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Chávez and RCTV: The verdict after a year

Philip Bounds

A year has passed since Hugo Chávez's government in Venezuela withdrew the broadcast licence of RCTV, one of the country's two most popular television stations. RCTV had been consistently hostile to Chávez and had supported the illegal coup against him in 2002. It made its last terrestrial broadcast on May 28th 2007, though it still provides a satellite and cable service. Its demise has had a dramatic effect on the balance of forces inside Venezuela.

Chávez is no longer as popular as he was. Deprived of the soap operas, action programmes and game shows that helped to keep their spirits up, many members of the Venezuelan masses have begun to have their doubts about Chávez's 'Bolivarian Revolution'. The effective closure of RCTV has also sparked a new era of student protest. Thousands of student activists in Caracas and elsewhere now march through the streets on a more or less daily basis, insisting that Chávez's media policies are symptomatic of his growing indifference to freedom of speech.

It is possible that Chávez has come to regret his decision. His failure to win last December's constitutional referendum, combined with his increasingly dire poll ratings, has surely convinced him that messing with the people's favourite programmes is a dangerous business. Yet his political difficulties tell us nothing about the ethical status of his actions. The question remains: Was the withdrawal of RCTV's licence the right thing to do?

Many of Chávez's supporters have no doubt that it was. The sharpest arrow in their quiver is RCTV's attitude towards the coup of April 2002. They point out that as soon as Chavez was turfed out of office (only to be restored to the presidency a few days later), RCTV gave its full support to the coup's leaders and opened up its airwaves to them. Some even suggest that the station effectively contributed to the coup, not least by maintaining a news blackout in its aftermath. The issue is essentially one of democracy, or so we are told. When a television station supports an illegal attempt to overthrow an elected government, it can hardly expect to retain its right to broadcast. Free societies cannot and should not coexist with extra-constitutional plotters.

These are powerful arguments and they shouldn't simply be dismissed as Bolivarian special pleading. RCTV's behaviour during the coup was certainly disgraceful and Chávez's decision to withdraw its licence is eminently defensible. And yet the quality of Venezuela's media culture has declined appreciably over the last year. There is no longer a major terrestrial channel seeking to hold the government to account, while the sudden disappearance of entrenched forms of popular entertainment has caused real discontent. The grim truth is that Chávez should never have meddled in the first place. Democracy has not been served by the muzzling of RCTV.

As someone who remains optimistic about the prospects of Venezuelan socialism, I would suggest that the sorry saga of RCTV holds some valuable lessons for other radical governments in Latin America. The first relates to what Marxists sometimes call the politics of 'intermediate' periods. Any attempt to abolish, restructure or fundamentally reform capitalism brings dangers in its wake. The urge for a radical government to suppress free speech in the interests of 'social justice' is often hard to resist, especially in parts of the world where democratic traditions have only recently been established. The great virtue of the right-wing media is that their sheer abrasiveness helps to keep the constitutional show on the road. No one complains more loudly about encroaching tyranny than a nervous millionaire. In exposing Chávez's government to coruscating (and often very unfair) criticism, RCTV did a great deal to hold its less democratic impulses at bay. On balance its influence was a positive one.

The policy implications of all this are surely clear enough, even if they seem deeply counterintuitive to a certain sort of left-wing mind. Radical administrations like those in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador should treat their opponents in the media with exemplary charity. Only in exceptional circumstances should the right to publish or broadcast be curtailed. Even the squalid supporters of coups, capital strikes and industrial sabotage have a right to say their piece, especially if the alternative is the weakening of media independence. The most important task of all is to ensure that 'bourgeois' ideas about the separation of powers are once again taken seriously. Never again should a senior politician like Chávez have the right to issue broadcast licences. The responsibility for administering the media should be taken out of the hands of the government and delegated to an independent commission, ideally composed of representatives of the public, the trade unions and the media companies. All legally binding decisions about the media should be open to appeal.

The television station which replaced RCTV is state-owned, violently pro-Chávez and specialises in political propaganda. Every day it bores for Venezuela with its unappetising menu of Soviet films, political documentaries and left-wing musicals. Its failure to appeal to its target audience holds another lesson for Latin American radicals. Like many other people on the left, Chávez and his supporters seem desperate to politicise culture. Thrilled by the changes that the Bolivarian Revolution has set in motion, they cannot see the point in songs, programmes or films whose concerns are purely personal. Their goal is to fuse culture and politics and create a media culture in which public issues take precedence over personal ones. Romantic films? No! Documentaries about agriculture? Si!

The whole thing betrays a strange misunderstanding of political psychology. If Chávez were better attuned to the people he claims to represent, he would recognise that revolutions increase the need for entertainment rather than reduce it. The Venezuelan poor are tired. They support the revolution but from time to time they want to forget all about it. When they turned on RCTV and immersed themselves in a world of irresistible kitsch, they were not besmirching their minds with what Chávez has called 'irresponsible sex' and 'big lies'. Their experience was arguably much more cathartic than that. Driven to despair by the complexities and injustices of Venezuelan society, they blasted away their incipient feelings of apathy in an acid bath of private fantasy. The result was that they returned to the revolution with renewed feelings of vigour.

Nor should we underestimate the utopian dimension of popular entertainment. However trashy or 'bourgeois' they might have been, RCTV's most popular programmes held out the hope that everyday life could be transformed for the better. When the Venezuelan masses saw one of their number win a bucket load of money on Quién quiere ser millonario?, they caught a glimpse of what life might be like in the absence of poverty. Drama series such as Te Tengo en Salsa conjured an enchanted emotional space in which human relationships were passionate, honest and unalienated. Chávez and his supporters were quite wrong to hold these simple pleasures in contempt. Their big mistake was to try and transform popular consciousness at one stroke rather than remaking it from the inside out. Where inchoate feelings of popular utopianism exist, there is always a possibility that they can be harnessed to progressive causes. As unthinkable as it may seem to many socialists, RCTV imbued its viewers with a crude but potent sense that anything is possible. Chávez should have done everything in his power to inflect this fragile mood of optimism to the left.

If the Bolivarian Revolution comes to grief, Hugo Chávez's puritanical dislike of popular entertainment will have stoked the fires of political defeat. It is crucial that Latin America's other progressive administrations do not make the same mistake.