Weekly Report - 17 November 2011 (WR-11-46)

A political debate is a rare thing in Venezuela, all the more so when it pits the horsemen of the apocalypse against each other. But this is what happened on 14 November when the five presidential pre-candidates for the opposition coalition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) accepted an invitation from a student movement to take part in a debate ahead of primary elections in February for the right to face President Hugo Chávez next October. Chávez himself has no intention of jousting with whichever of the five opposition pre-candidates he compared to the horsemen from the Book of Revelation emerges victorious in the MUD contest next year.