In its annual human-rights report released Monday, the U.S. State Department said Venezuela's ''human-rights record remained poor'' and ''government intimidation was a serious problem'' in 2002. ''The president, officials in his administration, and members of his political party frequently spoke out against the media, the political opposition, labor unions, the courts, the Church, and human-rights groups,'' the report said. ``Many persons interpreted these remarks as tacit approval of violence, and they threatened, intimidated, or even physically harmed several individuals from groups opposed to Chávez during the year.''***
For more than a decade, the Venezuelan military with United States cooperation carried out annual eradication campaigns involving hundreds of soldiers who chopped down and yanked out clandestine fields of marijuana, opium poppies and coca, the raw material for cocaine. But last year, as Venezuela experienced social and political upheaval including an aborted military-led coup in April, the country carried out no eradication.
"[The mountains] are full" of drug crops, said a national guardsman in the town of Machiques who participated in past eradications but requested anonymity. "The places we destroyed have regrown." In fact, drug acreage in Venezuela is tiny compared with the numbers in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, long centers of illegal drug exports. In 2001, Venezuela eradicated 117 acres of coca and 96 acres of poppy crops, while the other three eliminated tens of thousands of acres. Still, nobody is certain how much illegal drug cultivation exists in Venezuela, since it has no monitoring program.***