Arcadia Foundation

Freedom of the press in countries throughout the Western Hemisphere are facing serious threats from authoritarian governments, especially in Venezuela and communist-led Cuba, a group representing news media from across the Americas warned Sunday.

Many claim the Venezuelan repression stems for the regime’s inability to both sustain a viable economy and feed a starving citizenry, utilizing the media as tools to condemn the actions of makeshift scapegoats while the ‘revolution’ flounders.

Alejandro Aguirre, president of the Inter American Press Association, singled out Cuba and Venezuela as the region’s the worst offenders against press freedom.

“The most worrisome case continues to be the case of Cuba, where a dictatorship that has lasted nearly half a century has not allowed a minimum of freedom of expression or free press,” Aguirre said in a telephone interview from the Caribbean island of Aruba.

Continued, as excerpted from the Los Angeles Times:

Aguirre also condemned what he called efforts by President Hugo Chavez to silence media critics in Venezuela.

Chavez “has used all the government’s tools to close and antagonize the media — doing everything possible so that the flow of information in Venezuela is dictated by the government,” said Aguirre, executive director of the Miami-based Diario de Las Americas.

Chavez’s administration has already revoked the licenses of 34 radio stations last year, saying most of them failed to update their registrations or allowed their concessions to expire. Officials have said dozens of other broadcasters could also lose their licenses.

In January, Venezuela’s state-run telecommunications regulator ordered local cable companies to drop RCTV — an anti-Chavez TV channel — because the network allegedly defied new rules requiring cable channels to carry mandatory government programming, including some of Chavez’s speeches.

Chavez denies attempting to silence his critics. The former paratroop commander has repeatedly rejected the IAPA’s criticisms in the past, calling the organization a pawn of the “empire,” a continued reference to the U.S. government.

David Natera, who heads Venezuela’s largest association of newspapers, accused Chavez’s government of starving newspapers of revenue from public advertising by steering that to pro-Chavez media.

“He’s not closing newspapers, but he’s strangling them financially,” said Natera, owner and publisher of the Venezuelan newspaper Correo de Caroni.

The IAPA is also increasingly concerned that democratically elected leaders in countries such as Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia appear to be following Chavez’s example by cracking down on critical media outlets.

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