Foreign politicians drawn into Venezuelan polls, minister calls Paraguay's leader scum

The candidates in Venezuela's 14 April presidential elections have begun to use some blunt talk that may yet become ruder even than words traded in the 2012 campaign between Henrique Capriles and Hugo Chávez. Rudeness was also evident in Venezuelan reactions to foreign politicians' recent comments about Venezuela and its leaders. On 4 April Venezuela's Foreign Minister said he was "obliged to respond" to comments made about Chávez by Paraguay's President Federico Franco, qualifying Franco as "human and political scum." Speaking on TeleSur, Jaua contrasted the late president's "moral and human stature" with "the human and political scum President Franco signifies," but regretted that Franco "is not the last human and political scum who will be able to offend and attack the memory of that historical giant," Europa Press reported. The two states have minimal ties, and Franco recently called Chávez's death a miracle. Another conservative critic of Venezuela was the former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who has several times accused Venezuela of backing Colombia's two communist guerrilla armies. He wrote on the website Twitter on 30 March that Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro had "raised the tone" by calling his opponents the "heirs of Adolf Hitler" and there was "no limit" to his cynicism; Maduro replied on Uribe's account, asking him if he should have called them "your heirs." Uribe then wrote that Maduro's "partners" - Colombia's communist FARC guerrillas - chain "hostages to wire fences like Hitler," Bogotá's Radio Santa Fe reported on 31 March. Foreign Minister Jaua praised Maduro's response to the "genocidal" Uribe, the website Noticia al Dia reported. Brazil's former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva separately upset the Venezuelan opposition after stating support  for Maduro on 3 April. Lula told a Uruguayan daily that while not as charismatic as Chávez, Maduro was "an extraordinary human being...who I think is totally prepared" to govern as his predecessor, Globovisión reported. "I think he will win the elections and will govern," Lula said. The Venezuelan parliamentarian Maria Corina Machado called his "rude intervention" the next day "grotesque and unacceptable," and said Lula had become Maduro's "salesman" and "electoral agent." Machado is the foreign affairs spokeswoman on the Capriles election team. His comments Machado said, did not so much befit a former statesman as "a merchant." She said "someone who is unaware of the reality of our country and ignores the problems Venezuelans have to deal with every day has no right to state opinions. We wonder if Maduro has spoken to Lula of the dead taken to the morgues every day, the product of [crime] violence, under the complicit gaze of this government," Globovisión reported on 4 April. Venezuela's opposition has repeatedly accused the regime of neglecting the problem of crime.