Miami (January 27, 2010)–The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today reiterated that the closure of six Venezuelan cable television channels is yet another demonstration of how press freedom and free speech continue to deteriorate in the South American country as a direct consequence of the federal government there.
“We have not the slightest doubt,” said IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, “that the shutdown is part of an orchestrated government strategy whose main objective is to wipe out privately-owned an independent media, while generating the existence of an increasingly large chain of state-owned media devoted to disseminating official propaganda.”
Aguirre, managing editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, recalled the protest that the IAPA had made in its latest report on Venezuela in which it noted that “the progressive elimination of independent media as an official policy and the ‘communication hegemony’ proclaimed as a goal by President Chávez are among the greatest challenges that freedom of the press is facing in the country.”
At its membership meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in November the IAPA declared that Chávez had “at his service the frequent and obligatory national hookups which he uses to take over air space of all broadcast media in order to transmit threats and propagandistic rhetoric; he has available to him, moreover, 238 radio stations, 28 television channels, 340 print media outlets and more than 125 Web sites.
For his part, the chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, declared, “We have before us one more act of censorship. Today six television channels are shut down, last year 34 radio stations were closed, before that RCTV on-air broadcasting, and six administrative lawsuits were filed against Globovisión, while its owner and other reporters and editors are being subjected to harsh judicial harassment.”
In recent years the IAPA has been protesting all kinds of government reprisals that Venezuelan journalists are having to face. Among these have been accusations leveled at Guillermo Zuloaga of Globovisión, criminal prosecution of Rafael and Patricia Poleo of the newspaper El Nuevo País, the jailing of reporters Gustavo Azócar and Leoncenis García, and intimidation of and attacks upon journalists from a number of independent media.
The IAPA officers noted that the “communication hegemony” became apparent last year when Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz sponsored a bill on “media offenses” which in the end was not taken up by Congress, while “this government takes discrimination to the ultimate, excluding independent media from placement of official advertising and using all its strength to try to intimidate the weaken private advertising.”
The IAPA also recalled that the Venezuelan government is one of the few in the Americas that continues to refuse to allow the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to visit the country to look into the state of human rights and freedom of expression there, as well as failing to comply with its decisions and those of the Inter-American Human Rights Court.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information, please go to http://www.sipiapa.org
