Venezuela: On the campaign trail with Alek Boyd

Venezuela News and Views has An interview with Alek Boyd, from the Rosales campaign trail. Alek, who blogs at VCrisis is not only covering the Rosales campaign, he's also the guy that sued London mayor Ken Livingstone:

So it has been a set of circumstances. You had to leave your family behind, which is certainly tough. But you also left a lawsuit. Any news on that?

The part of leaving my family behind was indeed very difficult. As you know there are dangers of the physical sort associated with what I am doing and that was the one issue that had both my wife and I worried. Journalist have been killed in Venezuela and although local bloggers do not seem to be in the regime's radar I think my activities abroad have gained me a certain degree of notoriety among officials. One example of that is precisely the lawsuit I filled against London Mayor's Ken Livingstone who saw fit to accuse me of being a terrorist without providing one shred of evidence to support his spurious accusation. Had these allegations come from another apologist of Chavez I wouldn't have paid much attention to it. However in 2005 the Metropolitan Police shot 5 times and killed a Brazilian citizen living in London thought to be a terrorist. Other blunders such as the Forest Gate raid gave me much reason to think, deciding that the best course of action was to sue Livingstone, who, as Mayor of London, meets on a regular basis with Metropolitan Police chiefs. I have no doubts that Livingstone has been following orders from Caracas all along, even more so now that he has become head of Chavez propaganda office in London, headquartered in City Hall, and is about to launch an oil for propaganda programme that his lieutenants will implement in London's bus fleet. I have to admit that I made many mistakes in the way of presenting the case. Not having professional counsel certainly affected my chances of winning. Before even presenting his defense Livingstone offered me a settlement out of court which I decided to accept. However in a surprisingly malicious move Livingstone repeated his accusations the day after I withdrew my claim. I recently wrote a summary of the whole thing which can be read here.

Read the whole interview, and continue to visit both blogs regularly. You'll learn more about Latin American politics than you ever thought possible.

(technorati tags Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, Manuel Rosales)