Venezuelan journalist Gustavo Azócar, an outspoken Chávez critic, has spent two months in prison without being sentenced.
Latin America’s neo-populists are undermining independent media in the name of democratization, a Washington meeting heard yesterday.
Reflecting the classic populist distrust of liberal democracy’s mediating institutions, regimes are portraying independent media as elitist while fostering direct channels of communication with “the people”, including politicized forms of community media.
Neo-populist regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela are exercising executive prerogatives to interfere with independent media, George Washington University’s Silvio Waisbord told a meeting on freedom of expression in the Americas.
Government intervention is growing at the expense of private ownership, exploiting defamation laws and taking advantage of weak accountability mechanisms, while journalists increasingly face harassment, threats and more subtle forms of intimidation.
Independent media are further challenged by the region’s ingrained patrimonialism and polarized politics, he said at a discussion organized by the Center for International Media Assistance and the National Endowment for Democracy’s Latin America and Caribbean Program.
International pressure must be brought to bear to highlight media rights violations and expose offending governments, said Carlos Ponce, founder of Consorcio Desarrollo y Justicia and general coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights would shortly hold a hearing on judicial prosecutions and intimidation of journalists by Venezuela’s Chavista government, he said.
“There can be no democracy without a free press,” said Milton Coleman, senior editor of The Washington Post and treasurer for the Inter American Press Association. There are “no overnight solutions” to the problems being raised, but the sense of impunity for crimes against journalists must be challenged.
Intolerance of a critical press is the common denominator across the region, irrespective of governments’ political orientation, said Carlos Lauria, senior program coordinator for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Democratically-elected leaders are “deliberately marginalizing democratic institutions” in order to stifle dissent, he said.
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