Is Hugo Chavez Trying To Keep IAPA Meeting Out Of Venezuela?

By: Mark Fitzgerald Top officials of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) believe pressure from the Hugo Chavez government is behind a Venezuelan hotel's sudden cancellation as the press freedom group's spring 2008 meeting.

IAPA's executive committee will discuss changing the site of its mid-year meeting next March after a hotel in Maracaibo, Venezuela, withdrew its offer to be the meeting venue.

IAPA had already moved the meeting to Maracaibo because the host committee of Venezuelan publishers were unable to book hotels in the capital Caracas or on Margarita Island.

The host committee told IAPA the hotel in Maracaibo backed out "due to the prevailing situation in the South American country."

IAPA and the Chavez government have been harshly critical of each other for years.

At its mid-year meeting this March IAPA delegates adopted a resolution "to denounce before the international community the dictatorial violation of freedom of expression by the regime of Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela."

Chavez's government stoutly rejects criticism from IAPA, which it portrays as a self-interested group of rich publishers. Last year, no government officials at any level would meet with an IAPA study group looking into complaints of oppression of the press. And Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel once famously declared, "SIP is a latrine," using the group's Spanish initials.

IAPA President Rafael Molina, editor of the daily El Dia in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, said he believed the hotels had been pressured by the Chavez government.

"We regret, in the name of freedom of the press, democracy and the Venezuelan people, that they are closing the doors on us in such an inelegant and indirect manner," Molina said Thursday.

IAPA's 63rd annual General Assembly gets underway Saturday in Miami.

Among the topics of discussion will be the Venezuelan government's shut down of Radio Caracas Television in May. The station was critical of Chavez, and, many charge, sided with the officers who briefly ousted the president in a coup in 2002.

At the Miami meeting, IAPA will present its Grand Prize for Press Freedom to the television network's president, Marcel Granier.