Were U.S. officials behaving badly in Latin America again?

A year after the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia, a new scandal involving U.S. officials may be brewing in Venezuela. The Associated Press is reporting that two officials from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas were injured in a Tuesday morning shooting “inside or outside the Antonella 2012 nightclub” in the capital. The AP identifies the locale as a strip club:

Police said the two U.S. officials were shot following a brawl inside the club, which is in the basement of a shopping center in the upper-middle-class Chacao neighborhood.

The club’s Twitter account features racy photos of nude or scantily clad women pole dancing, posing inside cages or reclining on beds. The text under one photo invites visitors to come and watch the club’s “sexy show.”

“Apparently it was a fight originating in a nightspot where these people were attacked and shots were fired at them and they suffered gunshot wounds,” police spokesman Douglas Rico told TV channel Globovision at the health clinic where the victims were taken. He said one was shot in the leg and abdomen and the other was shot in the abdomen.

A police official identified one of the victims as military attache Roberto Ezequiel Rosas. She said he was shot in the right leg during an argument outside the night club in Chacao, which is east of the city center.

The AP appears to be referencing this Twitter feed, which does not make any mention of the shooting in its recent tweets (instead, they mention raffle winners and thank Twitter users for following the club). But the account’s images do indeed scream strip club:

Bloomberg has more details on the club:

The shooting took place at the Angelus night club at 4:25 a.m., according to the police report. Angelus, which changed its name to Antonella recently, is a strip club, said Hermando Herrera who has worked as a car park supervisor in the mall for more than 20 years.

“Lots of famous people come here,” Herrera, 42, said. “You get a bit of everything – baseball players, basketball players.”

Outside the club there are signs prohibiting entry to couples, unaccompanied women and anyone under the age of 30. Inside the club, which was shut today, a wall had black-and-white images of pole dancing women wearing platform heels or knee-length boots.

U.S. officials, not surprisingly, have been far more tight-lipped about the episode. Speaking to reporters today, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell did not identify the embassy employees, referring to them as “other agency personnel” rather than Foreign Service officiers (the Venezuelan press has identified the two men as Roberto Ezequiel Rosas and Paul Marwin). Ventrell said only that the incident took place in “some sort of social spot,” though he wasn’t sure whether it “was a restaurant, or a nightclub, or what the actual establishment was.” If these early reports are accurate, Ventrell won’t like the answer.