Reply #157: Do you have a link ? Because I come up with this when I search

[EFerrari]

"venezuela election canada monitors"

US Works to Delegitimize Venezuela's December Presidential Election
October 25th 2006, by Chuck Kaufman

I participated in a delegation of US citizens and residents who met with Venezuelans from across the political spectrum from September 30-October 8, 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela. The delegation, sponsored by the Venezuela Solidarity Network and Marin (CA) Interfaith Task Force on the Americas looked at factors influencing the December 3, 2006 presidential election with a particular emphasis on the US government role in that election. The official delegation report will be posted to www.vensolidarity.org.

The delegation was met with courtesy by every Venezuelan organization we interviewed ranging from Sumate, the best known opposition group, to the Vice Foreign Minister for North American Relations on the government side. Only at the US embassy were we met with barely minimum courtesy. The US ambassador refused to meet with us. His Political Officer had us shown to empty room with a two way mirror and folding chairs set in a circle. Across the hall was a well appointed unused conference room. We were not even offered water in sharp contrast with our meetings with Venezuelans who always offered us coffee and water.

Venezuela is politically polarized. We witnessed the extremes of this during a dinner with lawyer and author Eva Golinger. Some very drunk opposition supporters recognized Golinger as author of The Chavez Code and a strong Chavez partisan. Some of them surrounded our table and began screaming at Golinger and the delegation, calling us "assassins" "Cubans," and "Argentines." The verbal abuse went on for long minutes until waiters ejected the most out-of-control anti-Chavez woman. We were later told that she worked in the Ministry of Justice, highlighting one of the many contradictions arising from the fact that Chavez' Bolivarian revolution came into power democratically through the ballot box rather than by force of arms. Armed revolutions generally sweep opponents out of government jobs and places of influence such as the media, but in Venezuela many in the opposition are still in the civil service and most of the media is virulently anti-Chavez.

The one issue that unifies both the opposition and the supporters of the government is rejection of the Bush government's foreign policy. Nearly everyone we met with criticized President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The opposition uniformly volunteered that statements from the White House or State Department strengthened Chavez and, of course, supporters of President Chavez remember the attempted coup of April 2002 and the ongoing US hostility to the democratic advances they feel they have made.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2028

I know this site isn't all that objective. So, if you could scare up a link to a report from your monitors, I'd appreciate it and would like to read it.