2 Venezuelan Journalists Accused in Assassination

Two prominent Venezuelan media figures who are frequent critics of President Hugo Chavez’s policies are among seven suspects who face charges in connection with a car bombing last year that killed federal investigator Danilo Anderson.

Arrest warrants were issued Friday night for Patricia Poleo, a prize-winning radio and newspaper journalist who wrote about the presence of Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos in Venezuela in 2001, and Nelson Mezerhane, a prominent banker and principal owner of the Globovision TV station.

Other warrants issued Friday and Saturday named Jaime Jose Escalante, who heads Venezuela’s National Guard along the western border with Colombia, and Eugenio Anez Nunez, a retired general who is a Chavez critic. Local news reports quoted unnamed government sources as saying the explosives used in the car bomb that killed Anderson came through Escalante’s district. The other targets of the warrants were unnamed.

The warrants were issued nearly a year after Anderson was killed last Nov. 18 in Caracas, the capital. The motive for the bombing remains a mystery, but some have theorized that Anderson was about to bring charges against accused plotters of an attempted coup against Chavez in April 2002. Another theory had it that Anderson himself was involved in an extortion ring whose members feared being identified had it been investigated.

Venezuelan Prosecutor General Isaias Rodriguez told reporters in Caracas on Saturday that conspirators met three times to plan Anderson’s killing as part of a plot to destabilize the nation. He cited an unnamed witness as well as telephone evidence linking the suspects to the slaying.

Human rights and media advocates, however, said the arrest warrants for Poleo and Mezerhane were designed to intimidate opposition news media.

The Inter-American Press Assn. over the summer warned of an “ongoing government strategy against freedom of the press” in Venezuela after an investigation targeted the newspaper El Universal for criticizing Chavez.

The Congress, dominated by Chavez’s party, last year passed the Radio and Television Social Responsibility Law, which has increased government regulation of broadcast content. And changes in the penal code have made print journalists more vulnerable to criminal charges for alleged “offenses” committed against government officials, said David Natera Febres, president of the Venezuelan Press Assn., a group of the nation’s 40 largest newspapers.

The charges against Poleo and Mezerhane are “a farce, an invention the government is using to try to scare the Venezuelan people and restrict the liberty of expression,” Natera Febres said.

Rafael Poleo, Patricia Poleo’s father and owner of El Nuevo Pais daily newspaper, for which she writes, said in an interview Sunday that his daughter’s anti-Chavez stance in recent articles and radio broadcasts made her a target.

The charges against his daughter and others are “a big mistake by Chavez because he has given the Venezuelan opposition a unifying motive that it has lacked,” Poleo said. He said his daughter was in hiding but that she wanted to give herself up to clear her name.

“I would prefer she doesn’t. The government’s intent is to break her, to break me, and the freedoms we represent,” he said.

Levi Benshimol, president of the National College of Journalists, Venezuela’s largest reporters association, said he did not believe that the younger Poleo, an ex-student of his, was capable of “anything so horrible” as involvement in Anderson’s death.

Pedro Nikken, a Caracas attorney who is a former president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and has advised opposition political interests, said, “I don’t want to prejudge, but ... we have yet to see what evidence they have or what sense it makes to link these very different persons to such a plan.”