VenEconomy: Venezuelan Government Goes for More Censorship, Barbarism
 From the Editors of VenEconomy
Latin American Herald Tribune
August 22, 2014

The world public opinion is appalled, and has good reasons for it, by the beheading of American journalist James Foley, who had been kidnapped in Syria in November of 2012. Such barbarity was caught in a horrifying video broadcast over the Internet by their authors belonging to the jihadist group Islamic State. This criminal action is justified by Islamic State as an act of retaliation over the aerial attacks by the U.S. on Iraq.

It is outrageous that more than three days have passed and Venezuelan authorities have not yet expressed their condemnation of an act that has no justification or political, religious or economic explanation of any kind. Nor have they denounced the facts, among others, that Hamas has fired over 3,000 rockets from Gaza toward residential areas in Israel, or the use of schools as missile storage facilities.

This complicit silence is the result of the usual automatic solidarities seen between animals of the same species, because we must not forget that both the government of Syria and Iraq are two of the outlaw “allies” of the Hugo Chávez-Nicolás Maduro regime.

But this is nothing to be surprised about since this unforgivable silence has been persistently replicated by the governments of the “Bolivarian revolution” in the wake of dramatic and unpunished actions by criminals who have taken the lives of thousands of Venezuelans. Coincidentally, one of the most recent cases is about a journalist from the government ranks (Álvaro Nono Bandera Godoy), who worked as press director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The alleged perpetrators of the crime are thought to be military officers. The cause remains unknown, but whatever this might have been is as inexcusable as the one that led the jihadist extremists to behead journalist James Foley.

Criminal actions such as this are precisely the ones the Government seeks to silence with its communicational hegemony, which has been making progress by leaps and bounds from last year to date with the transfer of ownership of news channel Globovisión, the Cadena Capriles media group and the daily El Universal to “entrepreneurs” loyal to the “Socialist Motherland.”

As claimed by Nitu Pérez Osuna, a renowned local journalist, who happened to become one of the first to be removed from the new Globovisión payroll and that her radio talk show “Aquí entre tú y yo” (Here between you and me) broadcast on a daily basis by Radio Caracas Radio (RCR) was taken off the air, the media blackout and the imposition of silence to journalists and independent analysts reporting the real situation of the country does not silence the media outlets per se, but the citizens.

Those citizens who are deprived of the right to express their discontent and rejection to endless abuses and illegalities committed by public servants; those who are being denied the right to demand their rulers to comply with their duty of developing public policies for the collective welfare; those who demand accountability from the administrators of the public purse. It is the people who they are closing the window to so they are not able to denounce the criminals taking a loved one from them; or the thief who stole their property or goods; or the bureaucrat who extorts them or that abuses of his/her power or denies to provide them with a public service.

What is lost thanks to this communicational hegemony, which also this week had Radio Sensacional, a radio station from Barinas state, closed down, are spaces for understanding the reality of the national scene. That truth hidden with total cynicism by the information network of the State, which sells the population a “cool Venezuela” only seen by those sucking the blood out of the nation.

And not satisfied with having total control over the media, the Government will now use coercion through legal channels over each journalist, with a new attempt to modify the Law on the Exercise of Journalism, in which training, studies, experience and ethics will have no place anymore.

A “Bolivarian state,” whose hand would not tremble in suppressing dissent, is now in an intensification stage.

____________________