The Venezuelan Transport Ministry suspended flights to and from Chile indefinitely on Wednesday, shortly after that nation’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, condemned the Venezuelan socialist regime at the U.N. General Assembly.
While Boric has long self-identified as a radical leftist, he has also consistently used international forums to condemn Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro for decades of systematic human rights abuses against his own people, holding a long list of sham elections to stay in power and impoverishing his people to such an extent that the global Venezuelan refugee population now totals eight million people. Boric told the General Assembly on Monday that Chile has now taken in 800,000 Venezuelans and that, despite his sympathy for their situation, “Chile is not in a situation to receive more Venezuelan migrants.”
He also used his address to a fraudulent presidential election Maduro held in July, at the behest of American Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which he banned top opposition leaders from the ballot, appeared on the ballot himself 13 times, and still lost. Maduro declared victory without publishing vote tallies, while opposition candidate Edmundo González published ballot counts from local-level voting stations that showed him achieving an overwhelming victory. Following a brutal, violent crackdown on political dissidents, González fled to Spain in early September, effectively ceding influence in the country.
Boric and the leaders of several nations in the region have refused to accept Maduro as the legitimate winner of the election, however, which the regime has described as a “colonialist” attempt to ingratiate themselves with the United States.
The Spanish newswire service EFE reported on Wednesday that the Venezuelan regime issued a brief statement confirming the indefinite suspension of flights to and from Chile without any explanation for the change. The greater context of the flight suspensions, however, is a similar policy imposed against the governments of Peru, Panama, and the Dominican Republic after the July sham election, which Caracas described as necessary to combat “right-wing government interference.” While the Panamanian and Dominican governments are conservative, Peruvian President Dina Boluarte is an avowed leftist who assumed the presidency after becoming vice president under her predecessor Pedro Castillo, a Leninist communist.
The Chilean Foreign Affairs Ministry lamented the socialist regime’s decision. In a statement on Thursday, a spokesperson for the agency described the suspension of flights as a “unilateral decision that again makes vulnerable the situation of 800,000 Venezuelans who live in our country.”
“It is an unjustified action and we lament it,” the spokesman added.
Boric’s address at the United Nations that preceded the flight suspensions defended Maduro’s regime from global human rights sanctions, falsely claiming that cutting funding to Maduro and his elites hurts the Venezuelan people. Aside from that offer of support, however, Boric insisted that he would continue to condemn Venezuela for its human rights abuses despite sharing an ideology with Maduro:
“On occasions, the international community is accused of double standards in the face of human rights violations,” he noted. “It is condemned when the adversary does it, but when a supposed friend is the one who violates the U.N. Charter, they look the other way.”
“As a young, Latin American, and leftist president, I say loud and clear that human rights must be respected always and everywhere, and we must demand this respect regardless of the political color that the government that violates them has,” he continued.
“We are before a dictatorship that seeks to steal an election, persecutes its opposition, and is indifferent to the exile not of thousands, but of millions of its citizens,” Boric decried, calling for a “political exit” to the crisis.
Speaking at Columbia University on Wednesday, Boric reiterated his rejection of the Maduro regime:
“What is happening in Venezuela is a tragedy from every point of view. Unfortunately in Latin America, in many of our countries, the Venezuela crisis has been used as a tool and an internal political weapon without having a true concern for what the people of Venezuela are living,” Boric said. “In Chile, there are over 800,000 Venezuelans. Imagine the desperation that a worker, a working mother, a student many of them with university degrees or higher education, must feel to leave their country in such a precarious situation.”
Boric repeated his assurance that he believes Maduro stole the July election.
The Chilean president has made similar comments against the Venezuelan socialists for years, including on one occasion while sharing a room with Maduro. During a summit of Latin American leaders in May 2023, Boric recognized Maduro’s presence and said he would “salute and applaud” his decision to attend; nonetheless, he condemned attempts by allied leftists to ignore the human rights crisis.
“I have to say that the human rights crisis in Venezuela … is not a constructed narrative. It is real, in flesh and bone,” Boric said. “And I tell you this because I see it in Chile with the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants who have left their country.”
Maduro has not directly responded to Boric, but a lower-level bureaucrat at his Foreign Ministry, “viceminister for Latin America” Rander Peña, published an outraged post on the encrypted messaging Telegram application insulting Boric following his General Assembly speech.
“You can’t hold Nicolás Maduro’s gaze, you have no morals, you are lacking so much,” Peña ranted. “Wash your mouth before talking about Venezuela and our people.”
Peña went on to compare Boric to conservative former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet.
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