Maduro denounces a worldwide smear campaign to asphyxiate Venezuela

The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has denounced this Friday that “a pernicious worldwide campaign of discredit” has been woven to asphyxiate the country for challenging the “single thought regime” of the market economy and neoliberal globalization.

Maduro has assured that this model is the “modern version of colonization” and has warned of the “resurgence of xenophobia and aporophobia, hate speeches and crimes and intolerance” that are growing “under the shelter” of ultraconservative and extreme right-wing parties and governments, in a letter read at the UN Assembly by the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Carlos Rafael Faría Tortosa.

The president also made mention of the 913 economic sanctions that he describes as illegal that weigh on the country, and which according to him translate into “suffering, deprivation and systematic aggressions that restrict life and collective rights” in the country. Maduro has estimated the losses caused by this blockade in the last few years at 150 billion dollars.

He has also called for prioritizing the reestablishment of the diplomatic path and political dialogue, above military confrontation, and has assured that humanity “will not survive a world war”. For this reason, he expressed his rejection of the sanctions taken against Russia and the “campaign of hatred unleashed to the detriment of the Slavic people”.

The president has claimed Venezuela’s role in the international energy crisis due to its gas and oil resources and ‘puts on the table’ its capacity in agriculture for the search of global solutions.

In addition, he has predicted a change of post-imperial epoch in the face of the present crisis of the “supremacist, imperialist Western civil model, which denies, attacks and tries to suppress the other, the difference”. In this sense, he called for an “ethical change” on the part of the old powers in favor of the construction of “a new common world”.