Chavez Prepares Government-Takeover Of Venezuela's TV Networks

Felipe Perez Marti Unable to silence media criticism of his administration's massive corruption and angry with press coverage of his country's general strike, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is now planning to take control of privately-owned TV stations.

The scheme was announced by top Chavez minister, Felipe Perez Marti, speaking Friday to a small crowd of Chavez-supporters gathered in front of stateowned oil company PDVSA: " - After the taking of PDVSA, the people will take control of the mass media," promised Perez Marti.

Mr Perez Marti, an economist, is the head of Venezuela's Planification Ministry. On previous occasions, he has publicly voiced support and admiration for the Cuban model of government, where only one TV station is allowed and where state censorship strictly controls public opinion. His predecessor in the post, former Planning Minister Jorge Giordani, goes one step further. Giordani is best known in Venezuela for having authored a college text that holds up North Korea as an example to follow.

Planning Minister Perez Marti promised that the government would only take control of TV stations who let the opposition speak, and that those journalists who abide by the official government line can still keep their jobs: " - Mass media which does not transmit biased news and which transmit good news will survive. Those who betray the people's cause can not continue to transmit in Venezuela", he assured.

Government control of the press is already unsurpassed in Venezuela, where the Chavez government can - at any time, and with no prior notification - hijack all TV- and radio signals to broadcast its own messages.

So far this year, nearly one thousand such interruptions of regular programming have already taken place. Independent political parties and democratic opposition groups do not have this right, but are instead voluntarily given ample coverage by the country's privately owned TV stations. This coverage of opposition leaders has angered Hugo Chavez, who calls the TV stations biased.

Venezuela's mass media has been critical of Chavez and has served as an important brake on corruption and human rights abuses in the country. In Venezuela, all branches of government are controlled by one single party, the MVR or Movimiento Quinta Republica, whose is under the command of Hugo Chavez.

" - Ordinary Venezuelans now turn to the press, rather than going to court or complaining to politicans when their rights are violated," explains general Enrique Medina Gomez, former military attache to Washington and now a dissident who has joined with 134 other military officials to publicly oppose Hugo Chavez. " - They know that they can not fight the government in a country where the president has packed the Supreme Court with his cronies, and where both the legislative and adminstrative branches are under the sole control of one man only."

December 21, 2002 www.militaresdemocraticos.com