Guillermo Zuloaga, the fugitive owner of Venezuela's 24-hour news channel Globovisión, has accused President Hugo Chávez of ordering his arrest to silence his criticism of the government, Reuters reports.
The Chávez administration issued orders over the weekend to arrest Zuloaga, owner of Venezuela's Globovisión TV network, Reuters and the Associated Press report. Intelligence agents searched Zuloaga's home, and President Hugo Chávez accused him of fleeing Venezuela, El Universal says (Spanish).
Separately, the government took over the mid-sized Banco Federal on Monday, citing liquidity problems and threatening it for its links to Globovisión, whose board of directors includes the president of Banco Federal, Reuters says in a separate story.
Zuloaga owns Globovisíon, whose anti-Chávez editorial line has created many conflicts with the government. He also holds the concession to other media outlets. He is accused of hoarding cars belonging to a dealership he owns while waiting for prices to rise—charges that reportedly had been dropped months ago, The Wall Street Journal says. Charged also with usury, he has denied the accusations against him, calling them acts to intimidate his network for its critical stance.
After the government suspended cable and satellite TV broadcasts last January of RCTV, another opposition channel, Globovisión is the only medium critical of the Chávez administration that remains on the air.
The arrest order against Zuloaga was announced a week after Chávez publicly complained that the media executive remained free while awaiting trial, the Associated Press adds. The act was condemned by press freedom groups, including the Inter American Press Association, which lamented that "there is no independence of powers" in Venezuela, and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
"If the government is using the lawsuit against Zuloaga as a pretext for silencing and intimidating the only critical TV channel, then the rights of citizens to be informed will be severely restricted, and Venezuelan democracy will suffer another blow," CPJ's Carlos Lauía says, as quoted by Globovisión.
The warrant for Zuloaga's arrest follows the nearly four-year prison sentence of newspaper columnist Francisco Pérez, on charges of defaming the mayor of Valencia in a column for El Carabobeño newspaper. Pérez, who can serve the sentence at home, was also banned last week by the court for practicing journalism during his sentence. He says he will appeal the ruling, CPJ adds.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
