Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) refused to denounce brutal Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro on Monday when asked by a reporter and instead used the opportunity to attack a member of the Trump administration.
“The Trump administration is pressuring Maduro to step down after a re-election widely considered a scam that circumvented the Venezuelan constitution,” The Free Beacon reported. “The United States and dozens of other countries have backed Juan Guaido, head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the country’s rightful interim president and condemned Maduro as a dictator.”
“As a Democratic Socialist, I’m wondering what are your thoughts on the Venezuelan crisis that’s happening right now and if you would denounce the Maduro regime?” a reporter asked.
“Yeah, so, I think that, that this is absolutely a complex issue,” Ocasio-Cortez responded. “I think it’s important that, uh, that we approach this very carefully. One I am, um, myself just like anyone else who is absolutely concerned with the humanitarian crises that’s happening and I think it’s important that any solution that we have centers the Venezuelan people and centers the democracy of Venezuelan people first.”
“I am very concerned about U.S. interventionism in Venezuela, and I oppose it, especially when we talk about a figure like this U.S. Special Envoy Elliott Abrams here,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “I think it’s, he’s pled guilty to several crimes related to Iran-contra and I don’t think that we should be, you know I am generally opposed to U.S. interventionism as a principle, but particularly under this administration and under his leadership I think it’s a profound mistake.”
WATCH:
The situation in Venezuela has become so dire that Maduro recently detained journalists for asking him about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the country.
“Amid the increasingly dire situation in Venezuela, Univision’s left-leaning anchor Jorge Ramos traveled into the rapidly imploding socialist country for an interview Monday with dictator Nicolas Maduro,” The Daily Wire reported. “But after Ramos said he took the conversation in a direction Maduro didn’t appreciate, things quickly devolved, resulting in Ramos and his team having all their equipment confiscated and a frightening two-hour encounter with agents.”
Fox News reported that Ramos “said the last straw for Maduro was when the Mexican-American journalist held up his iPad and showed him footage he had filmed himself of three children on the streets of Venezuela rummaging through the back of a garbage truck for scraps of food.”
“He just couldn’t stand it,” Ramos said. “He didn’t want to continue the interview. He tried to close my iPad. They confiscated all of our cameras, all our videos.”
WATCH:
Venezuela’s collapse, thanks to its socialist policies, has resulted in its citizens losing an average of 24 lbs. of body weight due to food shortages and approximately 90% live in poverty.
There have been numerous reports of starving people in Venezuela being forced to eat zoo animals to survive as the socialist nation’s consumer prices rose 1,300,000.00+% in 2018.
“Sometimes we only find the animal’s heads, guts and legs,” said Robert Linares, a Maracaibo waste disposal worker who works in Venezuela. “We used to see this very little in the past, but this practice is now out of control and on the rise.”