Remember the Venezuelan reporter whose house was raided and trashed by dictator Hugo Chavez’s security agents? We wrote about her here, here and here. She’s now being prosecuted. The interior minister is believed to be targetting Patricia Poleo because some think he wants to erase his role in a 1992 coup attempt from history, and she’s written about it. Alek Boyd has a summary here.

In the middle of all this, there’s a grotesque picture of someone, accused by Poleo of being the interior minister himself, of posing over a dead body from the 1992 coup attempt here she wrote about. It’s the kind of atrocity photo America has been raked over the coals for at Abu Ghraib. And even if it’s not the interior minister, it’s someone who should be prosecuted. Who it is is unknown.

There might be a little more to this. A strange pattern of Internet traffic – a huge sudden wave from a single google search seeking that picture – has been observed on the Venezuelan blogs here and here which have also discussed the issue long ago. it began apparently before the news of the prosecution reached the press. Who would have wanted to see the controversial picture so many times? It might have been locals getting the news early, but it also might be official intimidation. The bloggers are calm and say don’t panic, but we are keeping an eye on this in the Venezuelan blogosphere, because it could be a chavista warning to blogs that they are under scrutiny too.