Weekly Report - 25 September 2008 (ISSN 1741-7422)

President Hugo Chávez followed up his recent expulsion of the US ambassador by expelling the regional director of the US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) and his deputy from Venezuela this week. The two men had released in Venezuela a 230-page report entitled, “A Decade Under Chávez : Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela", which made the incendiary claims that not only had Chávez 's time in office constituted a “lost decade" but he had also used the short-lived coup of 2002 as a pretext to consolidate his grip on power to the detriment of state institutions and human rights guarantees.