Venezuelan Venom

By: Mark Fitzgerald There's plenty in Latin America to madden supporters of a free press.

Cuba is imprisoning two dozen journalists in conditions so harsh that one recently attempted suicide and several others have staged hunger strikes.

Drug cartels murder editors with impunity along Mexico's border with the United States.

So many reporters have been killed in Colombia -- at least 54 in the last 11 years -- that these days the many armed organizations contending in the nation, including left-wing guerrillas, right-wing "self-defense" armies, and narcotics traffickers, have needed only to issue detailed death threats to silence journalists, or chase them out of the country.

But when it comes to getting blood really boiling, there's no place like Venezuela.

The mutual loathing between Venezuela's newspaper publishers and Hugo Ch?vez's government was on full display during last week's Inter American Press Association (IAPA) annual General Assembly in Indianapolis.

Recent accounts in The New York Times, CJR, and elsewhere suggest Venezuelan journalists are undertaking a kind of examination of conscience over the anti-Ch?vez partisanship their news organizations demonstrated during the short-lived coup in April 2002. Certain journalists are ashamed of how they dropped all pretense of objectivity in their fervor to see Ch?vez deposed.

Well, there was no evidence of that among the Venezuelan media owners, publishers, and editors attending IAPA sessions.

Instead, the rhetoric was reminiscent of the Cold War, especially when Cuban-born publishers, enraged at the lifeline oil-rich Venezuela has been extending to Fidel Castro's failed state, chimed in with their own denunciations.

In his report to the IAPA on conditions in Venezuela, Juan Manuel Carmona, editor of the daily El Impulso in Barquisimeto, declared that the press had been reduced to "self-censorship through fear [fueled] by official propaganda against all privately owned media."

Ch?vez, he added, ran a government that was "Communist, but baptized as '21st century socialism' by Mr. Ch?vez."

Speaking of utopias, he added at one point that "it would be utopian to believe that freedom of the press exists in Venezuela," language that IAPA adopted in its official country report.

"What is happening in Venezuela is a collapse of the rule of law when it comes to the communications media," Carmona said. If there is no law, however, there are plenty of regulations, he added, most of which are "changes to make it more difficult to operate."

Carmona's address was followed by an equally impassioned denunciation from Marcel Granier, director general of Radio Caracas, who said the Venezuelan military had conducted "numerous" raids on newspaper and broadcast newsroom, seizing photos and documents. "All of these aggressions against journalists and the communications media occur with impunity," and no punishment of the aggressors, he added.

There were more than 70 attacks against journalists or their news organizations in the past six months, Carmona said.

So what was the reaction to all this back home in Caracas?

Even before IAPA took up the subject of Venezuela, an official of Ch?vez's "Bolivarian" government shrugged off the criticism.

"It just slides off our back because [IAPA] is simply an entity that has no moral authority, is not serious, and it responds to interests rather than reality," the president of the National Assembly, Nicolas Maduro, said, according to an account in the state news agency. IAPA, he said, never complained when Venezuela was governed by "the oligarchy."

But if Maduro could laugh off IAPA's criticism, the vice president of the country could not.

"SIP is a latrine," Jos? Vicente Rangel snapped to reporters, using the initials in Spanish for IAPA. "It represents the muddiest and darkest of the world of media business," he said, according to The Associated Press.

PAN-AM HIGHWAY

An occasional report on the working conditions for journalists around the hemisphere.

ARGENTINA

Leandro L?pez, a photographer for the daily El Sol in the eastern city of Concordia, was beaten in a police station after an incident in which police officers stopped him from photographing a traffic accident Oct. 10, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reported. "After firing a shot into the air, two policemen tried to stop me working by pushing me back and shouting at me," the photographer told RSF. He said he went to the police station to find out more about the accident, and was accosted by the same officers. "What shit are you getting into, you son of a bitch journalist?" he said they shouted. They took him to a corridor and, in the presence of other police officers, hit him on the legs, stomach and head. RSF said he was left with a perforated eardrum that resulted in a 40% loss of hearing.

COLOMBIA

Pedro Luis Mogoll?n, director of "El Universal," and
Jacqueline Rhenals, the daily's political affairs editor, said they have been receiving death threats ever since articles on the election in Cartagena appeared in the paper, the Bogota-based Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) reported Oct. 20. Rhenals began receiving text messages on her cell phone beginning in mid-August. After the paper published a survey Oct. 11 on the close vote between supporters of the mayor and those who would cast a "blank" vote of no confidence, she got a text message reading, "Bitch, if you don't stop supporting the 'blank vote' your life will be in danger ... We are not playing here." The paper's director noted it had not editorialized in favor of the blank vote, only reported surveys.

CUBA

The wife and mother of Mario Enrique Mayo Hern?ndez say the imprisoned independent journalist has attempted suicide twice, according to an Oct. 19 report by the Paris-based free-press group Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Hern?ndez was one of 75 independent journalists and other dissidents rounded up in March 2003 and sentenced to long prison sentences under Cuba's catch-all Law 88. He is serving a 20-year prison sentence. His wife told RSF after an Oct. 12 visit that he has deteriorated physically and psychologically in prison.

"He has written 'Innocent. Freedom' in large letters on his body with a razor or a nail or something else he found, on his stomach, arms and face," wife Maidelin Guerra said. "He told us he would continue to write these words on himself until there was no more room and then he would commit suicide. He kept repeating to us, 'I shouldn't be here. I've done nothing.' He cannot stand
it any more."

PARAGUAY

On 10 October 2005, journalist Nicolas Sotelo, director of
FM San Juan community radio station in the San Juan del Paran? district, was brutally beaten and threatened by town mayor Aldo Lepretti, who was angered by criticisms that had been made on Sotelo's program, the El Salvador-based journalists group Probidad reported.

Lepretti damaged the studio, and without any explanation began punching and kicking the journalist, and threatened him with a revolver. Lepretti had entered the studio soon after the airing of an interview of two community leaders who criticized the mayor's administration. Lepretti grabbed Sotelo by the throat, threw him to the ground, punched him in the face, and kicked him. Probidad reported the mayor then held a gun to Sotelo's head and threatened to kill him, saying "I've already let you get away with a lot."