Several information sites to which access was difficult were unblocked Thursday, September 17 by the Venezuelan authorities to the great satisfaction of their leaders and journalists who have suffered from this censorship for years.
This opening comes as the government and opposition began a second round of negotiations on Thursday afternoon, nine months after the capture of President Nicolas Maduro by the American army. Freedom of expression is one of the points on the agenda of this second sequence of negotiations. The first cycle in August notably resulted in the launch of a judicial reform process.
Activists, journalists and NGOs denounced this blocking of websites, seeing it as a censorship mechanism. To access it in Venezuela, you had to use a VPN (virtual private network).
Will the blockage be lifted for all media?
The National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) announced on its website the “official restoration of access to various platforms and national and international digital communications media”.
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“We managed to hold on, we managed to invent, and we managed to survive until this moment,” Tal Cual site director Víctor Amaya told AFP. Tal Cual has been blocked on the internet since July 2024 and the repression of the post-electoral crisis of the presidential election in which Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner despite accusations of fraud. Tal Cual lost 60% of traffic and advertisers moved away for fear of being sanctioned by the authorities, he said.
Víctor Amaya, however, was skeptical about the lifting of the blockade for all media: “Let’s hope that this does not happen like with certain releases of (political) prisoners, where we announce 100, but we only see 60 or 70”, hoping that the measure allows the country “to have a normalized communication environment”.
Digital rights NGO VE Sin Filtro verified access to 17 websites from several internet service providers. It still lists at least 188 sites blocked in the country, including 79 news media.
Venezuela must turn the page on “polarization”
For its part, NTN24 initially confirmed that its website was accessible in Venezuela, but later indicated that access was intermittent. Other media outlets reported the same thing. El Nacional, Efecto Cocuyo and El Pitazo, three big media outlets, are accessible, AFP journalists noted.
For Luis Ernesto Blanco, editorial director of Runrunes, “there is a recognition” on the part of the regulatory authority that “it had censored them, essentially because it wanted to, there was no administrative decision, nor judicial order that required it”.
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“We must put back online the pages that are not online in Venezuela,” Deputy Communications Minister Gustavo Villapol declared on state television, who said he hoped the country would turn the page on “polarization” and “difficult years of confrontation.” “We can never again vilify people without having proof in hand. We cannot use communication to serve foreign interests in the vital sense of our nation,” he said.
The head of the opposition delegation responsible for dialogue with the government, Dinorah Figuera, welcomed this unblocking on “It is a right in a full democracy, not a concession (…). It is a first step. There is still a lot of media missing and they must all return, fully and permanently,” she also said.
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The measure had notably been recommended a few hours earlier by the Program for Peace and Democratic Coexistence, a non-governmental body created by the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, which is subject to pressure from Washington.
A former opposition mayor, Javier Oropeza, returned to Venezuela at the start of the week after two years of exile, was arrested Thursday by agents of Sebin, the intelligence service in Barquisimeto (north-west). He was released in the evening after an intervention to this effect by the opposition delegation in negotiations with the government.
With AFP
