You know, there are very serious problems in Venezuela. It's a developing country. There are problems with crime. That's why I talked about the police. There are problems with Colombian paramilitaries; they regularly cross the border and commit atrocities, and they are working with criminal gangs. There are terrible problems with drug dealing. Recently the United Nations said that Venezuela is one of the countries that has the most confiscated drugs from these thugs, these murderers who bring drugs into the country.
But what I am trying to convey to you is that despite all these problems it may have, this is a government that's actually trying to solve these problems, not a country that is turning a blind eye to them. Every country has problems of one sort or another, even Canada. We could talk about things that are irrelevant for us to bring out here, but what I am trying to convey to you is that this a government that... In the past, the governments were quite terrible to their population, but this is a government that is really trying to solve the problems of the country.
I would also like to say that I disagree that some of the organizations that have brought reports against Venezuela are credible. The Inter-American Press Association is not an association of journalists, it's not an NGO, and it's not an academic organization. It is an organization of the owners of newspapers, and they are very powerful.
I would like you to listen to what the Latin American journalists say. The Latin American Federation of Journalists has stated that IAPA “has been an accomplice in barbarity and has fathered the derailment of democratic processes... It has no moral authority, having endorsed some of the most bloody coups d'état in recent decades.”
IAPA has never condemned the coup in Honduras, nor the killing last month of the six journalists in Honduras.
As for Human Rights Watch, a recent Human Rights Watch report spurned an open letter by 100 of the most distinguished international experts on Latin America in North America and in Europe, who had issued an open letter stating that Human Rights Watch “does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility".
You can see that there are some very powerful people stacked up against Venezuela. We greatly fear that this is very similar to campaigns that have occurred in other parts of the world before very terrible conflicts were unleashed against those countries.
Yes, there are many problems related to the same things that all developing countries are facing, but we believe what the Venezuelan people believe and what they have shown in elections and what they have shown in polls. Over and over again, international polls have shown consistently that Venezuelans are among the Latin Americans who most highly regard their democracy, and they have the highest rating in the region in believing that their government has the capacity to solve their problems. In the end, that's what's most important: what the Venezuelans believe, what they vote for, and what they express through these international polls.