Venezuela: Socialists Offer Iran Massive Farmland Giveaway
Iran’s deputy interior minister for economic affairs Mohsen Kousheshtabar announced to Iran’s Tasnim News agency on July 26 that the socialist regime of Venezuela has ceded one million hectares of the South American nation’s farmlands to the Islamic regime for the cultivation and growing of food.
Kousheshtabar boasted that Iran “has become so great and strong and has reached such a high level in scientific exchanges that other countries are reaching out to the Islamic Republic.”
“It definitely signifies the technical knowledge of these [Iranian] knowledge-based companies that has transpired at the international level,” he said.
The announcement, which further solidifies Venezuela’s role as Iran’s gateway to the region, comes one month after socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro visited Iran to sign a new 20-year energy, financial, and defense cooperation agreement between both countries.
Since 2001, Venezuela’s farmlands have suffered greatly as a result of the socialist regime and its land reforms, which destroyed Venezuela’s agriculture sector and forced the country to import the food that it was once capable of producing on its own.
In 2005, then-President Hugo Chávez — whom the Socialist Party of Venezuela posthumously refers to as the “Supreme and Eternal Commander of the Revolution” — armed with his controversial land law, began a one-sided “war against latifundium,” or large extensions of privately owned farmlands, and against farmers in Venezuela. The Chávez regime seized over five million hectares of farmland from capable hands and gave them over to chavista loyalists and allies without any sort of technical capacity, bringing once-productive lands down to near-zero production.
“From having once producing food for all Venezuelans, now those lands only produce pity,” said Aquiles Hopkins, president of the Confederation of Associations of Agricultural Producers of Venezuela (Fedeagro), in 2019. By 2021, it was estimated that the number of farmlands seized by the socialist regime had grown to more than nine million hectares.
Iran has found in Venezuela opportunities to further spread its influence by coming to the rescue of the Maduro regime after it has systematically destroyed all of the nation’s vital industries — with Venezuela’s run-down farmlands being the latest example.
Iran has been providing the Maduro regime with technical assistance to repair the nation’s run-down oil refineries. The Islamic regime has also been supplying the Maduro regime with fuel shipments to offset the nation’s severe fuel shortages, and in more recent times, exporting Iranian crude oil to supply the now repaired Venezuelan refineries. The Islamic regime has also reportedly been supplying arms to Venezuela, including long-range missiles, air defense systems, and radar equipment.
Maduro’s current oil Minister, Tareck El Aissami, whom the State Department currently has an active $10 million bounty on over drug trafficking charges, is widely believed to be Maduro’s link to Hezbollah and a huge monetary contributor to the terrorist organization.
In addition to farmlands, direct flights between Caracas and Tehran, and an ever-growing dependence on Iran to keep Venezuela’s oil industry afloat, the Maduro regime also took a supermarket chain seized from a Colombian private company and handed it over to members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the socialist regime completely ran the once privately-owned supermarket chain it to the ground — giving Iran a foothold in Venezuela’s food distribution chain.
