Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez The Venezuelan president criticized testimony to the US Congress by Washington's top diplomat for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, who said Venezuela was a "threat to regional stability". Shannon said the administration is "working multilaterally, engaging the OAS (Organization of American States), the EU and the Council of Europe, among others, to support Venezuelan civil society, speak out against abuses of democracy and hold the Venezuelan government accountable to its commitments under the Inter-American Democratic Charter.
The Bush administration is "reaching out, at a bilateral level, to our partners in the hemisphere and in Europe to do the same, and sensitizing them to the threat to regional stability posed by the Venezuelan government's arms shopping spree and its support for radical political movements," Shannon said. "Within Venezuela, we are working to preserve political and civic space for increasingly at-risk groups," the diplomat told the House of Representatives' subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
Chavez accused the Bush administration of "assuming the right to grossly intervene in any country". Shannon's remarks, he told the executives, were part of a "new offensive" by the White House, after its "failure" at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina.