Please find below Rod Stoneman's response to a recent Telegraph piece on Venezuela - you can find the original piece at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/6679698/President-Hugo-Chavezs-revolution-in-Venezuela-limits-singing-in-shower.html :

The half-page, feature length article by Peter Sherwell about the current situation in Venezuela that appeared in The Sunday Telegraph on 29th November follows an established pattern of unsympathetic and negative reporting in European and North American media, some of it touched on in my book Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, published earlier this year. While this particular report is unremarkable for its fulsome dismissal of the Venezuelan president and the changes he has wrought, it is worth pausing to analyse the arrangement of components deployed in the process of denunciation. The repeated application of such negative reporting has led most people, even those on the liberal left, to assume that Chávez is some combination of clown and dictator and that any supposed attempt at social change in Venezuela over the last 10 years has been a complete failure.

(From various sources)

Intense drought is leading to falling water levels at key dams which are used to generate most of the country's energy. About 75% of electricity in Venezuela comes from hydroelectric power, not as widely assumed, oil. The unprecedented severity of the drought has led to the lowest reservoir levels of water in decades - especially in the county's main Guri reservoir which supplies 73% of Venezuela's electricity- causing outages in many areas of the country.

Dry weather has also severely affected other countries in South America such as Ecuador, Colombia, Guyana, Argentina and parts of Bolivia.