Abstract
Like many other authoritarian leaders across the world, Maduro rules thanks to a mix of brutal repression, political shrewdness and control of information. Many Venezuelans have long stopped believing that Maduro’s days could end soon, and are adjusting to the new reality of living in a totalitarian society: keep your mouth shut or go somewhere else. For those who don’t want to join the almost five million Venezuelans who have already left, not saying anything about anything becomes the only way to cope.
“There are at least three types of self-censorship in Venezuela,” said Luis Carlos Diaz, a Spanish-Venezuelan journalist, human rights activist and online media expert.
There are the journalists who cannot cover a story because of a lack of information, the shutdown of access to government institutions, or physical impossibility to do their job. (Blackouts and roadblocks have become the norm in most of Venezuela outside the largest urban areas.)
People demand the release of Luis Carlos Diaz, a Venezuelan-Spanish journalist and human rights activist, who was detained by intelligence agents in March 2019 after they raided his apartment
CREDIT: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
Another type, according to Diaz, is self-censorship due to polarisation: an activist or a journalist may not want to denounce something that may damage the political side they feel aligned with. That is why you don’t see pro-government media covering opposition marches, and vice-versa.
This type of self-censorship is common not only in Venezuela but also in many other deeply polarised countries, and increasingly so. One of the battle cries of the wave of protests that rocked Latin America last year, from Chile to Bolivia to Colombia, was that the government media would not attend the protests for political reasons.
But the third, and most common, type of self-censorship is the one motivated by preservation and triggered by fear.
It is the most common because it touches not only reporters and professionals but also wider society, which tacitly understands that the consequences for speaking up, or not following the rules, are dire.
One case is particularly telling. Jesus Medina, a photo-journalist, served 16 months in a military jail after posting a video directed at Chav-ismo radical leader Diosdado Cabello.
Medina is explicitly anti-Maduro. On 28 August 2018, he argued that the people who lived in Caracas’s largest slum, Petare, should protest against the government. The following day, he was detained by agents of Maduro’s secret police, the Bolivarian Service of National Intelligence (SEBIN).
His lawyer, Stefania Migliorini, says the agents did not have an arrest order to detain Medina, that he was psychologically tortured while under custody, and that the agents took him to a military jail outside Caracas, Ramo Verde.
Medina was charged with five counts, ranging from money laundering to incitement. Two of the charges were dropped before the trial even began. As Medina was kept in jail under precautionary arrest, the hearings were repeatedly postponed. After spending more than 16 months in prison, Medina was granted house arrest on 6 January this year. His trial finally began on 30 January, 488 days after his initial detention.
Medina has no doubt about why he was detained: “The Venezuelan state was looking for an example to scare the others and, among other journalists, I have always been a symbol against censorship.”
Data from human rights organisations show that brutality is growing, especially during the intense street clashes that took over Venezuela in 2017 and 2019.
In 2018, Espacio Publico, a human rights watchdog, registered 608 violations of freedom of expression. In the first eight months alone of 2019, there were 845 violations, the vast majority in the first four months of protests, culminating with Guaido’s uprising.
Professional journalists know that the companies they work for could be wiped away if they publish information beyond what is expected.
“In a way, the channel has to look after itself,” said a national TV channel correspondent, who asked to speak to Index anonymously for fear of retaliation.
“Of course, it’s not ideal, I know that. It’s not ideal, and it’s not what we learnt at school, but this is the reality.”
Public employees often feel they are directly in the line of fire: around 30 were victims of retaliation, threats and persecution for taking part in opposition protests and denouncing corruption, according to Espacio Publico.
Marisol Chirinos, a worker at public oil company PDVSA, doesn’t use social media because she fears her accounts would be monitored by PDVSA internal security which, she says, employs former SEBIN officers. Many of her colleagues use pseudonyms on Twitter or Instagram.
“We stay away from expressing our views at work,” she said, “but they have cameras and hidden microphones all over the place. We are pawns in the hands of the state as long as we work there.”
The PDVSA press team did not reply to a request to respond to the allegations that the company’s employees were spied upon.
Given that Chirinos’s salary is less than £10 ($12) a month, one would ask if it is really worth keeping her mouth shut, but she said: “It’s our stability at stake. I don’t want to get into trouble.”
Terror and people’s desire for a quiet life are being used to blunt free speech. “People self-censor really a lot here,” said Luz Mely Reyes, founder of the online portal Efecto Cocuyo and one of the most famous journalists in Venezuela.
“The classic thing,” she explained, “is that they say: ‘I can tell you, but don’t put my name’. And you can see why: by our reckoning, there have been 17 people arrested here for a tweet.”
Diaz, the human rights activist, agrees: “This is a sadistic state. There is no symmetry, rather a completely disproportionate use of force. Officers in balaclavas use weapons against private citizens.”
Diaz has also faced the weight of the government repression. On 11 March 2019, he was detained by SEBIN and taken to a clandestine prison before being released the following day after intense diplomatic pressure from Spain.
On top of the repressive apparatus stands Maduro himself, who is the first to benefit from the lack of expressed dissent.
People are not proud to be swallowing their emotions but sadly, as fewer people open their mouths, the wall of silence grows stronger.
“Many people say that as long as we, the public employees, don’t speak out, nothing will change,” said Chirinos. “Deep down, I keep hoping that one day I will be able to see my boss face to face and tell him what is wrong at the company, I do. But right now, my level of hope is close to zero.”
Reyes, who remembers working as a journalist in the pre-Chavez days, is quick to highlight a more sinister risk of the silencing culture: “The ultimate risk is that now the opposition leaders demand the same… After seeing that the Chavistas have got away with it for 20 years, I fear that once Maduro finally falls, the next round of politicians ruling the country will be just as intolerant against those who think differently.”