Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  On the state-run television channel, Chávez also began working on his first weekly television show. Maripili Hernández, who was in charge of the channel at the time, argued that it was part of “a communicational strategy that responds to a specific situation: at this moment, there is a need for a leader who can explain things to the country.” Neither of these projects, however, achieved the desired result. Chávez has offered his perspective on this: “We started by putting out a newspaper, but it failed…. Then we did a weekly television show, De Frente con el Presidente [Face-to-Face with the President], on live TV every Thursday night, with a studio full of people, and the people would ask questions or call in by phone. It wasn’t bad, but it started to get boring and lost its audience.”7 Although these two experiences ended badly (the newspaper amid charges of corruption), the Chávez government has continued to promote and support a variety of communications projects with both logistics and financing. These new endeavors include a new public television station, Vive TV; a new government newspaper entitled Vea, edited by Guillermo García Ponce, president of the so-called Political Headquarters of the Bolivarian Revolution; and even a magazine, Question, which is associated with Ignacio Ramonet and Le Monde Diplomatique. Through the Ministry of Culture, the government also supports a wide variety of community initiatives and websites, all of which emphatically endorse the Bolivarian Revolution.

  Nevertheless, it was with Aló, Presidente that Chávez found both the format and the results he was after. Aló, Presidente airs live every Sunday morning. It usually kicks off at around eleven, and nobody ever knows when it will wrap up. Audience participation takes the form of screened telephone calls, and in general, the callers sing the praises of the star. The show always has guests, either Venezuelans or foreigners, who serve as a kind of panel that listens to the president, intervening only when spoken to. Members of the cabinet are always on hand as well, and their on-air nods and smiles offer unconditional support of all the chief executive might say. As for the show’s length, this is what the president has to say: “I like it that way. I know that other people don’t like it so much. I have made an effort to reduce it, but the trend—which I impose, after all—[chuckles] has been to make it longer.”8 Show number 100, aired on March 17, 2002, took the record at seven hours and thirty-five minutes. The show is completely unscripted, relying solely on whatever Chávez decides to improvise: he may talk about the government’s activity that week, but he might just as easily tell stories about his grandson, recount a few anecdotes from his personal life, sing, comment on the week’s news articles, or summarize the projects his administration is planning to undertake. He has proudly asserted that his program is always number one in the ratings, despite the fact that the weekly reports of AGB, a media research group that measures television audience ratings, are not quite so flattering.

  Even so, there is no doubt that Chávez has managed to make Aló, Presidente a focus of attention for other sectors of society. Thanks to the unpredictable quality of both the show and the president, journalists are always on high alert. On more than one occasion, for example, the head of state has surprised the country with exclusive on-air announcements, as he did on January 23, 2000, when he named Isaías Rodríguez his first vice president. Another time, in April 2002, he fired the majority of the management team at Petróleos de Venezuela with a cry of “Fuera!”—in other words, “Get out!”

  “That was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made, and I did it with a whistle on top of it,” he said with a titter to journalist Marta Harnecker.9 “That was abusive of me, I’ll never do that again.” On the program that aired Sunday, August 22, 2004, a week after winning the recall referendum that allowed him to remain in the presidency, he announced that he would be appointing two new ministers in key posts: Interior Relations and Information.

  All these things, combined with his own gift for television, his sense of humor, his anecdotes, and the colorful touches he adds to the program, only fan the flames of his intense relationship with the media. The psychiatrist Edmundo Chirinos states, “His show, Aló, Presidente, has become real working material for every journalist in the country. Everyone waits around for Monday, to see what the journalists have to say about the program. It makes me wonder what they would do if Chávez were to disappear.” The opposition parties, however, say that the spectacle costs the country a great deal of money, given the logistics, the guests, and the audience members it needs. Carlos Berrizbeitia, an opposition congressman from 2000 to 2005, reported that as of May 23, 2004, the grand total for all the president’s television programs was in the vicinity of $37 million. The government, however, did not seem to take the hint. In fact, its media aspirations have only grown, as Chávez is now promoting the idea of a continental television network for all of Latin America, plus a weekly hourlong radio show that people from Chicago to Patagonia can tune in to.

  As early as the first Aló, Presidente, on May 23, 1999, Chávez was already talking about the media: “Even here, in Venezuela, sometimes people abuse, denigrate, lie, some people launch defamation campaigns through certain media of communication…this is a battle for Venezuela, for the future of our children, for the future of the homeland, and what I am trying to do here is fulfill a responsibility, so you see, my friends, we are here in the middle of a battle for freedom of expression.” It was the prelude to a battle that had only just begun.

  The journalist Rafael Poleo, an opponent of the Chávez government, believes that many important media outlets “fooled themselves into believing that they would be able to manage Chávez just as they had always managed politicians of humble backgrounds before him—some more, some less. The owners of the television stations, newspapers, and radio stations created their own personal fantasies, fed by a combination of fear, ambition, and greed. Chávez read them and used them, waiting for the moment when he would confront them, motivated by the real thing that determines his relationships with media: power.”10 The journalist and Chávez ally Vladimir Villegas, who was president of the state-run television station in 2004, believes that in the beginning “the media in general found themselves obligated to accept the harsh reality of Hugo Chávez Frías” but that after the honeymoon ended, confrontations began because of “the pervasive and mutual mistrust between the head of state and the owners of the communications corporations.”11

  Admittedly, some members of the media believed that they could interact with the new government exactly as they had done during the previous forty years. Early on in the Chávez administration, the Diego Cisneros Organization, whose principal company in the country is Venevisión, tried to get someone close to the company appointed head of the National Telecommunications Commission. Chávez refused, and because of this the two sides became locked in a battle that raged on for years. In the end, his relations with magnate Gustavo Cisneros would be characterized by pragmatism. After Chávez met with Cisneros toward the middle of 2004, the old enemies seemed to have reached certain agreements. For the moment, the mutual aggression has ceased. Venevisión has softened its tone a notch by canceling a morning show that was sharply critical of the government and, according to sources close to Chávez, granting the Ministry of Information and Communication behind-the-scenes control over an interview show to be broadcast from six to six-thirty in the morning.

  Alcides Rondón, vice minister for communications management in 2004, says that Chávez is not a man who gives in, that he “is frontal, and here with the media nobody was ever frontal, ever. And so, let’s just say that this is balance.” There are other perceptions. Angela Zago, an early government supporter who worked closely with the president, tells how she had a bitter argument with Chávez in late 1999 regarding the debate about whether or not to include the concept of “truthful information” in the new Constitution. During the Caldera government Chávez had fought against the use of this term, which he was now promoting. It was a delicate topic that led people to fear that freedom of expression might be threatened. Zago sa
ys she does not understand why the government could possibly have wanted to get mired in a confrontation with media corporations and journalists. The idea of regulating the media seemed misguided to her. When she brought this up with Chávez, the president replied, “Angela, that little battle is one that I want to fight.” Zago was dumbfounded.

  According to Zago, November 1999 was the beginning of a more or less permanent battle Chávez began to wage with the media.

  Other incidents show signs of this tension. In September 1999, during an OPEC summit held in Caracas, Chávez accused CNN of “distorting” and “lying” in its coverage of the event. Earlier that month, some government employees had complained of an “international media conspiracy,” and in protest, a small group of progovernment activists occupied the offices of the Associated Press. On another occasion, after Mario Vargas Llosa made some remarks about Chávez in an interview published in the newspaper El Nacional, Chávez’s response was immediate and pointedly aggressive. On Aló, Presidente that week, he defended his sovereignty and criticized the opinions of the Peruvian writer, calling him “illiterate.”

  As his relationship with the media grew more and more confrontational, Hugo Chávez refused to visit the television studios, and he stopped giving interviews to the local press. His conflicts with the print media, especially the most influential newspapers, El Nacional and El Universal, were never-ending, and in speeches he would speak disparagingly of their owners. The only newspaper where he has not sown enemies is Ultimas Noticias, a middle-class newspaper edited by the well-known journalist and academic Eleazar Díaz Rangel, a man with close ties to the government. And if Chávez’s relationship with the national media was bumpy, his relationship with the international media was a roller-coaster ride. Whenever favorable pieces were published, he would brandish them on Aló, Presidente like trophies. One day, for example, he waved an article from The Wall Street Journal in front of his audience. But when a newspaper published a critical editorial or a piece that touched on negative aspects of his administration, the president would declare that they were all part of an international media plot, that the big money was against his government, and that it was all a conspiracy hatched by the neoliberals of the world.

  For a long time after the crisis of April 2002, the president praised the U.S. news channel CNN as a paradigm of objectivity and good journalism for having been the first media source to tell the world that he had not resigned. The Venezuelan president’s attitude would change radically a few years later, thanks to a little news item about a quadruped, a short but colorful news piece that showed a skinny cow named Mariposa living in a commercial district of Caracas and its owner, a chavista militant, preparing to turn her into barbecue meat. The president’s displeasure hit the ceiling. Why on earth, many people wondered, would he get so angry over a saucy little cartoon?

  “Because it summed up the way things were. It wasn’t that cow itself, it just summarized the [media’s] treatment of the Venezuelan situation and our hope, after the coup, that we might be viewed with more objectivity by the international news channels like CNN,” explains Alcides Rondón.

  From mid-2000 onward, another factor further complicated his already acrimonious relationship with the media: the Organic Telecommunications Law. Among other things, Article 209 granted the executive branch the power to suspend transmission of whatever medium of communication it deemed necessary in order to protect the interests of the nation. One year later, the general framework was announced for a Law of Social Responsibility, also known as a Law of Contents, which was intended to regulate all aspects of the communications media. The opposition quickly called it a “gag law.” Despite widespread protests and criticism leveled by trade groups and other organizations around the world, the law was approved in 2005. The television stations have the most to lose with this legal instrument, which regulates programming and establishes standards for the prohibition of certain content.

  Of even more concern to analysts was the relationship between the new law and another aspect of the country’s legal framework: the reform of the penal code. According to political analysts, this reform bill was an attempt to control news reports, information programs, and opinion shows. The idea was to open a very broad and ambiguous margin for sanctioning possible incitements to violence and conspiracy. According to the reform, approved in 2005, if a guest on a participatory television show were to slander or insult someone, the show’s presenter and possibly even the TV station would bear responsibility for the guest’s comments. Of the eleven commission members evaluating and judging television content, seven are selected directly by the executive. Some people maintain that this represents the end of a cycle that Chávez himself started. With the failed military coup of April 2002, the Chávez team purged the armed forces. The strikes in December 2002 and January 2003 allowed the government to take control of the oil industry. The recall referendum in August 2004 consolidated Chávez’s political authority. And finally, the Law of Content has empowered the government to regulate and control the media while promoting self-censorship, a mechanism that is more subtle but also more effective.

  Another disturbing element about Chávez’s relationship with the media is the issue of the “chains,” as they are called—those moments when the Ministry of Information and Communication orders all the commercial television and radio stations in the country to cede their space to the government’s signal and carry out a joint transmission, effectively “chaining” themselves to what the administration chooses to air. Since his first year in office, Chávez has used the chains frequently and at random, subjecting the country to an unprecedented phenomenon. In 1999, the “chains” occupied 62 hours and 27 minutes of air time. In 2000, they took up almost 108 hours. In 2001, 116 hours and 58 minutes. In 2002, the number went down to 73 hours, but in 2003 it shot back up to 165 hours and 35 minutes. As of July 24, 2004, the sum total of “chain time” was 25 days and 8 hours, with no interruptions.

  In short, this is a national policy designed and directed by the president himself. On many occasions, public events like diplomatic greetings, microcredit grants, military award ceremonies, law enactments, musical performances, and provincial tours are “chained” and the entire spectacle occurs in front of Chávez’s audience as if it were something spontaneous. Suddenly, someone will begin to yell, “Ca-de-na! Ca-de-na!” and the public will shout back the same word. Then Chávez smiles and asks a nearby aide, “Can we?” Of course they can, they always can. In any event, most times it has been planned in advance.

  “There is a team that draws up and makes recommendations regarding the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses of each type of broadcast. The work is systematic, and [Chávez] really does listen. But the person who makes the final decision is the president. The decision regarding the chain comes from the president,” says Alcides Rondón, who attests to the fact that it is not easy to work closely with the president, a demanding boss who stays on top of the smallest details, especially when they have anything to do with the media. During his first six years in office, he changed his information chief nine times.

  Many government supporters, even when they admit that the addresses have been excessive, insist that they are waging a “war,” a “battle” for information, and that all the commercial media outlets produce subjective and biased information that tends to attack the government. In this sense, they say, the commercial stations operate their own “chains” and the government is only defending itself against the siege of the commercial media. Chávez’s supporters say that he uses his “chains” only to tell the country the truth about what is going on. Maripili Hernández, for example, recognizes that “there have been too many chains, and they have gone on for too long, to the point that they go on at noon and then are rerun at night, for no reason at all. That could have been avoided.” But she also accuses the privately owned media of outrageously manipulating its information segments, with absolutely political goals. “It should never have come to
either of the two extremes: Chávez should not have used the chains so much, and the media should not have broadcast one single news report urging Chávez’s removal.”

  Marcelino Bisbal, a university professor specializing in communications studies, has baptized this odd relationship as a “media schizophrenia” in which “an extremely antigovernment sector and a government sector, also very extreme, believe that all the country’s problems may be resolved in the space offered by the media.”12 Bisbal’s comment reflects an almost palpable sensation that permeates the day-to-day life of most Venezuelans. It is a country that is intoxicated, overinformed, saturated by the manner in which one single story is told over and over again, subjected to the most endless and exhausting media diatribes. In the middle of this cross fire, the everyday citizen ends up in the worst position of all. The role of the media, independent of political affiliation, becomes blurry. Boundaries begin to fade. On several occasions, the media associated with the opposition have made the mistake of disseminating information that was later discovered to be false and of reporting controversial statements that, in the end, had no factual basis.

  The state-run media, on the other hand, have become veritable propaganda brigades that seem willing to stop at nothing in their defense of the president. Venezolana de Televisión (channel 8) has gone so far as to broadcast taped telephone conversations between opponents of the government, which is illegal and expressly prohibited by the Constitution. On one occasion, channel 8 aired an exclusive interview that belonged to the news channel Globovisión: the material was robbed and aired before Globovisión, the channel that actually produced and owned the material, was able to use it. In the middle of this media war, the government has employed another old tactic, that of refusing to grant government advertising to anti-Chávez stations. At the same time, the government reproaches these stations, calling them coup plotters, fascists, terrorists, and “horsemen of the apocalypse.”