sábado, 11 de julio de 2009

Only the voice of the dictator


Consolidating his communist country project has been given top priority on Hugo Chávez’s agenda since December 2008. However, taking note of what has happened with his peers in Argentina and Mexico as a result of the latest electoral setbacks and with the ousting from office of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, it seems that Chávez has decided not only to learn from their mistakes but also to raise the volume of his “revolution” to the maximum.Even though the opinion polls say that Venezuelans continue to ratify what they already made clear at the 2007 referendum on the amendment to the Constitution and are not buying his communist proposal. What is more, prompted precisely by this rejection of the majority, he has made silencing the media even further his first priority in order to impose a single editorial line on information and to ensure that the only voice people hear is the voice of their dictator. It has not been enough for the hegemon to have closed official information sources to the independent media; now the National Statistics Institute, the Central Bank, PDVSA and, indeed, any government office have become black boxes when it comes to truthful and timely information.Today, Venezuelans have no idea of how much PDVSA produces or exports, how much Seniat collects in taxes, what and how much is produced by farmers, what the true rate of inflation is or by how much unemployment has grown. Because of this total absence of information, it is not even known officially how many people fall victim to crime. So far, the democrats have managed to overcome all the repressive strategies and tactics the government has imposed, among them the Gag Law, the closure of Radio Caracas TV, and the inclement persecution of Globovisión and other media that refuse to practice self-censorship. Neither subjugating other private media to the Executive, nor the official media’s near monopoly of the radio spectrum, nor the proliferation of community media subsidized by the state has been sufficient to impose the manipulation of the truth. That is why the government is now seeking to impose a whole series of amendments to the laws, counting on the knee-jerk approval of its National Assembly, to inhibit Venezuelans’ right to information and communication, beside arbitrarily and illegally implementing a series of measures to restrict free enterprise in the communications sector even further. The new and amended legislation in the pipeline that would inhibit freedom of expression includes a Journalism Bill (to abolish the confidentiality of information sources); a Telecommunications Bill (to eliminate radio circuits and also limit the number of joint broadcasting hours to prevent the regions from learning about what is going on in the country and also to divest subscription television channels of their independence) ; a proposed amendment to the Gag Law (to increase sanctions on the media and media workers at the discretion of the Executive), to be complemented by a Media Crimes Bill proposed by the Attorney General to sanction media that “generate anxiety and panic in the population” as a result of reporting the barbarities and illegalities committed by the government; and an Education Bill that seeks, among other things, to regulate all programming of the media so that Hugo Chávez has total control over the information broadcast to Venezuelan society. Once this complex legal structure has been put in place, free information will be a crime and those who deal in it will be treated as criminals. Worse still is the fact that Venezuelans will not have the slightest chance of learning about the ravages wrought by the communist policies that will be implemented, for example, in education or with regard to private property or the productive system.

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