, and we invite them to do so because we need them for our plan for economic revival,” he said last month.
Over two million people have left the country since Maduro rose to power in 2014, as the aftermath of Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution left the country in economic meltdown. The exodus is known as “Bolivarian diaspora,” with many Venezuelans now forced to live in places all over the world.
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.
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