Alek Boyd at VCrisis writes that he’s still shaken after being attacked by a horde of 80 Chavista thugs at a campaign rally in the obscure town of Valera in the high Andean mountain state of Trujillo, over in Venezuela’s mostly rightwing west.

Trujillo’s a tiny state, with a population only at 608,000, and sort of Juan Valdez territory, where some people wear ponchos and ride llamas and donkeys. Its biggest city, Valera, looks like this:

Valera, in the Andean state of Trujillo, Venezuela
Source: Municipal Government of Valera

But Alek said thousands of Valera citizens attended a Manuel Rosales presidential campaign rally. Rosales is the guy who’s challenging Chavez for the presidency.

They were set upon by a bunch of red-t-shirted Chavista goons who’d been bused in from someplace else. Mostly, they were government employees from a Chavista mayor’s office. The first person they went after was the Globovision correspondent, hitting her cameraman over the head with a two-by-four, grabbing at his camera, stealing his film and trying to steal the Globovision van. Alek said he was at the back of the rally and was set upon by the thugs, too, and they smashed his camera.

Read Alek’s whole account of the attack here.