Police using water cannons on Sunday dispersed thousands of stone-throwing protesters outside Venezuela’s telecom authority, which ordered the country’s most popular television off the air at midnight.
The closure of Venezuela’s oldest network, the latest bone of contention in President Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution in Venezuela, sparked growing protests over the weekend.
Chávez’s political opponents champion RCTV as an opposition voice and decry his refusal to renew its broadcast licence after 53 years on the air. RCTV president Marcel Granier vowed: ”We will continue the fight for freedom of the press and democracy.”
Troops were to seize the television studios at midnight on Sunday to allow the smooth handover of the station to the state. It will become a public service broadcaster, dubbed TVes, which Chávez has called ”socialist television”.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled that RCTV must temporarily leave its equipment and broadcast infrastructure in military hands when it goes off the air to ensure that TVes can provide quality service. Granier called the decision ”an unconstitutional seizure of our equipment”.
Station managers asked its 3 000 employees to remain in the studios overnight and to be ready for work on Monday, possibly to hinder the handover.
RCTV owners ”have a plan to sabotage the new channel’s signal”, Chávez said on Saturday, over the broadcast airwaves he has used for three days in a row to address the emergency.
Meanwhile, Chávez supporters began a huge, night-to-dawn public party outside RCTV studios to celebrate the birth of the new ”socialist television” and the end of the bitterly anti-Chávez RCTV.
However, about 70% to 80% of Venezuelans oppose the closure, according to recent polls.
Chávez announced the decision not to renew RCTV’s licence soon after he was re-elected in late 2006. During the campaign, RCTV openly called for the president’s defeat, and Chávez never forgave the network for calling for an April 2002 coup that deposed him for two days.
”The decision was mine” to close RCTV, Chávez said on Saturday, calling its steamy soap operas ”a danger for the country, for boys, for girls”.
RCTV, which notably airs the popular ”telenovelas” and variety shows, has one of the largest audiences in Venezuela and is one of the few stations with national broadcast capabilities.
From Monday, the government will control two of the four nationwide broadcasters in Venezuela, one of them state-owned VTV. However, the government renewed the broadcast licence for Venevision, RCTV’s main competitor, which expired on Friday. Venevision is owned by billionaire Gustavo Cisneros, who dropped his open opposition to Chávez in 2004.
Since 1999, Chávez has gradually tightened his grip on the levers of power in Venezuela, and in January the National Assembly allowed him to rule on most matters by decree, without legislative debate.
Criticism of the RCTV shutdown poured in from around the world, including groups such as Human Rights Watch, Reporters sans Frontières and the United States Senate, which unanimously approved a resolution last week expressing ”profound concern” over the move.
El Nacional daily in a front-page editorial said RCTV’s shutdown marked ”the end of pluralism” in Venezuela and the government’s growing ”information monopoly”.
Chávez and his ministers deflected criticism, saying other media could still carry the RCTV signal. However, Granier said, ”the government is pressuring cable and satellite companies not to carry us”.
RCTV filed charges on Saturday with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organisation of American States. — Sapa-AFP