[NYTr] Behind the Protests over the Cancellation of RCTV
 
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 23:44:11 -0500 (CDT)


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Agencia Cubana de Noticias (AIN) - Jun 4, 2007
http://ainch.ain.cu/mailman/listinfo/ingles

What is Hidden Behind the Protests over the Cancellation of RCTV?

By Angel Alvarez
AIN Special Service

Left with no real reasons for protest, the Venezuelan  oligarchy and 
traditional leaders, are using the cancellation of RCTV's license as 
the excuse to support their plant to destabilize and topple the 
government of Hugo Chavez.   It is the same old story that has been 
repeated over and over again in Latin America any time a progressive 
government appears with aspirations to improve the living conditions of 
the majority of the population, evenly distribute the country's 
resources and govern independently of Washington's.

Three examples suffice to demonstrate this pattern. In the 1950s, in 
Guatemala, when the government of Jacobo Arbenz attempted an agrarian 
reform, the media, paid by the United Fruit Company and other powerful 
plantation owners, viciously attacked the government.

A media campaign was organized from the US embassy and ended up playing 
an important role in the creation of conditions for a military invasion 
headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas.

Barely five years later, in Cuba, even before the adoption of the first 
measure of the people's court, when social transformations were only 
outlined in the speeches of the leaders, the campaign did not wait.

But in Cuba, the  powerful media elite, headed by the Diario de la 
Marina, the same paper which had applauded the death of Independence 
leader Antonio Maceo, 65 years earlier, abandoned  their newspapers, 
and television and radio stations and fled to the United States, 
hopeful of returning some weeks later after the bayonets of US marines.

More recently, in the 1970s the socialist government of Salvador 
Allende was victim of the mass media, especially the property of the 
Edwards family that was unconditionally put into the hands of the 
Chilean oligarchy. The mass media helped feed the events that ended in 
the bombing of the La Moneda Presidential Palace and the death of the 
legitimately elected president and the installation of a ferocious 
tyrant.  Many of the mass media cowardly became silent before the 
assassination and the disappearance of thousands of young people. Now 
in Venezuela, as always, they are attempting to justify their actions 
under the guise of freedom of the press. In reality, it has more to do 
with the freedom of the businesses owned by the Cisneros and Capriles 
families among others, who hide their interest in preserving the old 
order of exploitation that for decades have pillaged the country's 
resources.

President Hugo Chavez has been extremely tolerant before the openly 
subversive conduct of journalists, magazines, and television and radio 
boradcasts, which went as far as encouraging the kidnapping of the 
president and the coup d? etat on April 11, 2002. Legal and moral 
reasons are more than enough to justify Venezuela's decision to not 
renewal RCTV's license. Since Hugo Chavez became president, these 
entities forgot their social function of informing and have become no 
more than instruments used to carry plans to provoke chaos with a clear 
intention of destroying the government. During the two days that the 
coup lasted, while the president had allegedly resigned and disappeared 
and a new "government" took over while people filled the streets of 
Caracas, all this time, RCTV were transmitting movies and cartoons.

How long, in the name of a false freedom of the press, should 
democratically elected be forced to stand the outrages of the private 
media, to the extend of even encouraging the assassination of the 
president and promoting destabilization?

In Venezuela a colossal conspiracy is underway, for reasons that have 
nothing to do with the suspension of the local transmissions of RCTV.  
In the US embassy in Caracas, the Under Secretary for Latin America 
John Negroponte, should know well the real reasons of street protests 
and support offered beyond the borders of Venezuela.
       
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