opinion

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The revolution mutates

by Franco Munini

Hugo, again we are on the brink of a transcendent moment in the history of power in Venezuela. For the first time the confrontation between the popular aspirations and the power of the capital will attack and gain the most insidious coveted beachhead for its tentacle: we will recover electromagnetic space. The form of authorization, deified by the corporations media outlets, will stop being a privilege from the cradle of the plutocracies and talent will go to the hands of the people, real people, to create the television they need.

This victory, Hugo, significant as it is, this historical milestone in the empowernment of the popular bases, will not happen by being one more stone in the mosaic that the communication transnationals' construct to satanize our image on a global scale.

This vital precedent of the process that we support to recover our communication sovereignty is going to be presented to the world as an arbitrary act of a totalitarian government: one checks the international press, studies the owners of news agencies, analyzes the way in which this action is presented on television in other countries.

This happens, Hugo, because while you give Danny Glover an exorbitant sum of money to produce movies that ideally will be a success (and not a predictable success), a group of Venezuelans and foreigners from different corners of the world who try to announce the humanist character of this revolution in other languages get a punch in the nose from the MINCI. It happens because while VIO (Venezuelan Information Office) spends something like $80,000 in a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post for an event that will attract the attention of a minuscule part of the population who reads this newspaper, to us, a group of columnists and independent translators who fight to transmit to the world the real image of the Venezuela that we are constructing, it is said to us that "we are a nuisance," that "we do not need to send so much information in the mail" from a manager of the MINCI "because we saturate the mailbox". It happens because we Venezuelans who speak English and other languages and want to use this skill to defend ourselves from media aggression, as well as the translators of more than 10 different nationalities, do not manage to make either the Minister of the Popular Power for the Communications and Information or the Chancellor understand, that when the revolution does not speak other languages, that's equivalent to having lost the communication battle.

Hugo, in the world there are hundreds of millions of people who watch what happens here from a distance.

Progressives, intellectuals, grassroots political leaders from Canada to Australia, from London to the Arab world hope to have tentatively trustworthy news of what we are constructing. They need to have at least, in their respective languages, information that resists the satanization of us done in the machinery of the media corporations.

With less than one spends in supporting VIO for a month, we can cover not only this communication gap, but also form Venezuelan journalists in other languages so that they assume this challenge that for the time being we try to cover during our free time for love of the revolutionary process, for the just aspiration of the Venezuelan people to never again be a colony --- because still today, eight years and shortly after we chose you, we keep on being a communication colony of the empire. You know it, Lara knows it, Maduro knows it: in addition to knowing it, we act. We battle every day to do what the MINCI does not manage to do, which is to penetrate the media barrier that they have constructed about us.

You know that we have internal enemies. Their biggest success is the sabotage of government actions, the mockery of your image and that of the country that supports you, the constant satanization of which we are victims. The infiltrators in CITGO managed to keep silent about VHeadline just before the elections of 3D, so that the official history of the day was the one that the media corporations wanted to sell (fraud, intimidation, dictatorship, etc.).

We have a modular project to counter-attack on the media front internationally, a project that is supported by the average personnel of the MINCI --- but that we do not manage to present to the decision-makers there. We are presenting a project that will allow that the revolution to speak English (USA, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia, in addition to English-speaking Caribbean), Italian, German, French and Portuguese (Europe and Africa), Arab and Farsi (Middle East) and possibly Mandarin Chinese (Asian North-East). We have at our disposal a circuit of eight AM broadcasting stations and 75 in microwave that includes approximately 550 radio stations in the southeast of the USA: yesterday in an interview by phone I told the reality of the case of RCTV to three million and a half radio listeners.

We are not speaking only about a pamphlet to publicize the works of the government; we are speaking about a platform of debate to study the experiences, alternatives and ways most adapted for the socialism that we need. We are speaking about a permanent forum so that Venezuela turns into the regarding one of the political intellectuality, which needs to propose a vision that stops this crazy career in which wild consumerism is leading the planet to its extinction. We are speaking about a communication village with people, without borders or intermediaries.

Last weeks it was circulating in the "minor" newspapers information according to which US American population has next to 3500 terrorist cells ready to attack from Venezuela, with the support of Hezbollah, not to mention Bin Laden and nuclear gadgetry. Drop by drop, the tide of lies constructs itself that will move the insensitive US American population, when not openly in favor of an intervention in our soil. And we kept silent.

What do we do, Hugo? We can choose between spreading the truth or keeping on being, as now, a mute revolution.

Bernal, Freedom of expression again
Heck, No sense of reality about Venezuela
Committee to Protect Journalists, Chávez attacks freedom of the press
Munini, Recovering electromagnetic space from the plutocrats
Reporters Without Borders, Defend freedom of the press against Chávez
Smith, Correa should think twice before prosecuting for insults
Wayne, Looking at Cuba without the distorted Miami lenses
Jackson, What to Do about Cuba?

Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Europe's declining influence in Latin America

Silié, Following the European Union's example

Leis, Ten factors in quality education

Sirias, Deadly poison from China