Tag Archives: censorship

Oct
26
2010
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VenEconomy: Anarchy, Disinformation, and Impunity

This article was originally posted by The Latin American Herald Tribune

This weekend, tweeters in Venezuela were inundated with news of the chaos and violence unleashed in the city of Mérida.

The tweets reported the anarchy and violence being wrought by the Tupamaros, an armed group sympathetic to the government, who took control of the city in revenge for the death of two of their members.

Most of the rest of the country – those who are not tweeters- were completely unaware of what was happening in Mérida. This disinformation on the violence that was spreading through this university city was the result, on the one hand, of the media controlled by the government imposing their usual information blackout on the violence into which the country is plunged, and, on the other, of the fact the few private media that still survive in Venezuela were very frugal in the information they gave on the chaos in Mérida. Some probably practiced self-censorship for fear of Conatel enforcing the Gag Law and accusing them of inciting people to violence or of generating panic.

The violence in Mérida raises a number of issues that give food for thought.

The first is that it reveals that freedom of the press is in its death throes in Venezuela. It comes as no surprise that the French NGO, Reporters Without Borders, has ranked Venezuela 133rd out of 178 countries as far as freedom of the press is concerned. This year, Venezuela dropped nine places compared to 2009.

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Aug
26
2010
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Venezuela’s crime rate a liability for Chávez

This article was originally posted by Sun Sentinel

 It all started last week when El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s few remaining independent news organizations, published an unquestionably gory front-page picture of the morgue in Caracas.

The picture, almost the size of the full front page of the newspaper and showing dead bodies partially covered by sheets, was meant to illustrate the violence that plagues Venezuela, and has plagued the South American country for years.

Venezuela and Iraq have almost the same population. Yet in Iraq, a country at war with violent and indiscriminate acts of terrorism, the number of civilians killed in 2009 was 4,644. In Venezuela, a country at peace, the number of people killed by violence that same year was more than 16,000; a number almost four times higher than the number in Iraq.

In Venezuela, this is both a social and a political issue.

It is social, because despite of all of its petro-dollars and the money the Hugo Chávez government has spent on social programs within the country, much of it has been stolen and the gap between rich and poor is still enormous.

But it also is political because the Chávez government, which slowly but surely has moved to control all aspects of life in Venezuela by expropriating private property and censoring or persecuting those who dare to criticize the president, has been unable to control the rampant violence that plagues the country.

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Aug
24
2010
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VenEconomy: And They Fell Short…

naciona VenEconomy: And They Fell Short…This article was originally posted by Latin American Herald

For some weeks now, President Chávez and his government officials have disclaimed the denouncements of the high levels of violence and the tremendous lack of security in Venezuela. Examples of this eagerness to deny the obvious are the statement by the President on Thursday, August 19, when he said that there was more, but much more, violence during the Fourth Republic, the already notorious “guffaws” of Telesur’s director, Andrés Izarra, during a CNN program, and, worst of all, the precautionary measure issued by a court that imposes de facto prior censorship on disseminating information on and graphics depicting violence, a measure that was later “toned down” owing to the widespread negative reaction it provoked.

The point is that the weekly figures mentioned by the experts on violence in the CNN program fell short compared to those revealed by a study mentioned this Friday, August 20, in El Nacional, entitled “National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Citizen Security 2009.” This study, which was conducted by the National Statistics Institute (INE) at the request of the Vice-presidency of the Republic, reveals that 19,113 people lost their lives at the hands of criminals in 2009, that is 3,076 more than those calculated by the NGO Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia and cited by the sociologist Roberto Briceño León on CNN, when he said that Caracas has a higher homicide rate than Bogotá and Ciudad Juárez, the same figures that caused Izarra so much hilarity.

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