This is a naive argument.

Even though RCTV was guilty of breaching every communications article in the Venezuelan constitution a thousand times over (along with that of any other democratic country), the author claims that it should have kept its licence because other stations were doing much the same thing!!

Well … yes. If you want to be really, really consistent about things. However, given the Venezuelan political situation – one in which the private media happily and brazenly go about conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow the government – inconsistency would not be high on the government’s or the country’s list of concerns. Sheer survival may be slightly higher.

Given the sensitivity of Venezuelan politics, to dump all the guilty stations would have been suicidal for the government and the country. The government has to exercise caution in cleaning up the nation’s media act. At the very least, the departure of RCTV from the public airwaves (but still continuing on satellite and cable) has partly rectified the gross imbalance of media information that existed before.

Why nitpick about the inconsistency of not renewing the licence of a station that clearly deserved such treatment, yet completely ignore all the positive media developments that are taking shape in Venezuela – for example, the hundreds of community radio stations and dozens of community television stations set up under the Chavez government, that give ordinary citizens unprecedented access to the media and a long overdue media voice?

As for the Walter Martinez affair, I tried to find out some background to this via Google, without success. What few links existed were almost all in Spanish. Can the author or any OLO posters out there fill me in on this? There has to be more to the government dumping this much loved public journalist than just some criticism on his TV show.

Chavez is an old-fashioned populist left wing autocrat clamping down on the rights of those who disagree with him. This is Human Rights Watch's view of events:

"President Hugo Chávez has repeatedly threatened to cancel RCTV’s license ever since he accused it of supporting an April 2002 coup attempt. On December 28, 2006, he announced during a military ceremony that the order not to renew the channel’s 20-year license had already been drafted.

“'President Hugo Chávez is misusing the state’s regulatory authority to punish a media outlet for its criticism of the government,' said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. 'The move to shut down RCTV is a serious blow to freedom of expression in Venezuela.'

Of the three commercial stations accessible in all parts of Venezuela, only RCTV has remained strongly critical of the government. The other two—Venevision and Televen—were themselves accused of supporting the attempted coup and subsequent anti–government protests. But both have since removed virtually all content critical of the government from their programming"

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/05/22/venezu15986.htm

you won't go far wrong by taking the other side of any argument, if the american government offers an opinion.

Rhian

‘ “President Hugo Chávez has repeatedly threatened to cancel RCTV’s license ever since he accused it of supporting an April 2002 coup attempt.” [Human Rights Watch]’

The operative words here are ‘he accused’. These words strongly infer that this is merely one man’s perspective – a man whose credibility has already been constantly attacked and undermined in the Western media – when in fact the concrete evidence of RCTV’s active role in the 2002 coup is overwhelming, irrefutable and accessible.

In addition, the government’s case against RCTV contained much more than just its role in the coup (the main emphasis of most Western accounts). The case included: RCTV’s lack of cooperation with Venezuelan tax laws; its failure to pay fines issued by CONATEL (the telecommunications commission) over the past twenty years; and its refusal to abide by constitutional laws prohibiting incitation to political violence, indecency, obscenity and the distortion of facts and information.

Regarding the Human Rights Watch assessment, it might be worth taking a comparative look at the list of HRW public statements for both Venezuela and Australia, covering the period 2000 to 2006.

Australia - http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=asia&c=austra
Venezuela - http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=americas&c=venezu&document_limit=20,20

The entries for both Australia and Venezuela for the period are roughly even – about 25 to 30 each – indicating that, at least in terms of HRW scrutiny, Australia’s record on human rights is on a par with Venezuela’s. (By contrast, the United States, Columbia and Nigeria contain well over 100 entries each.)

Australia’s HRW statements cover human rights abuses in relation to refugees/asylum seekers rights and threats to our civil liberties in relation to the anti-terror and anti-sedition laws (surprisingly, nothing on our appalling treatment of indigenous people).

Venezuela’s HRW entries relate mainly to the government’s ‘stacking’ of the judiciary and to the cancelling of the RCTV public licence. The entries do not make any allowance for the fact that both these moves were in response to the overwelmingly unbalanced stacking of the previous judiciary and media to favour the old oligarchy.

MLK
your attempt to establish moral equivalence between Venezuela and Australia is neither plausible nor relevant. If you don't accept what HRW says, here's Amnesty's take on human rights in Venezuela:

"Human rights violations, including torture, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances perpetrated by members of the security forces remained unpunished."

"Human rights defenders continued to be threatened and intimidated"

"Threats and attacks against journalists continued"

source:
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Regions/Americas/Venezuela

Rhian,
I was impressed by your deft sidestepping of the HRW implications for Australia.

I was far less impressed by your highly selective list of out-of context quotes from the Amnesty International 2007 report (which, by the way, also gave the Howard government a special negative mention in its Forward), that gives a very skewed view of the Venezuelan human rights situation. You could also do a Google and find a comparable number of out-of-context AI quotes condemning Australia’s human rights record – there’s certainly no shortage of those. (It’ll also be interesting to see how HRW and AI approach our new draconian ‘State of Emergency’ in the NT.)

You have assembled your AI quotes to make it look as if the Chavez government is brutally targeting human rights activists and journalists, as well as directly applying torture and enforced disappearances among the population – and inferring, of course, that these victims all ‘oppose’ his regime.

This misrepresents the Amnesty International report, which mostly refrains from apportioning responsibility for the incidents to either pro- or anti-Chavez forces. The report also makes positive references to the slow but sure redistribution of wealth and also to progressive gender legislation. It also acknowledges administration attempts to bring perpetrators to justice – albeit often unsuccessfully.

However, the report fails to acknowledge the administration’s major problems in cleaning up ongoing police and military corruption, or the destabilisation campaign by opposition- and US-backed paramilitaries, particularly in the countryside where hundreds of murders among the peasantry have occurred since 2001. A less US-propagandised account of these problems can be read here: (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8285)