Community Media (Venezuela)

The Context

Venezuelans do not know whether to laugh or cry at the oil wealth that has blessed and cursed them with equal abandon. One Venezuelan minister called hydrocarbons “the Devil's excrement,” given the way they contaminate the air, the rivers, governmental ethics, and national morale. No one can reflect on Venezuela, including its community media, without thinking about the challenge black gold incarnates for those nations that enjoy its abundance.

Other nations have repeatedly interfered in the country's internal affairs, all the while that local elites have prospered through their political, economic, and cultural commitments to outside interests. Oil revenues in Venezuela financed inequality, bringing to birth a structure of socioeconomic privilege that guaranteed power to certain complicit and lazy elites in the face of the poverty that the majority of the 28 million people in today's Venezuela have suffered for decades. Up to 1999, oil revenues financed the apparent golden rule of social inequality: 20% of Venezuelans consumed 80% of the wealth, while the other 80% survived on the remaining 20%.

This same logic governed the development of Venezuela's media system. Up to the end of the 20th century, the state owned a television channel and a radio station with two channels (classical and light). This allowed the private commercial sector prime place, given the oligopolistic concentration of ownership in the hands of a few local companies, dependent in their turn on the U.S. consortia that dominate Latin America's technology, news, images, TV series, films, and advertising.

Thirty years of bad governments led this model rentier democracy to crisis in 1989, when the announcement of International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment” policies sparked 3 days of rioting and looting, stamped out by repression on a scale unprecedented in Venezuela's history. In 1992, Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel, led an attempted coup, and when Caracas stayed in the oligarchy's hands, Chávez was allowed to broadcast very briefly to urge his supporters elsewhere to surrender. Those 56 seconds, and his statement that they had only failed “for now” but that “new opportunities will arise again,” became mythical and turned him into a new leader of people's illusions.

Thus, in December 1998, opposed by a single candidate representing the traditional elites, Chávez was elected president by the progressive middle class, leftist groups, and the majority of popular voters. He faced almost complete opposition from mainstream media, both then and since then.

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