Chavismo has reacted violently against freedom of the press three months before the presidential elections, on July 28. This Tuesday, the ruling party implicated investigative journalists from the digital portal Armando.info in a conspiracy to overthrow Nicolás Maduro. The attorney general, Tarek William Saab, accuses them of receiving money from a plot led by the former Minister of Petroleum, Tareck El Aissami, to destroy the reputation of other leaders of the ruling party. El Aissami, highly valued by Hugo Chávez in his day and for years belonging to Maduro’s inner circle, fell from grace a year ago and is currently in prison. The prosecution even accuses him of holding conversations with the opposition and the United States to bring about the president’s fall.
The accusations against the journalists, based on the statements of a detainee, come a week before the release of a documentary that reveals the systematic corruption of the Chavista Government, prepared by Armando.info’s own reporters in collaboration with the television program Frontline. Its titled A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela and has been produced by PBS, a public channel in the United States. The documentary shows the work with which reporters Roberto Deniz and Ewald Scharfenberg find a hole in the public coffers of more than 13,000 million dollars.
The web portal received a special mention in 2019 at the María Moors Cabot awards, awarded by Columbia University in the United States, for its more than 400 publications related to corruption and human rights violations in Venezuela. In 2023, she won the Lorenzo Natali, an award sponsored by the European Commission, which recognizes excellence in written, radio and television journalism on development, democracy and human rights issues around the world. The investigation against them is being carried out by a prosecutor’s office in the hands of Chavismo. It is directed by William Saab, one of the founders of the movement prior to the PSUV, the party in power, and he does not hide on his social networks that he exercises justice from a partisan point of view and in favor of the Government. What’s more, he serves as another member of the executive. Nor does X’s account from the Prosecutor’s Office hide his absolute partiality. In recent months, shortly before it was announced that the July presidential elections would be held, Chavismo has announced several plots, internal and external, which always supposedly have the same goal: to remove Maduro from power. This is nothing new: Chávez’s successor has announced more than twenty assassination attempts, which have been used to arrest activists, journalists, opponents and human rights defenders.
The involvement of Armando.info journalists is hardly credible, since this media outlet was one of the first to uncover large-scale corruption within PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, when El Aissami himself was vice president of the Government. That case is called PDVSA Cripto and now the Venezuelan authorities implicate these reporters in the plot that they themselves denounced. In 2017, for example, they published several reports in this regard. That case is called PDVSA Cripto and now they implicate these reporters in the same plot that they denounced. At that time El Aissami was untouchable and one of the most powerful people in Venezuela. He had Maduro’s complete trust. Deniz, Scharfenberg (a collaborator with Morning Express for several years) and other directors of Armando.info later had to leave Venezuela due to a major investigation that uncovered the identity of Alex Saab, considered by the United States to be Maduro’s front man and involved in multiple cases of corruption. From exile, the reporters have continued their investigations, which have earned them international recognition.
“This is a very clumsy and implausible maneuver on the part of the Maduro government to discredit Armando.info and, with that, silence the independent media that has been uncovering the regime’s major corruption scandals for ten years, including the case itself. in which the Chavista prosecutor now wants to involve us,” explains Scharfenberg by phone from Miami, where he now lives. “I am convinced that this attack responds to the upcoming premiere, on Tuesday the 14th, of the documentary. We tell the story of the Alex Saab case, which already led four journalists from Armando.info to exile in 2018. “Alex Saab is Maduro’s favorite contractor and alleged front man, and after returning to Venezuela last December as a result of a prisoner exchange agreed between Washington and Caracas, he has gained even more power in Maduro’s clique,” he adds.
This Tuesday, Colombian lawyer Ana Bejarano requested precautionary measures from the IACHR in defense of the media’s reporters, especially those who live in Venezuela. “Due to their location and status as journalists, they are exposed to a greater extent to the imminent risks of stigmatization, harassment, bullying and censorship,” she reads in the request. The lawyer and columnist for Los Danieles asks the IACHR to demand that the Government of Venezuela refrain from using intimidating strategies such as harassment, the opening of judicial cases, the practice of raids and other investigative acts. Furthermore, Chavismo must avoid public accusations by state officials and threats to the physical, mental and moral integrity of journalists. Chavismo has recently arrested and imprisoned renowned activists like Rocío San Miguel, who is in a prison with very little contact with her family and her lawyers, which limits her right to defense. Spain has tried to reduce the measures imposed by the prosecution against San Miguel, but has achieved nothing so far.
Chavismo faces elections in which, with the polls in hand, it would be likely to lose if a free and fair vote were truly held. The majority opposition has managed to reach an agreement to support the same candidate, a 74-year-old diplomat named Edmundo González. He is an unknown, but he has immediately received the support of María Corina Machado, the maximum leader of the anti-Chavistas who has a very large flow of votes – her polls always place her above Maduro. Machado has been vetoed by the Chavista justice system and so was her replacement, the renowned academic – and Real Madrid fan – Corina Yoris, so Edmundo has fallen by the wayside. The opposition interprets that these attacks on the media that reveal the corruption of Chavismo arise from the nervousness that exists about the possibility that they could lose the elections. Maduro has changed the classic colors of Chavismo, from red to blue, he walks through towns and cities after having spent several years without leaving the Miraflores Palace – for fear of being assassinated – and is looking for a campaign slogan on a reality show. Power is at stake in Venezuela and journalists have been caught in the middle of that crossfire.
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