The socialist dictatorship of Venezuela has sent 14 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid to Lebanon as a gesture against Israel’s self-defense operations following the October 7, 2023, Hamas slaughter.
Venezuela under dictator Nicolás Maduro has vocally supported Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Iranian terror state against Israel, holding “anti-Zionist” rallies and accusing Israel of “genocide.” The alleged humanitarian aid package follows an expansion of Israeli self-defense activities in the past two months in Lebanon targeting the leaders of Hezbollah, who Maduro for decades has maintained close ties with.
Shipping 14 tons of humanitarian aid out of Venezuela became an eye-catching international display given the country’s status as one of the world’s most impoverished. Once Latin America’s wealthiest state, following the election of socialist tyrant Hugo Chávez in 1999, the oil-rich state deteriorated rapidly as socialists plundered its coffers, forced its most educated population into prison or exile, and neglected the upkeep of its top industries. Venezuela’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell 73 percent in the past decade.
The collapse of Venezuela’s economy has led 8 million Venezuelans to flee the country – a migrant crisis comparable only to the war-torn states of Syria and Ukraine – and recent studies suggest over half of Venezuelans, at least, live in poverty. The Maduro regime stopped tracking poverty data in 2015, at a time of acute crisis in the country in which pervasive, involuntary weight loss became commonly referred to as the “Maduro diet.”
It is not clear at press time if the “aid” that Maduro sent to Lebanon came out of supplies initially reserved for Venezuelan citizens.
VTV, the state propaganda broadcaster, reported on Saturday that Maduro’s top diplomat, Yván Gil, had supervised the shipping of 14 tons of food, medicine, and other aid to Lebanon and Syria “for the populations attacked by Israeli Zionism.”
“As a gesture of solidarity and support towards the brotherly peoples, Venezuela remains firm in its commitment to back the Middle East nations in their struggle for peace and self-determination,” Gil said in a post on the communications application Telegram. Gil’s underling for Middle East issues, Tatiana Pugh, reportedly said that Venezuela’s aid was necessary to combat the “massacres” allegedly committed by Israel.
“Tons of food, medicine and basic necessities sent by the Bolivarian people and government have arrived in Damascus for the brothers and sisters of Lebanon affected by the bombardment of the terrorist state of Israel,” Gil proclaimed.
The approval of humanitarian aid in general is an abrupt shift for the Venezuelan dictatorship. At the peak of the humanitarian crisis in the country, some of Maduro’s top henchmen discouraged Venezuelans from accepting humanitarian aid from other countries, particularly the United States, falsely claiming it was poisoned.
“Something that should alarm us as a people is that the humanitarian aid comes contaminated and poisoned,” Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez scandalously claimed in 2019, as the administration of President Donald Trump shipped tons of food to the Colombian-Venezuelan border. “It is carcinogenic. Several scientific studies have proven that the … United States is looking to poison our people with chemicals. We could call them biological weapons.”
In reality, Maduro’s “aid” to his people is the food often contaminated and unsafe to eat. The regime feeds its poor – and manipulates their behavior – through an aid distribution system known as the “Local Committees for Supply and Production” (CLAP, by its Spanish-language initials). CLAP boxes are highly subsidized packages often containing cooking oil, rice, flour, and other food basics. While starving Venezuelan citizens often compete for the regime’s favor to get priority access to the boxes, they have for years been known to contain rotten food, including insect-laden rice, expired sardine cans, and other unsafe items.
Gil did not specify if the food sent to Lebanon came from Maduro’s CLAP box supply.
The United Nations recently estimated that over 80 percent of Venezuelans currently live in poverty, and over half – 53 percent – live in extreme poverty, unable to afford a basic monthly supply of food. A study by Venezuela’s Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB) in March found similarly that over half of Venezuelans lived in poverty in 2023, and about half lived in “multidimensional poverty,” including lack of access to health and education.
The move to express “solidarity” with Lebanese Hezbollah, the target of the Israeli operation, follows decades of attempts by Chávez and, later, Maduro to forge close ties to the jihadist terror organization. In 2015, Spanish journalist Emili Blasco revealed that Chávez sent Maduro, then Venezuela’s foreign minister, to Damascus, Syria, in 2007 to meet with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and discuss “drug trafficking, money laundering, [and] the distribution of arms and issuing of passports … to terrorists.” The distribution of authentic Venezuelan passports to Hezbollah terrorists with no clear ties to Venezuela was reportedly administered through a Hezbollah terrorist known as Ghazi Nasr al Din.
By 2017, a former official in Venezuela’s passport distribution office revealed that the country had issued at least 10,000 passports to Syrian, Iranian, and other Middle Eastern nationals who did not appear to in any way qualify for a Venezuelan passport. It is unclear how many of these were members of Hezbollah or any other Iran-backed jihadist terrorist organization.
Hassan Nasrallah died in late September as a result of a targeted Israeli airstrike on a Hezbollah base in Lebanon.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.