Luis Suarez bite: Venezuelan president says disgraced Luis Suarez was punished for knocking out England and Italy
Nicolas Maduro weighs into the controversy
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Your support makes all the difference.Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, is the latest man to weigh into the Luis Suarez row saying he believes the Uruguayan was being unfairly punished for helping to knock out Italy and England.
Suarez scored twice against England in Uruguay's 2-1 win and played as his team beat Italy 1-0, a result that saw the South Americans go through with Costa Rica.
However during the match with Italy, Suarez bit defender Giorgio Chiellini - a move which earned him a four-month suspension from all football by Fifa.
"They can't forgive Uruguay that a son of the people has eliminated two of football's big nations, so they invented a whole case," Nicolas Maduro said late on Friday.
"It's very painful this disproportionate punishment that Fifa has taken against Luis Suarez, a great striker who belongs to all of us in South America," said Maduro, the populist successor to late Venezuelan socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez.
"No one denies some corrective measures were needed, but to suspend him for four months from football where he shines? To take him out of the World Cup? Latin America views this with outrage and we reject it totally."
The Venezuelan president is not the first person to view Suarez's punishment as overly harsh, in fact Chiellini himself has spoken out about it as well as Uruguay's President Jose Mujica and football great Diego Maradona.
Suarez has now returned home to be with his family in Uruguay.
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