The ambassador of Venezuela to the Organization of American States (OAS), Roy Chaderton Matos, expressed his surprise at the results of the Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression issued by the international body in the case of the private opposition TV station Globovision, where is demonstrated the ignorance there is about the democratic freedom in the South American country.In remarks to the OAS, Chaderton said that "Globovisión, as RCTV, during the 10 years of democratic and revolutionary process in Venezuela, have been instruments to sow panic among the Venezuelan population."
Chaderton, Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the OAS, stressed that the agency, along with the Organization of United Nations (UN), prioritized the statements of the owners of Venezuelan opposition media, who seek to intimidate and cause destabilization among the collective, with the intention of manipulate the public opinion and face it with the government of President Hugo Chávez.
Following, is offered part of statements:
Statement by Ambassador Roy Chaderton Matos,
Permanent Representative of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the Organization of American States
Washington DC, May 23, 2009
I must express my surprise at the joint offensive in the Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression of the OAS and the UN, which proves their ignorance of the situation of democratic freedoms in Venezuela and the concerted and ongoing threats against it by part of some media owners, with international complicity, to destabilize not only democracy in Venezuela, but also to all the processes and democratic governments of social advance in the hemisphere.
In a joint statement is expressed concern over statements by the highest authorities in Venezuela, "generating an atmosphere of intimidation in which is severely limited the right to freedom of expression", all referring to the current situation of the terrorist television Globovision, which recently shocked the Venezuelan population with manipulated information about a tectonic move that caused no damages at all.
It is striking that both Rapporteurships are based on testimonies from malicious sources to draw light conclusions against the Bolivarian government, while there have been recursively trivialized and dismissed all the denounces substantiated with evidences, names of individuals and media companies that we have submitted in the internal discussions of the OAS and in consistent and repeated public statements. In Venezuela, under the Bolivarian process have been reached extreme levels of freedom of expression, easily checked and verified by those who, from a balanced position, have been following the programming and editorial lines of television, radio, newspapers and other coupist media.
For over two decades I have personally denounced on many forums the total silencing of a former Venezuelan president who during his tenure, for reasons of public health, dared to ban the advertising of liquor and cigarettes in radio, television, film and press. My repeated denounces about this case have always been condemned by the media dictatorship.
Globovisión, as RCTV, during the 10 years of democratic and revolutionary process in Venezuela, have been instruments to sow panic among the Venezuelan population, with their permanent distortion of information, active participation in the media coup d'état in April 2002, and in recurrent calls for assassination of the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez Frías, a practice, indeed, copied in a subliminal way by CNN in Spanish.
The evening of Thursday 21, complying with a court order to the alleged commission of a crime of hoarding, there was made a raid on a building owned by the owner of Globovisión, in an action legally independent of the media subject. By the way, it is noteworthy that one of the journalists of Globovisión who was covering this story, and an "anchor" of the same Channel that yesterday has read the aforementioned joint communiqué, are the same people who in the mid-2002 were reveling in an FM radio program, with the prediction of an alleged astrologer on the "happiness" that might arise in Venezuela after the assassination of President Chavez.
The accomplice silence of the international bureaucracies has only stimulated the sense of impunity within the big media monopolies. It calls to attention then, how these Rapporteurships alert with insistence on a supposed intimidating power of the democratic states, perhaps by overcoming their alleged fears, but it would be desirable that their apparent courage would be displayed by referring by its own name the perpetrators of the worldwide and regional media terrorism, major actors as the Murdoch Group, CNN in Spanish, the Grupo de Diarios de America, the Inter American Press Association, the Interamerican Association of Broadcasters, the PRISA and COPE networks of Spain and the FOX network in the United States, as well as subordinate and lower actors as El Tiempo in Bogota, El Universal of Mexico, Globovisión, RCTV and El Nacional in Venezuela. This way they would make a great good to freedom of expression, with rights and obligations for all individuals and institutions, as it should be in a participatory democracy.
