*Jamie Foxx is being blasted by human rights activist and former chess champion Garry Kasparov for his recent visit with Venezuela’s controversial president Nicolas Maduro.
“We have reason to believe that your visit with one of Latin America’s most notorious strongmen of the last few decades may have been motivated by financial interests,” Kasparov writes in a letter to Foxx and fellow actor Lukas Haas, after photos of them surfaced last week, and news of their visit made headlines on Wednesday.
In a letter and email addressed to both actors on Thursday, Kasparov called Maduro “a notoriously authoritarian chief of state,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. He added: “We have reason to believe that your visit with one of Latin America’s most notorious strongmen of the last few decades may have been motivated by financial interests and we would like you to clarify this to your millions of fans across the world.”
Kasparov wrote his letter and email under the auspices of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is chairman. The letter links to a 132-page report documenting “a dramatic increase in extreme poverty rates, the highest inflation and murder rates in the world, long lists of political prisoners, torture and extrajudicial killings of students, frequent power blackouts, and massive shortages of medicine and basic foods” in Venezuela under Maduro.
The letter also includes several visual aids pointing out the country’s cocaine trade and murder rate, along with photos of political prisoners and a list of things average citizens cannot find except on the black market, including toilet paper, milk and medicine.
“Your recent participation in a propaganda campaign of the Venezuelan regime threatens to undo all the good work you’ve done and to tarnish your public image,” Kasparov tells Foxx and Haas in the letter.
Foxx and Haas are both repped by the same agency, LBI Entertainment, according to THR.
In the letter, Kasparov asks Foxx and Haas to disclose whether they have financial participation in an “Aragua real estate deal,” referring to the region in Venezuela, or if they are receiving payment for publicizing that deal or any other government initiative in the country. He asserts the real estate deal is falsely labeled a government housing project but it has nothing to do with humanitarian work.
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