Steve Inskeep Shares Venezuela Reporter's Notebook

Following the presidential election in Venezuela, NPR's Steve Inskeep shared with us his reporter's notebook.

He reported all last week from Venezuela, and describes talking to people in a pro-Chavez neighborhood who felt the need to whisper that they planned to vote for the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles.

"We heard people who were saying, I'm going to vote for the opposition guy Capriles, but I can't say anything because there's this militia that kind of runs the neighborhood - and they're a Chavez militia," Inskeep told Here & Now's Robin Young.

Inskeep's first interview in Venezuela had to be rescheduled, when the man he planned to talk to was kidnapped.

"I think that it reveals something about the state of Venezuela, specifically, and Latin America, more broadly, right now," Inkseep said. "This is a country where there are tens of thousands of homicides in a year - and it's not that big a country. This is a country where the number of kidnappings has been increasing every year."