Why are they so silent?

Two days ago the blog site "Gateway Pundit" included some very interesting facts about Venezuela

It seems that on average 33 Venezuelan citizens are murdered every day, or approximately 1000 per month. So in the last three months 3,000 were killed in Venezuela, while the figure for Iraq was 1498. As an ordinary citizen you are at twice the risk in Venezuela, - the two countries have very equally sized populations - 27.5 in Iraq and 27.7 in Venezuela. In the first two days of 2008 there were 63 violent deaths.

The situations may be more complicated than we know, although they would have to be very important to explain a double murder rate. Those who commented on Pundit's message, especially the "Anonymous" who commented first, supply more alleged facts, especially the great increase over recent years in deaths resulting from "resiting the authorities".

Perhaps the socialist heaven is going the way of others and becoming repressive, that it is struggling to assert control against external (and we all know who will be blamed as an external force) subversion.

We just do not know, perhaps we shall never know the truth of much of what is happening.

However if the figures quoted for Venezuela are out by a factor of four, so that deaths for the last three months are 750 murders rather than 3000, they are still significantly high.

Why has there apparently been a deafening silence on BBC news broadcasts about the casualties in Venezuela, and a prominent reporting of as few as 6 in a day in Iraq?

There seem to be two possible explanations:

Either the reported deaths in Venezuela have been largely invented, or news control from there has been total.

Or the BBC is showing its preferences again - reporting in full detail anything which attacks the Americans however tenuous the evidence, and be sympathetic to "progressive" or left wing regimes.

I would like to hope that it is the former, but given the bias obvious elsewhere in the BBC.....