By Bruce B. Brugmann
CARACAS, Venezuela (Nov. 20, 2007) It was an amusing and telling moment in the history of freedom of the press.
On the morning of Monday, Nov. 19th, as the press mission of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) started its 10th mission to Venezuela to check on President Hugo Chavez’s accelerating crackdown on the press, Chavez sent a message to the delegation:
It was a half page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal, reprinting a copy of a congresswoman’s resolution urging the Executive Branch to declare IAPA “not welcome” in Venezuela. Click here to view the ad. This set the tone for our mission: The congresswoman refused IAPA’s invitation to meet with our delegation and no member of the three branches of the Venezuelan government and of the National Electoral Council agreed to meet with IAPA despite many contacts made in recent weeks from IAPA headquarters in Miami.
Nobody in the governement would meet with IAPA but Chavez, who was all over television and the newspapers for his trip to Iran and France, did send a Chavista group who called themselves Journalists for the Truth.
The president of the group told the IAPA mission that there was complete freedom of the press in Venezuela and then promptly told the press outside the meeting room that IAPA had been “duped in good faith by the reports prepared by the “opposition” Venezuela press. Gonzalo Marroquin, chairman of IAPA’s Commmittee on Freedom of the Press and Information, immediately retorted to the press that “it would seem that the journalists were at another meeting.” Gonzalo, director of Diario Prensa Libre in Guatemala, and a former television newsman, was widely interviewed on IAPA’s findings on radio and television.
The mission met with members of the Venezuelan Press Bloc, a constitutional attorney, representatives of a human rights group, polling experts, the mayor of Chicao, the head of the National Press Workers Union., and other civilian experts. The mission and its final press conference was widely covered in the Venezuelan press. There were no violent incidents nor any attempt to scare or demonstrate against the IAPA mission. B3
Click on the continue reading link to read the IAPA press release. Scroll down for the Spanish version.