Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís fired his ambassador in Venezuela on Wednesday after the top diplomat had voiced support for the government of embattled President Nicolás Maduro in a newspaper interview, Reuters reported.

Ambassador Federico Picado told La Nación that the shortage of basic products that has affected Venezuela for months was due to "political factors." He blamed "big business" for trying to destabilize the country and hurt Maduro's credibility.

Maduro has long insisted that the shortages in Venezuela are the result of a deliberate "economic war" against his government, teleSUR noted.

"Inspectors have discovered a number of warehouses with tons of essential goods and have found evidence of hoarding," detailed the news channel, a mouthpiece for the Venezuelan government.

Picado added that he thought Maduro was right to ask for extraordinary powers to bypass the country's National Assembly in order to respond to President Barack Obama's declaration of a "national emergency" to deal with the "threat" of Venezuela, according to the Tico Times. Venezuela's legislature recently granted the president those decree powers.

Solís said that his government did not share Picado's view, and Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González noted that the diplomat's newspaper interview had not been authorized, as is common practice. But during his weekly news conference, Solís was careful not to criticize Picado too harshly, the Tico Times explained.

"One doesn't have to be neutral to be an ambassador," the Costa Rican president conceded. But "in the case of Venezuela, the only spokesman authorized to give statements about the issue is the foreign minister," Solís added.

The Central American country's foreign ministry, meanwhile, reaffirmed González's position regarding Venezuela, which the minister had detailed last week during a meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington.

"The situation in Venezuela requires us to stay alert to the evolution of events and to clearly signal the importance, in a full democracy, of exercising the democratic balance of power and generating appropriate conditions so that the opposition can carry out its actions within the framework of legality and respect," it said in a statement.