Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro issued an extended diatribe on Thursday night in which he repeatedly referred to American President Donald Trump as a murderer and claimed the “poor rural whites” who attacked the U.S. Capitol this week had also invaded Iran and Afghanistan.
Since ascending to authoritarian rule in 2013, Maduro has attacked the headquarters of the Venezuelan National Assembly — the local equivalent of the U.S. Capitol — on several occasions, using both the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) and members of his violent paramilitary gangs, the colectivos. Maduro attacks have resulted in the hospitalizations of several lawmakers; the Maduro regime has killed hundreds of protesters in the past decade.
Despite his own record of violently attacking his own country’s legislature, Maduro had strong words for the rioters that assaulted the United States capital, while pretending to offer aid to the United States to restore peace. The current National Assembly in Venezuela — which took power this week after an illegitimate election that featured Maduro cronies seizing the leadership of the nation’s two largest opposition parties — also passed a resolution offering Venezuelan aid to the American people.
“From the country where the coups emerge, where the invasions emerge, it boomeranged back to them,” Maduro told viewers of his program on Thursday. “Now, take a look, the outcry because a group of poor whites from the rural and semi-rural towns of the United States entered and assaulted the Capitol. Four dead, they say. One of them a young woman who was 14 years offering her service to the U.S. Air Force.”
“I heard her husband’s declaration saying that she believed that there was a fraud [sic] and that in her country there couldn’t be fraud,” Maduro continued, referring to late rioter Ashli Babbitt. “That she had come from her town, her rural town, and she was gunned down by a security person in the Capitol, a policeman.” Maduro then claimed that these violent images “are what they [Americans] are used to doing to the countries of the world.”
“These very poor rural whites are the ones that you see dressed up as Superman invading Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Panama, Grenada,” Maduro stated. While America has recently maintained a military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, it is unclear what exchanges the dictator was referencing regarding Iran or Panama, the latter a friendly nation to the United States.
“They’re the same ones who have assaulted, invaded, and murdered entire peoples,” Maduro said of the rioters. “The same Donald Trump who attempted to impose on Venezuela an assault on power. He attempted to impose a puppet, which turned out to be too dumb, too stupid, too incompetent.”
Here, Maduro was referencing the once legitimate president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, whom the National Assembly appointed president in January 2019. The constitution of Venezuela allows the National Assembly to appoint an interim president if the current leader creates a “rupture in the democratic order,” which Maduro had caused through another fraudulent election in May 2018. Maduro’s last legal term as president ended in January 2019.
As Maduro has installed a new National Assembly and removed Guaidó as president of the legislative power, Guaidó’s current legal authorities remains unclear. As president, Guaidó received the backing of much of the free world, including the United States, but failed to exercise any of his legal authority.
Returning to his condemnation of Trump, Maduro once again accused the American president of attempting to assassinate him on multiple occasions. He added that Trump “attempted to set Venezuela on fire” and “ordered the overthrow and killing of Evo Morales,” the former socialist president of Bolivia. Morales is still alive and resigned voluntarily from the presidency; he was not removed.
The Maduro-controlled National Assembly — which now exists alongside a parallel Assembly of those deposed that took their “oaths” at an undisclosed location with Guaidó this week — used its first ordinary session to pass a law “urging the people of the U.S. to cease the spiral of violence growing in that nation.”
The socialist lawmakers “called for civility to resolve the severe political and institutional crisis in which the United States is submerged and offered its [the National Assembly’s] humble efforts for the construction of democratic paths leading to resolving the complex situation.”
Maduro’s state propaganda outlet VTV did not specify what the National Assembly, an authoritarian institution, offered specifically in terms of aid to the United States, or what possible help it could provide in the current situation.
The resolution concluded by accusing America of “systematic violations of human rights,” including the “genocide of the Venezuelan people.”
A pro-Trump mob burglarized the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday after a rally in support of Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election. During a speech at that rally, Trump personally encouraged the crowd to march to the Capitol and claimed he would join them, but ultimately returned to the White House without doing so. The mob within the Capitol caused significant property damage and injury; at least five people died during the affair, including one Capitol Police officer.
Congress certified the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden in the early hours of Thursday after the mob interrupted the typically procedural event, ending any dispute regarding who would be inaugurated on January 20.
The Maduro regime has repeatedly used violence against its own legislative body. In 2014, Maduro police attacked lawmaker María Corina Machado for attempting to enter her office, ousting her with tear gas for publicly condemning the violent socialist regime. In 2016, a socialist mob formed outside of the National Assembly, pelting lawmakers with garbage.
A year later, colectivos, violent socialist gangs, took hundreds of National Assembly members hostage for eight hours in a dramatic siege in which lawmakers said they were subject to severe beatings with pipes. Some colectivos opened fire on lawmakers.
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