How RCTV President’s CIA Connection Links Venezuela and Nicaragua
Wednesday, Aug 08, 2007
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2112 By: Chris Carlson – Venezuelanalysis.com
The president of Venezuela's RCTV, Eladio Larez,<1> is no stranger to the CIA. In fact, Eladio's contact with the agency goes back nearly twenty years. Back in 1989, Larez helped the CIA funnel money through Venezuela to the Nicaraguan opposition as they worked to topple the Sandinista government through massive violence and destabilization. Larez was actually so kind as to set up a fraudulent foundation in Venezuela, called the National Foundation for Democracy, as a front organization to receive money from the CIA and pass it on to fund the operations of a major opposition newspaper in Nicaragua.<2>
"As a journalist," Larez said to his Nicaraguan counterparts, "I understand the problems with freedom of expression in these countries and the necessities and difficulties with written and spoken media."<3> A few weeks later, Larez's friend and political ally Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez would order the national army to fire on innocent protesters, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of activists in the streets of Caracas. Larez's RCTV helped mask the reality by not televising images of the massacre.<4>
Likewise, on April 13th, 2002, after RCTV and other Venezuelan media supported and participated in a coup d’état against President Hugo Chavez, as many as 60 pro-Chavez protesters were shot down by the temporary government of Pedro Carmona.<5> RCTV refused to broadcast the violence, instead playing cartoons and soap operas as people were killed in the streets of the capital.<6>
Apparently, Larez’s fictitious concerns about "freedom of expression" haven't changed much over the years. One has to wonder, though, if his relationship with the CIA has also not have changed? A look at Larez’s role in the CIA's destabilization of Nicaragua sheds some light on how Eladio Larez and his RCTV are using the same methods in Venezuela.
Nicaragua’s La Prensa: A model for Venezuela’s RCTV
In the same year that the Sandinista rebels overthrew the brutal, decades-long dictatorship of the Somoza family in 1979, the U.S. State Department was already searching for a way to avoid any significant changes in the country and create what they referred to as “Somocismo without Somoza”.<7> In the years of Sandinista rule that followed, the United States and the CIA tried nearly every strategy at their disposal, including all out violence and warfare through U.S.-funded “counter-revolutionary” forces called the “contras,” in order to undermine, destabilize, and eventually topple the revolutionary Sandinista regime. The use of the media would be a critical element in the campaign.
In its attempts to create a hostile media atmosphere, the United States aided, created, and financed media outlets both inside and outside Nicaragua in order to shape public opinion and destabilize the Sandinista government. In the early years, the CIA broadcast into Nicaragua from radio stations in neighboring countries like Honduras, and gave financial assistance to existing opposition radio stations inside Nicaragua. But later, the United States eventually set up its own station inside the country called Radio Democracia with money from the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The mission, according to the director of the station, would be to “offset the
instruments for consciousness formation.”<8> This was logical, after all, since a conscious population might not agree with Washington’s plans for “Somocismo without Somoza.”
The most important media for the U.S., however, would be the well-known opposition newspaper La Prensa. From the very beginning of the Sandinista government, the Managua daily received millions of dollars in payments from the CIA and NED, much of it funneled covertly through third-party connections like Eladio Larez and the Venezuelan government of President Carlos Andres Perez.
Larez met with La Prensa’s owner, and Washington’s preferred candidate for the 1990 elections, Violeta Chamorro, the year before the elections to set up a fraudulent foundation to receive money from the CIA and pass it on to the opposition newspaper.<9> According to one document, Larez’s front organization, the National Foundation for Democracy, “would probably not actually have to serve as a pass-through other than on paper.”<10>
Larez collaborated in, and witnessed first hand, the U.S. efforts to orchestrate the Nicaraguan opposition media campaign and to promote the opposition candidate. Their efforts would allow the United States to “buy” the 1990 Nicaraguan elections for the opposition as explained by California Congressman George Miller: “We have taken Mrs. Chamorro and we pay for her newspaper to run, we funded her entire operation, and now we are going to provide her the very best election that America can buy.”<11>
CIA assistance enabled the paper to play a key role in the campaign against the government; the same role, in fact, that the CIA had cultivated in other countries that were victims of destabilization programs. The El Mercurio newspaper in Chile, for example, had played the same role in the CIA operation against the Allende government in 1973, as had the Daily Gleaner in Jamaica against the Manley government in 1980.<12> The media could be a very useful tool in getting rid of popular, yet “undesirable,” governments. In Venezuela, Eladio Larez’s RCTV appears to be playing that very same role.
Destabilizing Venezuela
In the few years I have been observing the media in Venezuela, there has been one aspect of RCTV news coverage that has really stuck out: everything centers on the president. On a daily basis, from morning to night, RCTV news coverage and political talk shows seem to tie every single problem in the country back to the Chavez government.
Interestingly, this strategy
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