Former Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates found himself in a diplomatic quandary when Washington started pressuring him to take a tougher line on Hugo Chávez when the Venezuelan leader visited Lisbon. A series of US embassy cables from 2006 released recently by Wikileaks show how the US government had pushed the Sócrates government on numerous occasions to be more vocal over Chávez’s human rights record. But US diplomats in Lisbon expressed their frustration over Portugal’s hesitancy to take a lead in diplomatic initiatives against the Chávez government because the Sócrates government feared repercussions against the large Portuguese community in Venezuela. Sócrates saw Chávez’s … [Read more...] about Friendship with Chávez “a necessary evil” for Portugal’s Sócrates