Francisco Toro, who blogs at Caracas Chronicles, writes at The New York Times website:
Venezuelans are used to the routine. A computer-generated Venezuelan flag flutters on the screen, followed by a ponderous announcement: “This is a broadcast from the Ministry of People’s Power for Communication and Information of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and by the national network of radio and television.” Forget about that baseball game. This is a cadena, or chain, meaning it’s a chained broadcast and every single channel has to show it. (And every radio station, too!)
As soon as the little flag and fanfare come on, wealthier Venezuelans immediately turn to cable TV or the Internet. But poorer Venezuelans are stuck. Their airwaves have been hijacked, and for who knows how long. A speech by President Hugo Chávez can last anywhere from a few minutes to many hours.
The system was designed decades ago as a way to ensure the timely diffusion of information in case of natural disasters or to broadcast the rare state ceremony. But its use has exploded in the Chávez era. Now, several times a week we’re hit with lengthy cadenas, always highly scripted affairs: torrents of propaganda usually in the form of a speech delivered to a handpicked audience of Chávez loyalists.
Which is what made the cadena broadcast from Venezuela’s industrial heartland, Guayana, this past Monday so astonishing. Speaking to a crowd of carefully vetted union supporters, Chávez suddenly found himself on the receiving end of some heated demands from steelworkers. The audience had refused to play the role assigned to it by his handlers.
Chavez’s audience, workers at the state-owned steel mill SIDOR, voiced their unhappiness about stalled collective bargaining and frozen wages at a time of soaring inflation.
Then “it appears that people not vetted to be on stage tried to rush on to discuss things directly with Chávez.”
It’s not entirely clear what happened, but as you can see, it seems things didn’t exactly go as planned. The sound goes dead for awhile, then there’s a shot of the stage from a distance, then shouting, then a shot of a hydroelectric dam, then an announcer declaring the end of the broadcast due to sound problems.
Although it didn’t have the same ending, one can’t help being reminded of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Bucharest on December 21, 1989.
At Venezuela News and Views, Daniel Duquenal is daring to predict Chavez’s defeat in the October 7 presidential election (presuming a reasonably fair election). This despite his government’s efforts to depict his social democratic opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, as a gay Zionist agent.
