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Most stand aside for new battles over Venezuela and its media
by Eric Jackson

In Venezuela, lower oil prices have hurt the local economy, opposition gains in last year's local elections have aroused new hopes and fears, government and opposition camps are fragmenting and old struggles are getting more vicious. But when an international "No More Chávez Day" patterned on Colombian President Uribe's "No More FARC Day" protests was called for September 4, the crowds in Venezuela were modest and the gatherings abroad were tiny. Despite the influx into Panama of many Venezuelans fed up with the leftist government in Caracas and an electorate that for years has shown up at the Venezuelan consulate here to vote against Hugo Chávez by wide margins, fewer than 100 protesters, most of them Venezuelan, gathered in Panama City. Some of this country's mainstream media, having promoted the event in advance, treated the demonstration as front page material but could do little to conceal the small turnout.

Earlier, the National Assembly had passed a resolution condemning the Venezuelan government for what it called violations of press freedom. That vote brought on a rare diplomatic visit to the legislature, as Venezuela's ambassador, Jorge Luis Durán, met with the assembly president, José Luis Varela, to complain that the deputies had been misinformed about the situation in his country.

The protests also came in the wake of a South American summit at which Hugo Chávez was fairly subdued but the continent's heads of state echoed the Venezuelan president's arguments by passing a resolution questioning Colombia's decision to grant the use of a network of seven military bases to the United States. Only Peru's Alan García sided with Colombia's Álvaro Uribe in that argument, while Brazil's Lula da Silva moved to calm the situation and quietly assert his country's new role as the principal regional power.

Lula had asked US President Barack Obama to attend the UNASUR meeting in Bariloche, Argentina but Obama declined. The US president's Latin American policies are in some instances drifting cautiously away from those of past administrations and in other ways seem to be inching along, undiscussed, on the same course as always. In declining Lula's invitation, Obama avoided foreign distractions from the domestic brawl over health care reform and turned down a walk-on role at a gathering where the United States would neither have a vote nor set the tone. He could have reassured the South American presidents that the combination of little action to reverse the Honduran military coup and an enhanced US military presence in Colombia do not add up to a continued policy of supporting the violent overthrow or political destabilization of Latin American governments that don't meet Washington's approval, but it probably served Obama's domestic political and foreign policy purposes to leave that matter in doubt.

Those doubts, however, have been taken by part of the Venezuelan opposition as a green light for another coup attempt and by some of the Bolivarian Revolution's more radical fringe elements as a reason to stage violent attacks on the opposition. The Venezuelan government, meanwhile, has been making a series of economic moves that steadily erodes the power of the old social and economic elites. These include measures that affect the news media, and that have prompted international criticism of the Chávez administration.

Excluding all of the many unspecified characterizations, the current argument that Chávez violates freedom of the press is based upon four main factors:

• The enforcement of existing broadcast regulations with what critics allege is a partisan bias, in a way that has taken a number of opposition broadcast signals off of the air and has imposed or threatened to impose sanctions on other anti-Chávez media;

• Violent attacks by Chávez supporters and other leftist elements against opposition media;

• A proposed media law that, among other things, would have criminalized the publication of tendentious news stories that tend to cause public panic; and

• The creation of new mass communications media under the government's control.

Broadcast licensing

As in the rest of the Americas, Venezuela has seen over the past several decades a trend toward the consolidation of ownership of broadcast media. Unlike in many places, however, the country's broadcast licensing laws were treated as a dead letter until after the April 2002 coup attempt, in which some major broadcasters were direct protagonists and most of the privately owned media organizations editorially sympathized with the coup plotters.

The most flagrant participation in the ill-fated coup was by RCTV, whose management was part of the coup planning and urged viewers to march on the presidential palace to overthrow the government, then misrepresented attacks by opposition snipers on both government supporters and their own people as Chávez-ordered repression, then misrepresented Chávez's arrest as his resignation, then blacked out news of opposition to the coup. When RCTV's broadcast license came up for renewal it was not renewed. Its old channels were given to a new government television network (which has not prospered in the competition for viewers) and a scaled down RCTV became an Internet broadcaster.

More recently, the Chávez administration has announced that the licenses of more than 300 radio stations would be reviewed, that long-unenforced rules about the creation and transfer of licenses would no longer be ignored, and that those broadcast companies that had been heeding the opposition's call to Venezuelan businesses in general not to pay taxes to the government would have to pay up or lose their licenses. In this process 32 radio stations and two television stations, including a few with pro-government editorial lines, were stripped of their licenses.

The most noise, however, was about the shutdown of five channels of the CNB radio network, whose 10 stations reached most of the Venezuelan people and whose news programs are solidly anti-Chávez. The network's owner, Nelson Belfort, is the head of the Venezuelan Broadcasters Chamber industry association and inherited the core of his network from his late father. However, Venezuelan law has long provided that all transfers of broadcast licenses must be reviewed and approved by the government, and does not provide that inheritance is an exception to this rule. For more than 30 years this regulation stood on the books but was ignored, such that the government can and does argue that not only the CNB license transfers, but virtually all of the transfers of licenses bought and sold over the past several decades, were improper. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which has declined to support anti-establishment broadcasters who have been shut down over licensing issues in other Latin American countries, sent a letter of protest to the ministry in charge of Venezuela's broadcast licenses. It concluded:

While your government has the right to regulate the airwaves, it must not use this authority to violate Venezuelans' basic human right to seek and receive information, as established by the Constitution. We call on you to put an end to the persecution of critical media outlets, and to guarantee that the regulation of all broadcast concessions is unbiased and transparent.

The closure of the 34 broadcast stations was the subject of the Panamanian National Assembly's August 4 protest resolution and the subsequent ambassadorial visit to the legislature.

In a televised response to criticism over the shutdowns of the 34 broadcasters, Chávez said that "It is not that we have shut some radio stations. We are implementing the law. We have put them back in the hands of the people and not the bourgeoisie."

Anti-media violence

On August 3 a group of about 30 uniformed members of the far-left Union Patriotica Venezolana (UPV) fringe party converged on the anti-government Globovision television network's studios in Caracas, burst into the building and hurled tear gas grenades inside. A police officer who tried to stop the attack and two Globovision employees were injured.

The following day UPV leader Lina Ron, who had been identified in videotapes of the attack, was arrested for a variety of charges related to the incident. She had earlier gained notoriety in 2008 for leading an invasion of the Catholic Archdiocese of Caracas offices after Venezuela's bishops criticized some of the government's actions.

Although the corporate mainstream press outside of Venezuela has generally described Ron as a Chávez supporter, the Venezuelan president defended her arrest. "She violated the law and must face the force of the law," he said, adding that Ron "is hurting the revolution and playing in favor of the enemy."

In a separate incident on August 13, a group of a dozen journalists who work for the anti-government Cadena Capriles private media conglomerate were beaten up while taking part in a protest against a proposed education law that would prohibit messages directed at children which "incite hate, aggressiveness or unruliness," terrify kids or "threaten the mental or physical health of the people." Some of the assailants were reported to be journalists from pro-government media.

The government condemned the attack and said that the police were investigating it. The legislature passed the education law.

These incidents take place in a context, years in the making, of polarization and hostility within Venezuelan society and the media by which the people communicate with one another and receive their news. In the abortive 2002 coup, public broadcast stations were taken over and shut down by pro-coup soldiers, while reporters and video crews from the pro-coup media were stoned and beaten when they showed up in pro-Chávez neighborhoods. Since then Venezuelans from the rival factions have increasingly tended to shout at one another rather than talk among themselves, and any medium that tries to occupy a middle position tends to be blasted from both sides. It has come to the point where media aligned with the contending factions avoid going into areas whose residents are loyal to the other side for fear of violence.

The media laws --- proposed and current

On June 30, Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz proposed a new media law with some provisions remarkably like some of the parts of the Torrijos administration's original Penal Code reform proposals. Among the proposed press crimes would have been the dissemination of "false reports" that tend to sow "fear and panic" among the public. However, the proposal met with strong criticism both from the opposition and within the pro-Chávez legislative caucus and was almost universally denounced abroad. The proposal was subsequently withdrawn from the National Assembly for lack of support, but may come back in a different form.

The great fear that has been raised about Venezuela is that it's going to turn into something very much like Cuba. In the field of press freedoms, that's a grim prospect if that's what's in store. However, Chávez has held power for more than a decade now and, unlike in Cuba, there are opposition media, freely contested elections and legal political forces beyond the government's control.

(The rumor mill within the Latin American left, which tends to be the main source of information about intrigues among Cuba's political elite, has it that this year's purges in the Cuban government and Communist Party have to do with Chávez's doubts about Raúl Castro as a leader and the latter's ouster of potential successors seen as too friendly to Venezuela. In this sense it's akin to the 1960s purge of a doctrinaire communist faction led by Aníbal Escalante, who tried to deal with the Soviet Union behind Fidel's back. In any case, one of the subtexts of the gossip is that although Venezuela and Cuba are strongly allied, it's a mistake to equate the two countries' leaders and governments.)

Meanwhile, Venezuela has a hand-me-down set of media laws that, as we have seen, the Chávez administration occasionally invokes. These laws are, by and large, not remarkably different from those in most other Latin American countries, or those in the United States for that matter.

A talk show guest suggesting a Mussolini-style end to the Venezuelan president? The broadcasting of a discussion of the political assassination of the sitting head of state (followed by public display and mutilation of the remains if we are to faithfully follow the facts of Mussolini's fate) is a culturally taboo and legally punishable offense in most countries. The validity of different countries' laws about this sort of thing tends to remain untested in the courts, because these things just aren't done.

Except in Venezuela, on Globovision. That talk show is now the subject of one of at least six pending administrative cases that Venezuelan broadcast authorities have brought against the opposition-oriented television network.

Text messages from viewers, scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen, which advocate a military coup and the murder of President Chávez? That's the basis for another of the administrative proceedings against Globovision.

One administrative strike against Globovision could get its broadcast license suspended for 72 hours. A second finding against the network could get its license revoked. As these are administrative proceedings, the full panoply of procedural rights to which the accused in a criminal trial would be entitled will not necessarily apply to Globovision.

Although you will find media in the United States and Panama who will defend Globovision on the subject matter of its broadcasts, even the most strident pro-PRD Panamanian media don't try to pull that sort of stuff on President Martinelli. In the United States, Fox News has not yet sunk to that level in its attacks on President Obama.

The difference is that in the minds of media barons everywhere, Hugo Chávez is an outlaw in the classic sense of the word --- beyond protection of the law. But at least for the time being, that characterization as an outlaw doesn't apply in Venezuela.

The sense that any offense against Chávez will enjoy substantial international backing comes through loud and clear in The Panama News's email boxes. We get Bolivarian propaganda and are also on various Venezuelan opposition email lists. Most of the things that are forwarded our way are copyrighted materials that are read but not republished because this is not a pirate publication. However, we occasionally do get things sent by their authors and do publish these things when there is reason to do so. (Screaming and not very coherent hatred, or allegations arising from a messy divorce with reality? We decline to publish those items although, sadly, they are numerous.) One telling opposition column that appears in this issue's Spanish-language opinion section is, on the surface, an ode to the honor and historic role of the Venezuelan armed forces. Those with a basic knowledge of Venezuelan history, especially those following current trends in Venezuelan politics, will recognize it as a not-so-cryptic appeal to the armed forces to act against Chávez.

A regular perusal of the Venezuelan media will reveal a division that cuts all the way through the opposition, to the government's advantage. Many of the oligarchic media have little favorable to report about Chávez, but stick to reporting versions of events that reasonably correspond to reality, and even if they can't stand the president, refrain from calling for his violent overthrow. Similarly, part of the opposition is concentrating on beating the Bolivarians in the next elections, while another smaller faction is calling for a coup or an assassination. The Chavistas tend to lump both groups together and portray the entire opposition as a bunch of thugs.

Conversely, if one reads the international corporate mainstream press, one will find references to ultra-leftist Lina Ron as a "pro-Chávez militant" despite the government's actions against her. That's the mirror image of the above, wherein the majority that has supported Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution as a mere criminal element.

Although some of the criticism of what's happening to press freedom in Venezuela is hypocritical, it's not far-fetched to observe that fundamental liberties are being wounded in the crossfire. The International Human Rights Commission, an OAS subsidiary organization, has reviewed freedom of expression issues and voiced its concern about "a gradual deterioration and restriction on the exercise of this right in Venezuela, as well as a rising intolerance of critical expression."

New government media

An Associated Press report summarized the Venezuelan press freedom situation as follows:

Venezuela still has many private radio stations and newspapers that take a hard line against Chávez and strongly criticize the government through both news reports and commentary. But in the last decade, the government has built a growing coalition of state-run media outlets, and some TV channels once virulently anti-Chávez have toned down their criticism.

So what's the main complaint? That broadcast media are subject to public regulation in Venezuela, as in most of the rest of the world? That most private television stations self-censor, to avoid calling for military coups or political assassinations as Globovision does? Or is it something about the "growing coalition of state-run media outlets?"

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano --- whose 1960s book, Open Veins of Latin America, President Chávez gave to President Obama --- once famously remarked that the "North-South Dialogue" is actually a monologue coming from the north. Look at any Panamanian corporate mainstream newspaper. The local reporting will mostly be local in origin, but almost all of the news from the rest of Latin America will come from agencies based in the industrialized world: AP (the United States), Reuters (the United Kingdom), AFP (France) or EFE (Spain). In the United States, due to the economy-driven reduction in foreign reporting by most major news organizations, the great majority of news about Latin America that people see or hear in the mainstream media comes from just the AP and Reuters. The Caribbean, a series of small countries with a collective population of more than 60 million people, many of whom have relatives in the United States, Great Britain or Canada, is considered a financial and news backwater that's almost entirely ignored in the industrialized world's major English-language media.

But there are the emerging online media of the Third World, a ragtag collection with wildly different standards and criteria and not enough capital to seriously replace the spaces abandoned by the developed world's major news corporations. There are emerging news agencies, some of them government-sponsored like Venezuela's Alternativa Bolivariana, some private, like the Brazilian-based liberation theology-oriented ADITAL. There is the Arab world's Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, private, well financed and blessed by several governments but treated as thugs by the United States and many other governments which don't want journalists who learned their standards from the BBC reporting from their countries or on conflicts in which their troops are involved. And now there is TeleSur, the Caracas-based inter-governmental public TV channel promoted by Hugo Chávez but co-owned by Cuba and several other Latin American countries. If the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States marked Al Jazeera's rise to prominence as a serious international medium, the Honduran coup and its aftermath have represented something like that moment for TeleSur. And now Venezuela has a mostly unused telecommunications satellite that it bought from China.

So why is "a growing coalition of state-run media outlets" included in the litany of Hugo Chávez's offenses against freedom of expression? Sure, it could turn into a totalitarian oligopoly like that of the former Soviet Union, where people had their choice of getting news from Tass, Izvestia or Pravda, or as in the information sources available in present-day Cuba. But well short of those sorts of total control, what's emerging in Venezuela, across the Third World and online is a new set of alternatives to the formerly dominant news corporations and media barons. It has come to the point where CNN had to go to TeleSur for video of the Honduran coup aftermath. It has come to the point where Al Jazeera not only champions BBC's traditional standards in the Arabic language, but scoops BBC in English.

And there you have it: yes, there are legitimate concerns about information control and freedom of expression in Venezuela, but on the other hand many of those raising the alarm are concerned about the welfare of rival institutions that previously had dibs on deciding which information and ideas get through to mass audiences.

In Panama...

We have a conservative coalition government, whose legislators weighed in on the closure of some Venezuelan broadcast stations. When the emissary from Venezuela, with which Panama has important business ties, sat down with the Panameñista president of the National Assembly, no exchange of insults was reported.

We have a wealthy elite who more or less control the mainstream media and the political parties, and the major news organizations drummed up an anti-Chávez demonstration to which almost nobody came. Nobody showed up to hang any newspaper publishers or television news directors in effigy either.

There is no major calamity to report here --- just another footnote in the long-running story of Panamanians' loss of confidence in all institutions, including those of the mass communications media.