Lonely voice in Venezuela

When the head of Venezuela’s state-backed television news station addressed the Organization of American States recently, he likened media outlets critical of President Hugo Chavez to radio stations in Rwanda that encouraged genocide. His country, said Andres Izarra, the head of Telesur, was battling “media terrorism.”

Likening democratic opposition to Chavez’s aggregation of power to calls for the slaughter of more than 800,000 people in Rwanda is nothing but paranoia-induced hyperbole. But the rhetoric is also revealing. It underpins the government’s efforts to silence the last television station that airs content critical of the president.

With a series of legal, administrative and police actions against Globovision and its executives, the government is maneuvering the station into a position where its license can be either temporarily suspended or permanently revoked. In October, the editor of El Nuevo Pais, an opposition newspaper, said in a Globovision broadcast that Chavez could wind up like Mussolini. The reference was to the president’s dictatorial behavior, but Chavez heard an assassination threat. The station was charged with violating the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, a censorship measure adopted in 2004. Then, in May, after the station was critical of the government’s response to an earthquake, another investigation was opened to determine whether it had broken the law by inciting panic with an intent to “destabilize” the public.

National guard troops and officials from Venezuela’s environmental agency have raided the home of Globovision’s president, Guillermo Zuloaga, an avid hunter, in search of unauthorized trophies -- twice in two weeks. The government has also charged Zuloaga, who owns two Toyota dealerships, with overcharging customers. Earlier this month, Globovision was assessed $2.3 million in back taxes, and on Tuesday, the administration tightened the screws again, charging the station with additional social responsibility infractions.

Zuloaga says Globovision will not bow to intimidation tactics. We can only hope so. It is no coincidence that many of Chavez’s prominent opponents face corruption charges or tax investigations, or have been arrested. And the only other private television station that criticized him, RCTV, lost its broadcast license two years ago. Now it transmits solely on cable to a drastically reduced audience. In Venezuela, there are no newspapers with a national reach, and if a free press is essential to a vibrant democracy, then the country’s political outlook is increasingly grim. So Izarra was partly right when he spoke of conflict between the media and the government -- he just had the victims and the perpetrators confused.