Venezuela’s oldest television network went off the air at midnight Sunday in a move slammed by the opposition as a new push by President Hugo Chavez to tighten his grip on the nation’s media.
Police fired water cannon to disperse protesters in Caracas just before RCTV screens showed recorded images of its teary-eyed employees singing the national anthem and then the screen went black.
The channel’s successor, Chavez-backed TVes, began broadcasting about 20 minutes later. TVes president Lil Rodriguez urged Venezuelans to display “responsibility within the framework of the constitution.”
As 53-year-old RCTV faded into history, network president Marcel Granier told US-based Univision television that Chavez was driven by “a megalomaniacal desire to establish a totalitarian dictatorship.”
He told reporters that he was certain that “democracy will return to Venezuela, along with RCTV.”
Using water cannon, police dispersed thousands of stone-throwing protesters outside Venezuela’s telecom authority, which ordered the station off the air.
Chavez supporters held a huge, night-to-dawn public party outside RCTV studios to celebrate the birth of the new “socialist television” and the end of the bitterly anti-Chavez media outlet.
The closure of Venezuela’s oldest network, the latest episode in President Chavez’s socialist revolution, sparked many protests.
Chavez’s political opponents championed RCTV as an opposition voice and sharply criticized his refusal to renew its broadcast license.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled that RCTV must temporarily leave its equipment and broadcast infrastructure in military hands to ensure that TVes can provide quality service.
Granier called the decision “an unconstitutional seizure of our equipment.”
Some 70 to 80 percent of Venezuelans opposed the closure, according to recent polls.
Chavez announced the decision not to renew RCTV’s license soon after he was re-elected in late 2006.
During the campaign, RCTV openly called for the president’s defeat, and Chavez never forgave the network for calling for an April 2002 coup that deposed him for two days.
“The decision was mine” to close RCTV, Chavez said Saturday, calling its steamy soap operas “a danger for the country, for boys, for girls.”
RCTV, which airs “telenovelas” soap operas and variety shows, had one of the largest audiences in Venezuela and is one of the few stations with national broadcast capabilities.
The government will now control two of the four nationwide broadcasters in Venezuela, one of them state-owned VTV.
However, the government renewed the broadcast license for Venevision, RCTV’s main competitor, which expired Friday.
Venevision is owned by billionaire Gustavo Cisneros, who dropped his open opposition to Chavez in 2004.
Since 1999, Chavez has gradually tightened his grip on power and in January the National Assembly allowed him to rule on most matters by decree, without legislative debate.
Criticism of the RCTV shutdown poured in from around the world, including from Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the US Senate, which unanimously approved a resolution last week expressing “profound concern” over the move.
El Nacional daily in a front-page editorial said RCTV’s shutdown marked “the end of pluralism” in Venezuela and the government’s growing “information monopoly.”
The government said other media could still carry the RCTV signal. However, Granier said, “the government is pressuring cable and satellite companies not to carry us.”
RCTV filed charges Saturday with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.
Yep… freedom of speech is the first to go in a dictatorship all under the guise of 'government security'.
Venezuelans need to wakeup before it's too late.
Oooops… here goes another:
The Venezuelan government has accused a news network of "inciting murder", just hours after the country's main opposition broadcaster, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), was taken off the free airwaves at midnight on Sunday.
It wants Globovision investigated for allegedly inciting an assassination attempt on Hugo Chavez, the president.
Venezuela also said on Monday that it was filing charges against US cable network CNN for linking Chavez to al-Qaeda.
Willian Lara, the information minister, presented at a press conference what he said was CNN footage displaying pictures of Chavez juxtaposed with those of an al-Qaeda leader.
CNN issued a statement late on Monday, saying "we strongly deny" being "engaged in a campaign to discredit or attack Venezuela".
The move against RCTV, which has since been replaced by a state-run channel to promote socialist programmes, sparked condemnation from at home and abroad, and accusations that Chavez was undermining democracy.
Incitement
Lara said experts hired by the ministry found Globovision had showed footage of an attempt on the late Pope John Paul II's life in 1981 accompanied by the song This Does Not Stop Here, sung by Ruben Blades, now Panama's tourism minister.
"The conclusion of the specialists … is that they are inciting the assassination of the president of Venezuela," Lara told the state prosecutor.
The interpretation of the clip leads to inciting the president's assassination, he said.
Lara said: "In Venezuela there is a context" for this kind of thing "due to the fact that the president has in several occasions denounced existing plans to assassinate him, and that there are groups whose political plans include an assassination against his person."
Alberto Federico Ravell, Globovision director, denied any wrongdoing, calling the allegations "ridiculous".
Chavez accuses both Globovision and RCTV of backing a bungled 2002 coup against him.
A Globovision reporter at the prosecutor's office said the footage was taken out of context.
The channel had been airing archive footage from RCTV accompanied by songs with a farewell theme the week before RCTV's closure, the reporter said.
CNN admission
With regard to CNN, Lara said the channel aired a story about the Venezuelan protests, but used images taken in Mexico of an unrelated story.
"CNN broadcast a lie which linked President Chavez to violence and murder," he said.
Protesters threw stones and bottles at police
who fired tear gas and rubber bullets [Reuters]
CNN acknowledged a video mix-up, and "aired a detailed correction and expressed regret for the involuntary error".
Regarding al-Qaeda's leader, CNN said that "unrelated news stories can be juxtaposed in a given programme segment just as a newspaper page or a news website may have unconnected stories adjacent to each other".
In Caracas, Benoit Hervieu, Americas director at Reporters Without Borders, said: "Yesterday we saw the takeover of the principal media critical of President Chavez.
"Besides Globovision, what television media is left that can criticise the government of Mr Chavez?"
Protests
Dima Khatib, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Latin America, said about 1,000 people, mostly students from different universities in Caracas, rallied in a busy area of the capital to protest against the government's decision not to renew the free-to-air broadcast licence of RCTV.
The demonstrations were at first peaceful but police fired tear gas and rubber bullets when a group tried moving towards a main avenue in the area, she reported.
Protesters threw stones and bottles at the police.
Smaller protests took place in other Venezuelan cities, but died down later.
Pedro Carreno, the interior minister, said that the protests were "part of an opposition plan" to use the RCTV case to "attack peace and security of citizens and of the state".