Armed protesters stormed the Caracas headquarters of a television station critical of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government on Monday, one of the channel’s managers said, as 34 radio stations faced closure.
Globovision’s Maria Fernanda Flores said around 30 people arrived at the outlet’s headquarters by car and aimed guns at security staff, forcing their way into the building — where they activated two teargas canisters.
One municipal policeman, charged with guarding the building, and some private guards were hurt during the attack, the station said.
PHOTO: EPA
“We cannot tolerate that violence would be an instrument though which we resolve our differences,” Flores said.
Station manager Alberto Federico Ravell said he held Chavez responsible for the attack.
“This attack is no longer against freedom of expression, it is against the lives of the people who work here,” he said.
Images from the scene showed flag-carrying demonstrators dressed in military-green T-shirts and red berets standing by as a smoky canister was kicked away by security personnel.
Meanwhile, radio hosts hung their heads as their FM station was forced off the airwaves along with 33 other broadcasters targeted by Chavez’s government in what critics say is a campaign to muzzle his foes.
For the first time in decades, CNB 102.3 FM fell silent over the weekend after Venezuela’s telecommunications regulators revoked some of the 34 stations’ licenses and refused to renew others.
But CNB challenged the government action within hours by starting to transmit programming over the Internet. Sportscaster Juan Carlos Rutilo told his online listeners: “Today freedom of expression is being restricted ... Today you have one less option.”
Media groups and human rights activists note more than 200 other stations are under investigation for allegedly not being properly licensed and accuse Venezuela’s leftist leader of pursuing a widening crackdown to silence dissent.
In a similar step, one of Chavez’s leftist allies, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, announced on Monday that “many” radio and TV frequencies will revert to the state over what he called irregularities in their licenses. He gave no specifics.
A majority of the stations affected in Venezuela aired criticisms of the government, though they were not overtly anti-Chavez and much of their programming ranged from US rock to salsa and traditional Venezuelan music.
In the country’s polarized media landscape, CNB took a relatively balanced approach by interviewing pro-Chavez lawmakers while also having opposition politicians among its talk show hosts.
Venezuela still has many private radio stations and newspapers that take a hard line against Chavez and strongly criticize the government through both news reports and commentary. But in the last decade, the government has built a growing coalition of state-run media outlets, and some TV channels once virulently anti-Chavez have toned down their criticism.
Hundreds of Venezuelan protesters gathered outside the CNB radio station over the weekend to express their outrage.
“I feel the country that I knew, where I was raised, is slipping away,” said Alix Villareal, a 43-year-old maid who cried alongside other demonstrators. “I’m sad because little by little they are taking away everything, and nobody does anything.”
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