The revolution seizes the newspaper El Nacional
Members of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) have proceeded to seize the facilities in Caracas of the newspaper El Nacional. Less than a month ago, the Civil Cassation Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) ordered the payment of more than 13 million dollars as compensation for the “moral damage” committed by the newspaper against Diosdado Cabello, number 2 of the revolution. An impossible and inaccessible debt for the media, the latest victim of Chavista communication hegemony.
“We are experiencing an illegal, unfair process, another attack against El Nacional. It's been 77 years, almost 78 years of history, bringing real information to the country. Democracy lives when there is freedom of expression,” warned Jorge Makriniotis, general manager of the newspaper. “Today they are seizing us, they are taking away our assets. This is an attack on democracy,” lamented the director of the newspaper.
“Search and confiscation of assets, loot in hand,” complained the historian Elías Pino Iturrieta, who was head of the opinion pages of El Nacional.
The newspaper is one of the most coveted pieces of the information world in Venezuela, which was forced to stop circulating on paper suffocated by the maneuvers of the Chavista regime, but whose website and social networks have millions of followers.
“I report that in the afternoon (midnight in Spain), the competent courts, within the proceedings of my claim to El Nacional, have executed the measures for fixing posters and notification of executive seizure and the payment process has begun of compensation. We will win!!”, the Chavista leader congratulated himself through his social networks.
Cabello has a television platform on public channels, “Con el mazo dando”, from which he threatens, persecutes and harasses opponents, journalists and human rights and civil society activists. In his latest statements, he has shown his disagreement with the possible opening of a negotiating process with the opposition and has recalled that new presidential elections will not be held until 2024..
The process started in 2015 thus reached its final stage. The emblematic newspaper then echoed information published by Madrid's ABC in which a former Cabello bodyguard, Leamsy Salazar, who fled to the United States, accused him of being linked to drug trafficking.. The news was also replicated in other media, such as the La Patilla website and the Tal Cual newspaper, also sued and against whom the head of the radical wing of Chavismo launched a witch hunt..
Miguel Henrique Otero, editor of El Nacional, was forced to go into exile in Spain in the face of Bolivarian persecution, as well as several of his directors, including the now MEP of the Popular Party, Leopoldo López Gil, father of the former political prisoner.
“It is arbitrary, it means taking over the company. It is a sentence to expropriate El Nacional and hand it over to Cabello,” Otero denounced at the time.. It is a rigged process from the first instance that culminated in compensation for moral damages, an improbable amount that at first was one billion bolivars and now it was set at 237,000 petros. One petro, the cryptocurrency invented by the revolution that has failed to impose itself in the market, is equivalent to $56.41, according to the Central Bank of Venezuela.
The legitimate National Assembly immediately showed its solidarity with the newspaper and its journalists. “We express our absolute rejection of the seizure of the newspaper by the dictatorship. Attacking the media does not cover up the truth: in Venezuela the nation is dying of hunger or in the hands of a criminal regime,” Deputy Delsa Solórzano spat.