SOLIDARITY campaigners attacked former Venezuelan minister Ricardo Hausmann’s call today for a foreign military invasion to end a supposed “famine.”

Britain’s Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) slammed Mr Hausmann for his article entitled D-Day Venezuela, published yesterday by the Project Syndicate website funded by billionaire speculator George Soros.

The Harvard University professor and former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank claimed Venezuela’s economic woes, which the government blames on a US-directed economic war and black market spivs, had created a “famine.”

Venezuela’s government has been supplying all households with subsidised food parcels each month to ensure people don’t go hungry.

However, Mr Hausmann equated the situation to that in the nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1944-45, when 20,000 people died of malnutrition.

Mr Hausmann claimed without evidence that “today’s Venezuelan famine is already worse. How many lives must be shattered before salvation comes?”

In November US troops joined the Brazilian and other regional armies for military exercises near Venezuela’s border simulating the creation of a “humanitarian corridor.”

Mr Hausmann also repeated discredited claims that the government had barred the right-wing Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mud) from elections.

Venezuela Solidarity Campaign secretary Francisco Dominguez told the Morning Star: “Sections of Venezuela’s extreme right wing, realising that the economic war has failed to persuade Venezuelans to stop supporting the Bolivarian government and faced with the utter electoral collapse of the Mud, have opted to campaign for military intervention.”

He said their aim was to “torpedo the ongoing dialogue between the government and the opposition in the Dominican Republic and prevent the coming presidential election.

“Mr Hausmann’s call for military intervention against a Latin American nation should be unequivocally and totally rejected by everybody in the UK and everywhere else,” Mr Dominguez said.

Mr Hausmann was minister of planning from 1992-93 in the second government of president Carlos Andres Perez, who was impeached for embezzling 250 million bolivars of government funds.