(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 1 May 2003 IAPA press release: IAPA holds emergency forum in Venezuela Calls for amendment of bills curtailing press freedom IAPA says there is “no press freedom” in country MIAMI, Florida (May 1, 2003) – The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has declared that press freedom is not guaranteed […]
(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 1 May 2003 IAPA press release:
IAPA holds emergency forum in Venezuela
Calls for amendment of bills curtailing press freedom
IAPA says there is “no press freedom” in country
MIAMI, Florida (May 1, 2003) – The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has declared that press freedom is not guaranteed in Venezuela and called on legislators to amend bills seeking to muzzle the press by punishing those who criticize public officials and to create oversight groups to control what the news media reports.
The call came on Tuesday during a public forum in Caracas on freedom of expression that the IAPA labeled an “emergency” session, designed to review a number of legislative bills for curtailing the practice of journalism and to protest the violence that has been unleashed against the press. The violence, said IAPA President Andrés García, was “spawned by an overall government strategy that seeks to curtail press freedom and impose the ‘official truth’ in any form of public expression.”
Speaking to an audience of more than 300 people, García said this was the fifth time that an IAPA international delegation had traveled to Venezuela in the past two years. He added, “we have come here because of the constant deterioration in press freedom as a consequence of a strategy carried out on various fronts by the government for some years now.”
Asdrúbal Aguiar, a Venezuelan lawyer, agreed that the government had an overall strategy and gave details of a bill for a Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, widely known as the Contents Law. Aguiar said that far from being a technical regulation of the media as it was supposed to be, the law was an attempt to interfere in media content and editorial policies, paving the way for censorship and punishing those journalists who criticize public officials, thus in practice creating an insult law.
Aguiar and the other panelists also rejected the provisions in another bill, for an Organic Law of Participation by Citizens, which would set up a News Media Oversight Council. The IAPA saw these two legislative measures, plus the establishment of people’s tribunals that sought to put editors on trial in public squares, and the government’s insistence that the media impose codes of conduct on themselves, as “clear evidence of an autocratic government that aims to monitor and control people’s freedom to receive information through the channels they deem most appropriate.”
The two bills were passed on first reading in the National Assembly.
Another panelist, Venezuelan jurist Pedro Nikken, said that “Venezuela must not remain in contempt” – a reference to the failure of the government to heed a demand by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that it investigate a large number of attacks on journalists and news media.
García publicly called on the authorities not to allow the April 11, 2002, murder of news photographer Jorge Tortoza and hundreds of attacks on journalists and media in the past four years to go unpunished. “The only way to put an end to the violence is for the guilty to be brought to justice,” he said.
Expanding on his mention of the question of contempt, Nikken said that Venezuela must observe the international treaties that it has signed. “The IACHR has presented numerous formal complaints to the General Assembly of the Organization of American States about situations such as those existing in Venezuela and history shows that insistence by such bodies has borne fruit and the offenders have been required to rectify matters,” Nikken said, in an allusion to the Alberto Fujimori ousted administration in Peru, which had ignored IACHR injunctions in similar circumstances.
Raúl Kraiselburd, president of the IAPA Press Institute and a former president of the organization itself, said it was hypocritical to say that press freedom existed in Venezuela. “This is a very clear situation,” he said. “In a country where journalists have to arm themselves with courage in order to report, where acts of violence against the media occur almost daily, where the masses are encouraged to lynch journalists, where there are ‘people’s trials,’ it means that we are facing the same kind of authoritarianism as in the 18th century. You cannot speak of there being any press freedom. In Venezuela there is none.”
Referring to foreign exchange controls that prevent newspaper publishers from obtaining the dollars they need to import newsprint and other supplies and broadcast media from being able to continue showing foreign programs, Kraiselburd said, “Venezuela is going back in time,” to times such as the 1950s in Argentina, the 1970s in Mexico and 1980s in Nicaragua, when the autocratic governments there rewarded or punished news media.
Another member of the panel, Argentine constitutional lawyer Gregorio Badeni agreed that Venezuela lacks the necessary guarantees for press freedom and therefore its democracy is weakened. He also referred to the standards set by the Declaration of Chapultepec for freedom of expression, which served as the framework for the emergency forum.
The IAPA bases its assertion that there is no press freedom in Venezuela on the fact that the government has failed to comply with the basic principles on freedom of expression that democratic states should guarantee as established in the Declaration of Chapultepec, regarded as the Magna Carta on the subject since its was drafted and adopted in 1994.
Edward Seaton, another former IAPA president, said that the Venezuelan government should concern itself less with passing laws restricting the press and make more of an attempt to create governmental transparency. Seaton stressed that Venezuela needs a law providing for access to public records, which would enable citizens to have the tools they need to learn how their leaders work and what they do. He said that there must be transparency in governance for a true democracy to exist. Examples of Latin American countries that have already taken such action, he said, were Mexico, Panama and Peru. Seaton added, however, that not all such laws in these countries were fully operative.
After moderating a lengthy discussion among the panelists and the audience, made up of a large number of university students, IAPA’s press freedom director Ricardo Trotti announced that this year the IAPA plans to hold training workshops for journalists and other forums in the country’s interior, where there is also violence and there is a need to bring about press freedom.
The IAPA delegation spent three days in Venezuela. In addition to meeting with reporters and editors in Caracas, it traveled to the provinces to visit El Siglo in Maracay, Aragua state, and La Voz and La Región in Guarenas, Miranda state. The IAPA heard complaints of violent assaults and legal actions and held meetings with journalists in the newsrooms to exchange views about the plight of press freedom in those cities.
