“A media show” is how President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela referred to the report presentation, in which Interpol said that it found no evidence of tampering with computers that supposedly belonged to one of Colombia’s rebel groups.

A controversy has broken out inside Venezuela’s largest opposition party, A New Era (UNT), over a lack of democracy in the party’s internal candidate selection process for the upcoming elections. UNT President Omar Barboza, announced that the party had selected candidates for 314 of Venezuela’s 335 municipalities by “consensus.”

Over the past week, the Venezuelan government signed agreements with Portugal, Ecuador, and China to jointly produce, refine, and market petroleum from Venezuela’s Orinoco Oil Belt. Planned projects will cost tens of billions of dollars and span over the next decade.

In a widely anticipated press conference, Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said that the computer files found in a raid of a Colombian rebel camp in Ecuador last March 1st discovered no tampering of these. Venezuela’s Embassy in the U.S., though, says that the interpretation of these files has been manipulated by the Colombian and U.S. governments, even if the files themselves have not been altered.