The website of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional was packed one recent day with stories about the shortages plaguing the economically stricken country. One covered a lack of medicine for diabetes patients. A second reported on multiplying lines at gasoline stations in Caracas and other cities. A third recounted the government’s failure to supply international airlines with the $3.6 billion in hard currency they are owed, which has caused a reduction in flights to Venezuela.
The website of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional was packed one recent day with stories about the shortages plaguing the economically stricken country. One covered a lack of medicine for diabetes patients. A second reported on multiplying lines at gasoline stations in Caracas and other cities. A third recounted the government’s failure to supply international airlines with the $3.6 billion in hard currency they are owed, which has caused a reduction in flights to Venezuela.
Unmentioned on this day was the case of El Nacional itself: Because of the government’s refusal to allow the paper to import newsprint, one of the last independent sources of news in the country might soon exist only in cyberspace. …
The discrimination against the 71-year-old newspaper is part of a broader campaign by the government of Nicolas Maduro to eliminate the last independent media in the country.
Since 2013, two other big newspapers and a television network were by longtime owners to investors linked to the regime or to shell companies whose principals are unknown. The result has been the shutdown of critical coverage of the Maduro government even as it presides over an economic collapse and mounting political repression. …
The newspaper also was offered a buyout but refused. The denial of paper soon followed. El Nacional has been forced to reduce its print run, which once was 220,000 papers on Sunday, by more than half, and to cut its daily edition to 16 pages, compared with 60 to 70 pages several years ago. Other independent newspapers across the country also have been affected; a dozen have been forced to stop printing. But El Nacional’s case is particularly important because it is the last large national paper to fairly cover the political opposition and report aggressively on problems such as the mounting shortages.
That it still is appearing at all is because of an extraordinary campaign of solidarity by other Latin American newspapers, which have been shipping their own newsprint to Venezuela to supply El Nacional. … The backing is particularly impressive considering governments in the region abandoned any effort to intervene against the Maduro regime’s repression, despite a 2001 treaty that commits them to act when democracy is threatened.
The Obama administration, too, mostly has steered clear of the Venezuelan crisis.
Last week, Congress passed legislation mandating sanctions against senior Venezuelan officials involved in human rights violations; after resisting the measure for most of this year, the White House now says it supports it.
Pulling the visas and freezing U.S. assets of the Maduro regime’s enforcers is a worthwhile step, but it won’t save Venezuela — or El Nacional. …
— Washington Post