(CNN) President Nicolas Maduro has accused Portugal of being behind a pork shortage that left thousands of Venezuela's poor without their traditional Christmas dinner and sparked a fresh round of angry street protests.

On Wednesday Maduro announced he had been unable to distribute thousands of pork hind legs to the poorest neighborhoods in the country -- as he had promised earlier in the month. And he put the blame squarely on Portugal.

"What happened to the pork?" Maduro asked during a Wednesday televised address. "They sabotaged us. I can name a country: Portugal."

Like many in Latin America, Venezuelans typically eat pork legs, known locally as pernil de cerdo, during the Christmas holidays. Maduro had promised to distribute the pork as part of the monthly subsidized food ration for low-income families.

"It was all set, because we had bought all the pork there was in Venezuela, we bought it all. So we had to import, and so I gave the order and I signed the payments. But they went after the bank accounts, they went after the two giant ships that were coming. They have sabotaged us," said Maduro.

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