IN VENEZUELA, CENSORSHIP HIDES THE EVIDENCE

August 30, 2010

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has found a magic solution for his country's staggering murder rate: simply censor the media so it can't report on the violence.
On Aug. 18, five days after the newspaper El Nacional published a photograph showing a morgue full of corpses, a Venezuelan court issued a monthlong ban on print media outlets' publishing articles or images depicting violent crimes. Chavez loyalists declared that journalists who reported on the country's rampant violence were peddling "pornography."
While the Venezuelan public defender reversed the court order two days later, Chavez's government had powerfully demonstrated its ability to clamp down on the media. However, Chavez's reach does not extend to the American press.
Simon Romero's Aug. 23 front-page story on the ban for The New York Times noted that there were nearly four times as many murders committed in Venezuela last year as there were civilian deaths in Iraq -- and with both countries' populations near 30 million, the two are comparable. The Times published a photograph with the article that, for a short time, no Venezuelan publication could have legally printed: one that showed the coffin of a little boy -- the fourth child in his family to be murdered.
That blood is on Chavez's hands. Since he came to power in 1999, 118,541 people have been murdered, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory. Those tens of thousands of deaths
are Chavez's responsibility.
Analysis by foreign policy experts and journalists in the region shows that Chavez's divisive politics have undermined the effectiveness of the police force and government. Officers who disagree with Chavez's policies are marginalized. Chavez often slashes funds to municipalities and regional governments that elect officials who oppose his policies; with poor wages and little training, some officers turn to crime themselves. In fact, crime in Venezuela shot up immediately after the Chavez declared his so-called "Bolivarian revolution." It also appears that despite Chavez's efforts and perhaps in part because of his poor governance, the gap between rich and poor is actually increasing.
What the murder rate really points to is a breakdown in law and order. When the police don't carry out their sworn duties, and the politicized judicial system does not detain, try or imprison criminals, no one is truly in charge. It means that Chavez is in fact a full-fledged dictator rather than the president of a republic, with only the military to back him and not the government.
What's more, Chavez controls the army, the courts, the constitution, the parliament and even the electoral system. He pretends to have won many elections. But in what kind of democracy does the president control the mechanism responsible for counting the votes? Who can trust the results of those elections? The term "democracy" doesn't apply to a country in which there are no checks on a leader's power.
Despite the reversal of the media law, there is little freedom of the press in Venezuela. Media laws are draconian, imposing criminal penalties and prison sentences for any expression the government finds objectionable. And very few members of the media are courageous enough to dare defy the government. Journalists who ignore the censorship laws are frequently attacked, and they run the constant risk of ending up in jail or in exile.
The crime rate in Venezuela continues to grow. The only difference now is that Venezuelans don't hear about it. But even if the government has succeeded in muzzling the media, it's too late for officials to conceal the Chavez regime's greatest failure: that it cannot protect its own citizens.
And it is not interested in doing so.
As the saying goes, the first step toward solving a problem is to admit that there is one. But I don't suppose this column will ever see the light of day in Venezuela.

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