MPs urge Corbyn to condemn Venezuela

JEREMY Corbyn was yesterday urged to condemn President Maduro’s violent regime in socialist Venezuela.

Cross-party MPs urged the Labour leader to speak out about the growing crisis after a widely criticised election.

Mr Corbyn has previously praised the country’s late president, Hugo Chavez, and his Marxist successor Nicolas Maduro.

Labour MP Angela Smith, who has joined a new all-party parliamentary group on Venezuela, said she was ‘appalled’ at the ‘wilful destruction of democratic structures’ in the country. ‘I hope that my party leadership will as soon as possible condemn what’s happening in the country and call for the release of opposition party political prisoners,’ she told The Times.

Graham Jones, another Labour MP and chairman of the group, said: ‘I believe everybody in the Labour Party should condemn the Venezuelan regime because the first duty of any state is to look after its citizens. Venezuela has failed.’ Venezuela’s intelligence service took opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez and Antonio Ledezma back to jail yesterday following an election that will effectively give the president power to re-write the constitution.

The country’s national assembly speaker Julio Borges said the arrests were ‘outrageous’ and ‘absolutely arbitrary’.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tweeted: ‘Maduro acting like a dictator of an evil regime … Political prisoners must be released and rights, freedoms and democracy respected.’