There is radio silence around the elections in Venezuela

Venezuelans will vote next Sunday for the country’s next leader, choosing between a president who dominates the public space but has not answered a journalist’s question since last year, and an opposition candidate who is virtually banned from television and radio and relies on social media to spread his message.

The July 28 election will pit authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro against opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who is leading in polls despite almost non-existent coverage in traditional media.

Instead, Gonzalez and his main backer, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, relied on Instagram and TikTok videos, as well as viral WhatsApp messages, to galvanize the democratic opposition ahead of the vote.

This week, Caracas is plastered with campaign banners showing a smiling Maduro full of confidence in Venezuela’s future, but journalists hoping to travel to Venezuela to interview him may be disappointed, as the authoritarian leader has not granted an interview since December and several international media outlets have had their visa applications denied in recent days.

The Ministry of Communication closed applications for reporting on the elections on April 19. Anyone entering the country to cover the elections without accreditation or outside the dates set by the ministry risks being expelled.

Maduro’s weekly schedule is top secret for security reasons, meaning most journalists already in Venezuela are not informed when the candidate holds a rally and are kept away from the campaign.

Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders called on the Venezuelan authorities to allow local and international journalists to cover the election, especially since the government withdrew its invitation to EU election observers in June.

Yet in the first week of the campaign, Maduro racked up more than 1,400 minutes of airtime on Venezuela’s state television network, while none of the other candidates were covered for more than 15 minutes, Spanish news agency EFE reported.

None of this is new in Venezuela, a country where nearly 300 radio stations have been shut down by the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL) over the past two decades, accused of operating clandestinely, according to local NGO Espacio Público. It was reported today that their site has been geoblocked.

Radio stations are particularly censored, critics say, because in a country with chronic electricity and internet problems, they often represent the only channel of information accessible to the country’s most vulnerable sectors, where government support is strongest.

“When Gonzalez announced his candidacy a few months ago, all the international media started interviewing him, but did we? We can’t do that,” a Caracas radio journalist told Index this week, asking to remain anonymous for fear of being fired if he denounced censorship in his workplace.

CONATEL government censors constantly monitor the airwaves for dissident content and send warnings to radio station management if a program is considered too unfavorable to the government, the journalist told Index.

The current tension in the newsroom recalls another recent episode of political tension, when opposition leader Juan Guaidó launched a constitutional challenge to Maduro by being sworn in as interim president.

“Our program was taken off the air at the time when two guests, political analysts, both called the government ‘Nicolas Maduro’s dictatorship,'” the journalist told Index.

“I remember it was a Friday, I left the office and went home. The following Sunday, I was making calls to plan the upcoming week when our executive producer told me that the show was canceled. Management decided to take the show off the air because CONATEL had called to complain that no one had corrected the guests. I spent the next four months doing nothing until a new show aired,” they said.

Since then, every radio studio in this reporter’s organization has installed an instruction document next to the main console, advising the program director to correct any guest who suggests that Maduro’s government is not legitimate.

In recent years, radio stations have diversified their coverage by allowing journalists to write more freely when posting online, where government censors have a harder time controlling who is behind problematic content.

This double standard, however, only makes the self-censorship of radio programmes even more evident.

“We have profiled every candidate in the running online, we have also profiled other opposition leaders… But on air? That will not happen,” the journalist said.

Luz Mely Reyes, who co-founded the online media outlet Efecto Cocuyo in 2015 after working for decades in print media, told Index that none of this was new, saying: “Censorship in Venezuela is systemic, it goes deeper than the yoke of radio and television stations.”

Although they are outside the jurisdiction of CONATEL censors, Venezuelans need a VPN to access Efecto Cocuyo’s URL, which is geoblocked by the government. Venezuelan companies are also reluctant to buy ads on the site, for fear of getting into trouble with the government.

“Sometimes security also comes into play. You end up asking yourself: is it worth sending one of my journalists to cover this or that? It’s not like they’re giving you an order, they want to force you to self-censor your coverage,” Reyes told Index.

However, both traditional and new media are finding new strategies to maintain the dissemination of free information in Venezuela.

“The silence on the radio speaks volumes, sometimes I leave gaps in the report,” the anonymous journalist told Index. “I can’t say we are in an authoritarian regime, but I can give the latest figures on malnutrition that an organization has shared, and in the end, the public can form an opinion.”

After a moment of silence, they sighed: “Being a journalist in Venezuela is frustrating: there are no opportunities, the pay is crap and journalism itself is in danger… but what keeps me alive is the hope that one day things will change.”