Venezuelan journalists under siege by Chavez: Incendiary attacks stir Chavistas

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Bombs at newspaper offices, threats against reporters, assaults on TV cameramen -- Venezuela's media say they're under siege and that the standard-bearer is none other than President Hugo Chavez.

"This is an escalating spiral of aggression, and it's being sponsored by the government," said Miguel Henrique Otero, publisher of El Nacional, one of the country's two top daily newspapers. El Nacional has been the subject of frequent vitriolic tirades by Chavez, as well as boisterous protests and a bomb that shattered a glass door at a sister newspaper, Asi Es La Noticia.

Chavez has long engaged in a verbal war of words with the press, which he lambastes as blatantly biased against him in their coverage. "The media are perverse factories of lies," he said. "What they sell is poison."

But until recent weeks, the skirmishes had been largely confined to newspaper editorial pages and Chavez's fiery speeches. Now, press advocates say, the president's incendiary verbal attacks have incited his followers to physical aggression against journalists.

Angry hordes have shoved reporters and photographers covering presidential events, rocked and banged on television-station vehicles, and spewed epithets at reporters such as "traitors to the homeland" and "sell-outs."

"Some people feel legitimized (by Chavez) in lashing out at us physically and verbally," said Globovision television reporter Jose Vicente Antonetti, who has complained to the government's Human Rights Office. "He is instigating people by saying that Globovision does not report the truth, which is totally false."

Reporters say the harassment is getting worse, with some saying that they have been followed, threatened and had their phones tapped. "One of the things they say is that my daughter is going to be the first death of this (Chavez) revolution," said Patricia Poleo, editor of the daily El Nuevo Pais.

At Chavez's radio show last Sunday, local newspapers reported that a Chavez supporter was videotaping journalists covering the event. When questioned, the videotaper ominously said the film was to identify the reporters to his colleagues.

The previous week, the official government news agency Venpres issued a story denouncing three reporters who have been relentless in uncovering government corruption scandals, claiming they are "narco-journalists" in league with drug traffickers. Chavez later termed the story "a mistake."

Officials of Chavez's government deny that they are orchestrating a campaign against reporters. "It would be very clumsy for the government to try to harm some journalists because, in some way, they want to be the center of attention," said Vice President Diosdado Cabello.

Some Chavez supporters, called Chavistas, say that journalists are merely getting as good as they have given because, they claim, the media has lost all objectivity in its political and governmental reporting.

"The media have taken a political position, which is legitimate in a democracy," said journalist William Lara, president of the National Assembly and one of Chavez's staunchest defenders. "But just as legitimate is Chavez's right to defend himself. They've called him crazy, a fascist, compared him to Hitler. No president has been subjected to this."

Faced with a largely opposition establishment press, Chavez has long sought to get his own view across to the masses. He tried to build his own media empire with a daily newspaper and weekly television show until lack of funds forced their closure two years ago.

Last year, he launched a "People's Voices" project in which he urged supporters to start community newsletters, but the project has failed to muster sway.

His most successful outlet is his four-hour-plus Sunday show Hello President, broadcast on the state-owned radio and television stations, which he commonly uses to counter the previous week's negative headlines and launch diatribes against what he perceives as unfair press coverage.

"No one can say that freedom of expression does not exist in Venezuela. There has never been wider freedom of the press here," Chavez said. "They can write what they want about me, but I have the right to reply."

Analysts say that the Venezuelan media have traditionally been tough on government, but in the past, presidents would respond with "under the table" measures such as limiting imports of newsprint.

"The press has been aggressive with all governments, but they were never attacked back," said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Datanalisis opinion polling firm. "Chavez is attacking them frontally, and at times, he is right."

The president points to evidence such as El Nacional's March 3 publication of a fictitious front-page story in which French intellectual Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, a Paris scholarly review, was highly critical of the Chavez regime.

After Ramonet disavowed any knowledge of the "interview," which the paper took from a Venezuelan Web site without verifying its authenticity, the author later admitted to inventing it as an experiment for a thesis about the unreliability of the Caribbean press.

Crowed Chavez: "The media are full of lies and you cannot believe anything they say, anything can be a lie."

Nevertheless, with journalists reporting increased harassment and growing international concern, Chavez has tried to temper his fervent followers' actions by saying that his grudge is with the "oligarch" media barons whose business interests are threatened by his leftist "peaceful revolution." Reporters, he says, are merely "workers" doing their bosses' bidding.

But Chavez still refuses to let up on his harangues against the press -- in his radio show last Sunday, for instance, the targets were the Spanish and Colombian media -- and he lauds his most radical supporters as true "revolutionaries."

The overheated atmosphere has alarmed international organizations. The Organization of American States in January ordered the government to take precautionary measures to protect journalists after Chavez's followers gathered outside the offices of El Nacional, banging pots and pans and shouting slogans for three hours. Employees were afraid to leave the premises. Officials responded by stationing police at newspaper office entrances.

After receiving numerous complaints, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission last month sent representative Santiago Canton to Venezuela for a report. Canton witnessed the tension firsthand -- raucous Chavistas disrupted his concluding press conference and refused to let him speak, forcing him to abruptly cancel the event.

Press advocates now lump Venezuela in with the region's more notorious journalist danger zones of Colombia, Cuba and Haiti. Warned the Miami-based Inter-American Press Association last week: "There is a deliberate policy by the state to restrict the exercise of freedom of expression and the right to information in Venezuela."

"The fears (we) have been harboring since Chavez started lashing out at the media are materializing," said Marylene Smeets, Americas coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. "He's created a monster."

(March 1, 2002)-- Venezuela's strongman faces widespread calls to step down By Phil Gunson | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

[Full Text] CARACAS, VENEZUELA - The man who won Venezuelan hearts three years ago as a strongman who could deliver a better life to the masses is now facing them in the streets.

More than 20,000 people turned out this week calling for the resignation of President Hugo Chávez, while some 2,000 supporters marched in a rival demonstration of support. The demonstrations come after months of building discontent with a president who has managed to alienate the labor class, the media, business groups, the church, political parties, and the military.

Four military leaders have publicly called for his resignation.

In November, Chávez introduced 49 "revolutionary" decrees. The package of laws - affecting everything from land rights and fisheries to the oil industry - unified virtually the whole of organized society in a nationwide business and labor stoppage that paralyzed the country on Dec. 10.

The protests this week have a note of irony, because they started out as a commemoration called by President Chávez. In his eyes, Feb. 27 is a milestone of his so-called revolution - "the date on which the people awoke" in 1989. That is when thousands of rioters and looters took to the streets in protest of an IMF-backed austerity plan, in which the government hiked gas prices.

In what became known as the caracazo, or noisy protest, thousands of rioters and looters were met by Venezuelan military forces, and hundreds were killed. Three years later, Chávez and his military co-conspirators failed in an attempt to overthrow the government responsible for the massacre, that of President Carlos Andres Perez. Chávez was jailed for two years.

"But the elements that brought about the caracazo are still present in Venezuela," says lawyer Liliana Ortega, who for 13 years has led the fight for justice on behalf of the victims' relatives. "Poverty, corruption, impunity ... some of them are perhaps even more deeply ingrained than before."

Chávez's supporters consist of an inchoate mass of street traders, the unemployed, and those whom the old system had marginalized. This, to Chávez, is el pueblo - the people. "But we are 'the people' too," protests teacher Luis Leonet. "We're not oligarchs like he says. The oligarchs are people like Chávez, people with power."

On Wednesday, Leonet joined a march led by the main labor confederation, the CTV, to protest what unions say is a series of antilabor measures, including one of the 49 decrees dealing with public-sector workers.

Chávez won't talk to the CTV, whose leaders, he says, are corrupt and illegitimate. So he refuses to negotiate the annual renewal of collective contracts with the confederation, holding up deals on pay and conditions for hundreds of thousands of union members like Leonet.

Across town on Wednesday, a progovernment march sought to demonstrate that the president's popularity was as high as ever. "For the popular classes, Chávez is an idol," says marcher Pedro Gutierrez.

Pollster Luis Vicente Leon, of the Datanalisis organization, warns that marches are no measure of relative popularity. "There is a lot of discontent among ... the really poor," Leon says, adding that so far the protests are mainly among the middle class.

But the middle class can be a dangerous enemy. It includes the bulk of the armed forces, and the management of the state oil company, PDVSA.

This month, four uniformed officers, ranging from a National Guard captain to a rear-admiral and an Air Force general, called on the president to resign, while repudiating the idea of a military coup of Chávez, himself a former Army lieutenant-colonel.

But senior "institutionalist" officers "are under severe pressure from lower ranks frustrated at the lack of impact" that these acts have had, a source close to military dissidents says. In other words, a coup cannot be ruled out, although the United States publicly denounces the idea.

Meanwhile, the president's imposition of a new board of directors on PDVSA this week sparked a virtual uprising by the company's senior management. In an unprecedented public statement, managers said the government was pushing the company "to the verge of operational and financial collapse" by imposing political, rather than commercial, criteria.

The political opposition remains relatively weak and divided. But in the view of many analysts, a president who offends both the military and the oil industry is asking for trouble. In the bars and restaurants of Caracas, the debate is no longer over whether Chávez will finish his term, which has nearly five years to run. It is when and how he will go - and what comes next. [End]

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Venezuelan life the last 10 months under Chavez's self-proclaimed "peaceful Bolivarian revolution": Chavez's threat to expel critical foreigners unsettling

S&P revises Venezuela ratings outlook to negative--[Excerpt] NEW YORK, March 18, 2002 (Reuters) - Standard & Poor's said on Monday it revised its credit outlook on Venezuela to negative, indicating that a ratings downgrade may be on the way if critical economic reforms are held hostage to the political tension gripping the country.

``The current situation has led to political polarization and a sense of frustration among the population at large, including the business and labor sectors, the Catholic church, and the military,'' S&P said in a statement.

``This, in conjunction with presidential statements about the possibility of nationalizing banks ... and the danger of exchange controls or a state of emergency, have created an environment that is not conducive to investment and growth.''

The ratings agency affirmed Venezuela's single-B long- and short-term foreign currency sovereign credit ratings. At single B, the ratings are five notches below investment grade.

A downgrade would increase the cost of borrowing for the world's No. 4 oil exporter at a time when President Hugo Chavez is facing stiff domestic opposition to his leftist agenda and authoritarian style. [End Excerpt]

I guess the greedy investors are against Chavez too. Gosh, I thought they'd go anywhere and deal with anyone, to realize a profit. What investment are you talking about, Chinese investment?

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