He Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, That this year it will celebrate its 80th anniversary, it continues to resist the attacks of the State, which not only left it paperless, but also blocked its website and confiscated its physical headquarters, Rather, it issued an arrest warrant against its director Miguel Henrique Otero and several summonses against at least four journalists.
(Also read: Venezuelan journalist in Bogotá asks the Colombian government for refuge)
On January 25, José Gregorio Meza, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, and Virginia Núñez, from human resources, were searched at their homes by police officers from the Criminal and Criminal Scientific Investigation Corps (Cicpc) after the publication of a series of reports in which the son of President Nicolás Maduro was mentioned.
The texts refer to the brothers Ricardo and Santiago Morón Hernández as alleged business partners of Nicolás Maduro Guerra, son of the president. The workers of El Nacional were taken to one of the Cicpc headquarters in Caracas, to testify in this regard.
Until now, Meza and Núñez prefer to remain silent. However, EL TIEMPO learned that, when questioned, one of the officials said: How can you think of messing with the president’s son!referring to the reports on which the journalists were working.
The Computer Crime division of the Scientific Police was responsible for conducting the interrogations that lasted a couple of hours. In them, they asked about the texts that were prepared by the El Nacional investigative unit and by journalists residing abroad.
But we have a web page that is very powerful and, although it is blocked in Venezuela, it is widely read
The 94th Prosecutor’s Office is in charge of the case, in which there was supposed to be an arrest warrant against Meza, who was stripped of his cell phone on January 25. The following day the equipment was returned to him and the prosecution clarified that there was no arrest warrant against him.
For Miguel Henrique Otero, this “new attack” against the newspaper will not prevent them from continuing to work on investigative reports. “More than what they have done to us is already very difficult to do, but we have a web page that is very powerful and, although it is blocked in Venezuela, it is read a lot,” the director of El Nacional told EL TIEMPO.
From his exile in Spain, he recalled that due to these reports, there is an arrest warrant against him, however he is unaware of the crimes he is charged with. “We created a research team to create new topics on power structures in Venezuelasomething that does not appear in the media and within that we publish those works by the Morón brothers”.
The reports
El Nacional published that the Morón Hernández brothers rose to fame in 2017 “when their ties to Nicolasito were discovered through a photo that at first glance seemed harmless, today they keep their profiles on social networks adjusted to the strictest privacy and the photographs, comments, posts and news that existed about them, their friends and family have disappeared. Today they are cybercosmic dust, electrons disappeared”.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department, through executive order 13,692 (amended), sanctioned the brothers Santiago José and Ricardo José Morón Hernández “because both supervise the financial mechanism of the illicit gold scheme led by Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra ”.
They point to him as the “gold and coltan czar” and accuse him of carrying out illegal transactions, including the sale of gold extracted in Venezuela and shipped from the Central Bank of Venezuela, the Venezuelan media publishes.
El Nacional published that the Morón Hernández brothers carried out a digital cleanup on the web and “deindexed” the contents and other profiles with the names of the Morón Hernández “appeared” on social networks, “which, through organic positioning (SEO ) got cyberstraw dolls to appear in the first search results on Google, Bing and other platforms”
I need this situation to be defined once and for all or they tell me clearly that they are not going to receive the refugee application process, but do not leave me at greater risk. I ask for protection, that is what I ask for and they are not giving it despite the obvious persecution that I am experiencing pic.twitter.com/Jz6wjkVMla
— Carola Briceño Peña (@CarolaBriceno) February 6, 2023
Venezuelan journalists at risk of being persecuted
Carolina Briceño is one of the journalists who participated in the investigations published in El Nacional. She has lived in Colombia for more than five years due to various threats she received when she lived in Venezuela. Now, she assures that she is facing something similar.
Briceño told EL TIEMPO that she left her home in Villa del Rosario after she received information that the Venezuelan government would be looking for her. On January 25, he renounced the Temporary Protection Permit (PPT) to be able to request refuge, however, he assures that the Foreign Ministry insists that the process has not been carried out and therefore refugee status cannot yet be granted.
The journalist assures that she is afraid of possible reprisals even when she has been in another country and that she fears not only for her integrity but also because she will be deported. She assured that before moving to Bogotá, she received threatening telephone calls in Cúcuta. He also pointed out that doing investigative journalism in Venezuela is complex.
The State sensors are on at all times, most of the journalists who work in this area are in exile, otherwise they are in danger of being imprisoned.
According to the NGO Espacio Público, 468 complaints of violations of freedom of expression were registered in 2022. This figure did not represent a significant variation with respect to what was documented the previous year.
Espacio Público in its January report reported that censorship complaints ranked first in the registry, totaling at least 199 incidents, which is equivalent to 43% of all violations.
“Mainly these violations were recorded through the closure of radio stations and during power outages or failures in the internet service, which limited access to information by the population, as well as the work of the media at the time of disseminate information”, reads the report.
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