NY Times: Pirate Radio as Public Radio, in the President's Corner(Caracas)

[La_Serpiente]

Pirate Radio as Public Radio, in the President's Corner

CARACAS, Venezuela, March 7 — The sound room of Radio Perola, a small community station on the poor edge of this city, is papered with posters celebrating Latin American revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and offering a stern warning to the behemoth to the north: "Death to the Yankee Invader."

The setting seems fitting for José Ovalles's politically charged Saturday radio program. Gripping a microphone and waving reports from a government news agency, the white-haired retired computer teacher charges that a far-flung opposition movement arrayed against President Hugo Chávez is part of an American-led conspiracy. He ridicules the president's foes as criminals with scant backing.

He urges listeners to defend what Mr. Chávez calls his Bolivarian Revolution, which is under international pressure to allow a recall vote on the president's tumultuous five-year rule. "We have to fight for a free country," he said recently, "one with no international interference."

The message, beamed from a 13-kilowatt station in what was once the storeroom of a housing project, reaches at most a few hundred homes. But Radio Perola is part of a mushrooming chain of small government-supported radio and television stations that are central to Mr. Chávez's efforts to counter the four big private television networks, which paint him as an unstable dictator.

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Pirate Radio as Public Radio, in the President's Corner

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