New York Times:
“The speech played the most important role in what happened,” said Riordan Roett, the director of the Latin American Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. “You can talk like that in Latin America, and people will have a chuckle, but there is traditional respect for protocol, and it was not amusing to a lot of people who see the U.N. as the forum for expressing third world views.”
“The speech really hurt his case,” said Enrique Berruga, the ambassador of Mexico. “Most members don’t want this place to be turned into a mockery. In the General Assembly, there are limits, and he went way beyond them.”
Another Latin ambassador, who said he knew of many countries that voted against Venezuela because of the speech, agreed that Mr. Chávez had stepped over a line.
“U.S.-bashing is acceptable, but not the U.N.-bashing that they thought Chávez’s speech amounted to because in the end this is everyone’s house, and a speech like that goes down the same dirty drain as the bitter criticisms of the U.S.,” the envoy said. He asked not to be identified because he was commenting on the leader of another South American country.
Asked if Mr. Chávez’s popularity might be flagging closer to home, Mr. Roett pointed out that presidential candidates who have been identified with Mr. Chávez in recent elections in Ecuador, Peru and Mexico all did badly. “For sure he’s not gone as a force, but people are less impressed with him than they were four or five years ago,” he said.
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