Vzla: A veritable Daniel is come to Venezuela

An executive of an Omaha firm that sold voting machines to Venezuela says a top electoral official asked him during a meeting last year whether his company worked for the CIA and predicted there would be no recall referendum against leftist President Hugo Chávez.

''There was a certain amount of paranoia,'' recalled John Groh, president of the international division of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), of the October meeting in a Manhattan hotel room.

The meeting was with Jorge Rodríguez, considered the most pro-Chávez and influential member of the Venezuelan National Electoral Council's five-person board of directors.

''I took an hour explaining to him that we were not part of the CIA, that I didn't have a military background,'' Groh told The Herald.

'We said that we understand you have an election coming up where there will be a presidential referendum, and . . . Rodríguez said, 'That election will never take place,' '' Groh said.