Alek Boyd at VCrisis and Daniel at Venezuela News & Views alert us to a new Chavista propaganda offensive against some of the best reporting on Venezuela coming out these days. It looks like Venezuela’s attacks on the free press do not stop at its water’s edge, but extend to any media anywhere in the world that dares report the truth on Venezuela.

In a spectacular article, The Christian Science Monitor sent a freelance reporter up to Venezuela’s mountain shantytowns and interviewed people about just how they felt about Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Not surprisingly, Venezuela’s poor have the same view of the brute as the rest of us do – they can’t stand the lies, the oppression, the crushed opportunity and the incompetence of the Chavez regime. The Monitor‘s excellent, must-read story is here.

The Financial Times has done similar good reporting and thus, along with the Monitor, has attracted the rage of the Chavistas. This kind of truthtelling is too much for them.

The Chavistas aren’t just sitting and steaming on K Street, though. They are quite busy, organizing a letter-writing campaign against the two good newspapers to intimidate them. They have encouraged banana-left activists to pretend to be ordinary readers and have told them to zero in on these two articles. They seek to harass these newspapers and make the editors think all readers see things as they do, in their twisted little leftist world. That’s what they are up to and it’s illegal.

The Venezuelan Information office has launched its offensive by sending out its call to activists, but is failing to cite in its email missive that it’s a paid-for organ of the Venezuelan government. That’s how unethical they are. It’s time the lawmen got busy because nobody does what they are doing and gets away with it.

Alek Boyd has the whole story and the e-mails from VIO here. It’s disgusting.

Daniel has much more here.