Vice-President Joe Biden has given a stark assessment of the ongoing unrest in Venezuela, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of widespread human rights violations and saying the situation reminded him of Latin America’s troubled and violent past.

In a written interview with El Mercurio of Chile, where Biden arrived on Sunday at the start of his seventh official visit to the region, he called the unstable situation in Venezuela “alarming” and said the Caracas government lacked even basic respect for human rights.

“Confronting peaceful protesters with force and in some cases armed militias, limiting freedom of the press and assembly […] is not in line with the solid standards of democracy that we have in most of our hemisphere. The situation in Venezuela reminds me of past times, when strongmen governed using violence and oppression; human rights, hyperinflation, shortages and extreme poverty ravaged the peoples of the hemisphere,” Biden wrote, according to the Spanish translation published by El Mercurio.

Biden has flown to Chile with his wife Jill to attend the inauguration of Chile’s new president, Michelle Bachelet, on Tuesday. The Venezuelan leader will also be present at the event.

The White House said that while in Chile the vice-president will have one-to-one meetings with Bachelet and with presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, Ollanta Humala of Peru, and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico.

For several weeks, Venezuela has been racked by clashes between government soldiers and student protesters backed by middle class Venezuelans disgruntled by extreme inflation and food shortages. Maduro has laid blame for the unrest against far-right provocateurs, the implication being that the US is fomenting the trouble.

In his El Mercurio interview, Biden disputed the claim, riposting that Maduro was trying “distract his people from the most important issues that are in play in Venezuela by inventing totally false and outlandish conspiracies about the United States. Instead of that, he should listen to the Venezuelan people, and to look to the example of those leaders who resisted oppression in the Americas, or risk repeating the injustices they fought against so bravely.”

He added a frank admission that previous US administrations had been propelled by the struggle against the Soviet Union to side with “leaders who do not share our values” – a reference to the backing given by Ronald Reagan and other US presidents to reactionary paramilitary groups and military governments across Latin America. “However, the US finally stayed on the right side of history in places like Chile, where the [former] US ambassador Harry Barnes and others publicly defended the victims of repression,” he said.

He went on: “We recognise that some hangovers of the cold war remain, so that suspicion goes with the territory. But most people in the Americas are tired of fighting old ideological battles that don’t help their daily lives at all.”