All four of these journalists pictured in this 2002 photo — Marianella Salazar, Ib????yise Pacheco, Marta Colomina and Patricia Poleo — are now facing trouble from the Chavista regime. Pacheco is in jail, Salazar is headed there, Colomina was subject to a murder attempt and Poleo was charged with murder and apparently sent into hiding.
Source: BBC

The Venezuelan press is under attack as never before. Contrary to Chavista claims that there is no campaign against the press, today Ibeyise Pacheco, a columnist for El Nacional, a newspaper MY OWN words have appeared in, was ordered imprisoned for slander by the dictatorial regime of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Her crime? Exposing the truth about the vile militarization of the state that is rapidly taking hold in the country.

The court already had her in jail for nine months and then had her out on some kind of parole. After she continued to speak out, she was promptly sent back, with the stipulation that she longer be able to write.

Ibeyise Pacheco on her way to a Chavista kangaroo court March 15, 2006
Source: Associated Press

Two other journalists are facing similar fates — Napoleon Bravo (not pictured), a radio reporter who compared the Venezuelan Supreme Court to a brothel, (U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the SAME court a “kangaroo court” if you want secondary confirmation), and Marianela Salazar, a newspaper journalist who exposed the Chavista theft of public funds.

In all three instances (and there are many more in Venezuela!) these were reporters acting properly as required by their profession. They were acting as a check and balance on the all-powerful government of Hugo Chavez and for that reason, had to be stopped by any means necessary. In other words, they were just doing their jobs, But by their mere words, they were a threat to the regime.

This comes at a time when the Chavista propagandists like Mark Weisbrot, are parroting the official gibberish in big papers like The Los Angeles Times that there is no such thing as persecution of the press in Venezuela. John Dinges, in his Columbia Journalism Review piece awhile back, was particularly insistent that there was no oppression of the press and the main ‘danger’ the Venezuelan press faced was its own lack of integrity. What a liar. What a propagandist. Reporters are in danger like they have never been before in Venezuela. None of these cases blew in from the blue – they have all been well known cases at the times these Chavista charlatans’ articles and essays were written. Now, they have blown up, and reporters are being silenced if not fighting to stay out of jail against stacked kangaroo courts.

And the mainsteam media in the U.S. is shamefully SILENT!

The stories are here, here, here, here and here.

Miguel Octavio has acid observations here, and Daniel Duquenal has further bitter thinking about this disgraceful “frontal” attack on the press here. Aleksander Boyd, who was also targetted by Chavistas for exposing their phony polling organizations, has more thoughts here. All of them name far more journalists under fire than I did.

Urru.org has a photo gallery of the rally for freedom of the press here.