Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has come through on an asylum offer to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, making the announcement on television during a broadcast of a parade marking the country’s independence day.
On Friday Nicaragua also joined Venezuela in extending an asylum offer for the fugitive former spy agency contractor, who is still holed up in a transit section of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport since fleeing Hong Kong twelve days ago.
Maduro, who often employs the same boisterous rhetoric employed by his predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chavez, has said his country will shield the whistleblower from prosecution by the US.
“I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young American, Edward Snowden, so that in the fatherland of Bolivar and Chavez, he can come and live away from imperial North American persecution,”said Maduro.
The two offers for political asylum from Central and South America come on the heels of an emergency UNASUR bloc meeting which was held Thursday in Cochabamba, Bolivia following an incident in which Bolivian president Evo Morales was denied entry into French airspace.
Morales’ plane was forced out of European airspace and to make an unexpected landing in Austria after a US diplomat lied about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden being onboard, local media reported.
The plane had departed from Moscow on July 2, but was not allowed to fly over France, Spain, Portugal or Italy after those governments were told the plane was carrying Snowden aboard.
When the plane landed in Vienna to refuel, US Ambassador to Austria William Eacho phoned officials from the Austrian Foreign Ministry, the Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse reported. Eacho “claimed with great certainty that Edward Snowden was onboard” and referenced a “diplomatic note requesting Snowden’s extradition.”
The Thursday meeting of the Latin American bloc was attended by the leaders of Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Uruguay, Suriname and Bolivia with representatives of Brazil, Chile and Peru also in attendance.
Following the emergency summit, the bloc issued a statement which voiced support for Morales and expressed indignation at Tuesday’s moves by France, Portugal, Italy and Spain to obstruct the Bolivian head of state’s aircraft from free passage.
The incident “set a dangerous precedent of violating international laws” in the world, the statement said.