Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil accused the United States on Wednesday of “instrumentalizing” migration to harm and promote sanctions on the socialist regime.
Gil made his accusations — directed against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — after Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Tuesday that the United States will provide a $578-million assistance package to “partner countries” for Latin American migrants in the region, including the millions of Venezuelan refugees who have fled their home country seeking an escape from socialism.
“USAID is an agency of covert political operations. Phonies and liars, the US instrumentalizes migration against Venezuela and promotes sanctions against the Venezuelan people,” Gil wrote on social media. “As usual those dollars, directed to conspiracy, will go to the pockets of the corrupt people of the big names. They will fail!”
According to the Department of State, the $578 million assistance package announced by Secretary Blinken will “help communities to respond to urgent humanitarian needs, expand lawful pathways, and support the regularization and integration of migrants.” Blinken made the announcement during his participation in a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Guatemala this week on the subject of migration.
A statement from the office of the U.S. Department of State’s spokesperson says:
The assistance announced in Guatemala advances the goals of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection and will address humanitarian needs arising from historic levels of displacement, with more than 22 million people displaced across the region, including more than 7.7 million Venezuelans.
Over the past decade the regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro has created an unprecedented migrant crisis prompted by the economic collapse of the country under socialism and the pervasive abuse of human rights. The Venezuelan migrant crisis is widely described as the worst of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, matched only by Syria’s and Ukraine’s crises.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that, as of September, at least 7.7 million Venezuelan citizens have fled their country, which represents roughly 27.5 percent of its entire 28 million population.
The Center of Justice and Peace (CEPAZ), a Venezuelan non-government organization, stated on Wednesday that while Venezuelan migrants had been mainly arriving to other Latin American countries, they have begun opting to enter the United States more frequently. The number of U.S-bound Venezuelan migrants has reportedly tripled in the past ten years.
CEPAZ estimated that the Venezuelan population in the United States has grown by 600 percent over the past 20 years.
The Maduro regime has repeatedly attempted to downplay or outright deny the unprecedented Venezuelan migrant crisis that its “Socialism of the 21st Century” has caused, failing to take any responsibility for the conditions that led to its origin.
In 2022, during a dialogue at the United Nations in Geneva, the Maduro regime’s representative denied the existence of Venezuelan migrants, describing the large number of refugees as an “invention” that sought to harm the reputation of socialism.
Shortly before the U.N. dialogue, Foreign Minister Gil, during his 2022 speech at the United Nations General Assembly, read a letter signed by socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in which he claimed that the Venezuelan migrant crisis was real, but “induced” by American and other national sanctions on his regime issued in response to the continued human rights violations committed against Venezuelans at home.
In the letter, Maduro also claimed that 60 percent of Venezuela’s migrants had “returned” to their home country, offering no evidence for this statistic.
The Maduro regime has reportedly refused to take in deportation flights returning Venezuelan migrants from the United States since February, breaking a deal previously signed with the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden in October 2023 that called for the “orderly, safe, and legal” deportation of Venezuelan migrants.
The Biden Administration temporarily lifted oil and gas sanctions on the Maduro regime between October 2023 and April 2024 as part of a now-failed plan to entice the Maduro regime to hold a “free and fair” presidential election this year. The Maduro regime, after having repeatedly violated the terms of the agreements that led to the oil and gas sanctions relief, is slated to hold a new sham presidential election on July 28.
U.S. acting ambassador to Colombia and the head of the Venezuelan Affairs Unit (VAU) in Bogotá, Francisco Palmieri, said on Monday that the administration of President Joe Biden is willing to once again ease sanctions on the Maduro regime if it commits to a “free and fair” election.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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