After 53 years of being on air, Radio Caracas Televisión, the oldest privately owned television station in Venezuela, has been officially closed by the Venezuelan government. This TV station, as well as all the other private stations, has shown opposition to Chávez’s regime for many years now and was therefore thought subversive by the government. The paranoia of the regime, or perhaps in a resounding demonstration of its power, finally took the station off the air and replaced it instead with a government-run TV station. The regime has already issued sanctions against another private station that will take it off the air as well, but only for three days. It is expected that similar measures will be taken against AM and FM radio stations in the near future.
We need to put Hugo Chávez in context. It is not enough to point our fingers to him and say “boycott CITGO!” He belongs to a specific socio-economic niche that gave rise to his populist and communist ideals. He is a direct product of many decades of neglect and corruption on the part of government officials. His popularity in 1999, when he was first elected, was exactly due to his claims of reform that gave hopes to those suffering of that same neglect. The poorest of the poor felt that Chávez felt for them, that he understood exactly what they were going through and that he would be able to “liberate” them. Corruption and abuse of power never go unpunished. Sadly, it turns out that the same people who had hopes of reform end up paying the highest price. Chávez had valid reasons for the reforms he wanted to launch, but he failed to see the true man and his true needs that represented all the people that he was now representing. Chávez’s mistake was to put too much faith in the State.
I just wish that when we turn our TVs on here in the US we can hear about the situation in Venezuela, as an example, without the usual “this will affect Americans…” in regards to oil supply and its repercusion on gas prices. That I heard this morning on Good Morning America. The US is not the axis of the world and when the media, especially, treats it as such, we forget people from afar and their problems and sufferings; we only pay attention to them if they affect our way of living in any way. Enough is enough. Not only Venezuelans should be mourning, but the whole world, because Latin America, the young continent that has suffered so much from many guerrillas and totalitarian regimes has yet suffered another blow. It is not about oil supply or gas prices. We should be worried about so much more.
When I was young, I studied Venezuelan history with such devotion and I used to pride myself in the fact that our country had one of the oldest democracies in Latin America, but now this situation seems so surreal. It all sounds so foreign. It is hard to find words and hence the incoherency of my thoughts. I mourn today, as many Venezuelans do, because totalitarianism has prevailed once again in Latin America while the whole world stands around in silence.
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