Phil Stewart

So, you know, it is an intense climate.

There are political prisoners.

One of them has just been freed today.

So there is a lot there, but it's not, you know, an open democratic state that –

Yeah, let me just finish myself.

It's an open democratic state in the view of international organizations.

I'm not going to sit here and talk about my views on his actions, but there are a lot of human rights groups that have criticized his activity inside Venezuela.

And and international organizations that, again, say that his election was was he did not win the last election.

Well, that's not really my job.

My job is just to report on the developments inside Venezuela.

Reuters is not a company that would brand the Venezuelan government or take a position on what kind of government it is.

We have reporters in Venezuela, as we have reporters all around the world.

But the criticism that I've mentioned is documented.

So in November, I think Reuters was the we were I think we were the only news organization to actually do this.

But we broke a story that talked about how the military had developed a regime change option for Venezuela.

That story ran on November 21st.

And at that point, we we we wrote that they were kind of pivoting to this news phase of operations that would start with covert operations.

And.

That all obviously was true.

We believe that the operations, the planning for this military option began well over a month before we wrote that story.