Figueredo refused to comply with a June 23 police summons, reviewed by CPJ. On that same day she received three private number phone calls warning her that a police investigation had been opened against her and Correa for “dangerousness,” the journalists told CPJ. On June 16, a local police officer parked outside the journalists’ home told them that they weren’t allowed to leave in an incident witnessed by others in the neighborhood.

“The Cuban government must halt its harassment of journalists Yunia Figueredo and Frank Correa, and allow them to continue their work with the community media outlet, Amanecer Habanero,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Reporters should not be threatened into silence with legal orders.” 

Cuba’s private media companies have come under increased scrutiny from a new communication law banning all unapproved, non-state media and prohibiting them from receiving international funding and foreign training.

Amanecer Habanero is a member of the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (ICLEP), a network of six community media outlets, which has strongly condemned the actions of Cuban authorities against Figueredo, who became director of the outlet earlier this year.

In a statement, ICLEP said Figueredo has been the victim of an escalating campaign of intimidation by Cuban law enforcement, including verbal threats by state security agents; permanent police surveillance without a court order; restriction of her freedom of movement; psychological intimidation against her family; and police summonses without legal basis in connection with her work denouncing government.

Cuba’s private media companies have come under increased threat from a new communication law banning all unapproved, non-state media and prohibiting them from receiving international funding and foreign training.

Cuban authorities did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

A criminal court on January 11 ordered Palmar, news director of the University of Zulia’s Luz Radio station, and Cubillán to remain in detention on preliminary charges of terrorism, conspiracy, inciting hatred and disturbing public order, according to the local chapter of the National Association of Journalists (CNP).

“Venezuelan authorities are clearly seeking to prevent citizens from being informed about the government’s abuses of power with the arrest and charging of journalists covering anti-government protests,” said CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, Cristina Zahar, in São Paulo. “Journalism is not terrorism and Leandro Palmar and Belises Salvador Cubillán must go free.” 

Palmar and Cubillán, who are being held at a National Guard base in Maracaibo, were denied access to private lawyers and have been assigned a public defender, according to Venezuela’s National Press Workers Union.

The arrests of Palmar and Cubillán come amid ongoing protests against President Nicolás Maduro, who was sworn-in for a third consecutive six-year term despite evidence publicized by the team of opposition candidate Edmundo González that he lost last year’s presidential election.

Ahead of Maduro’s inauguration, at least 18 people were detained, including Carlos Correa, a journalist and director of the Caracas-based free speech organization Espacio Público. Correa has not been heard from since he was apprehended by hooded individuals on January 7. CPJ and 29 press freedom and advocacy organizations have called for his immediate release.

CPJ’s phone calls to the Attorney General’s office and to the Defense Ministry, which controls the National Guard, were not answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

On January 9, CPJ signed another joint statement along with six organizations urging the Brazilian government to take a stand on the disappearance by hooded individuals, allegedly Venezuelan officials, of Correa. Brazil maintains a long-term relationship with Venezuela and sent an observer to follow the July elections. Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said he won’t recognize the results until the official figures are released, which hasn’t happened.

That statement called for “the international community, and in particular the Brazilian government, to press for clarification and accountability regarding the disappearance of Carlos Correa and other violations committed in Venezuela against opponents, protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders in recent months.”

Read the full statements in Spanish and Portuguese.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

On Monday, DW’s Spanish-language TV channel posted a video on X calling Venezuela “the world’s second most corrupt country” and reporting that high-ranking politicians were allegedly involved in cocaine trafficking, extortion, and illegal gold mining.

In response, Communications Minister Freddy Ñáñez accused DW of “promoting hatred” and defaming Venezuela. On Monday evening, the National Union of Press Workers (SNTP) said DW was no longer available on the country’s two main cable distributors, Supercable and SimpleTV. On his weekly TV program that day, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, justified taking DW off the air by calling it a “Nazi” broadcaster.

“By taking DW off the air over a critical report, the Venezuelan government is once again demonstrating its overt hostility to press freedom in the country,” said CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, Cristina Zahar, in São Paulo. “Venezuelans have a right to information, especially information that holds the powerful to account. Venezuela’s government must allow DW to return to the air.” 

In a statement Tuesday, DW Director General Peter Limbourg said, “We urgently call on the Venezuelan government to once again ensure the distribution of the Spanish language DW television channel as quickly as possible. This restriction of DW’s broadcast is a serious encroachment on the freedom of the people in Venezuela to find independent information themselves.”

Amid government censorship of local media, international TV stations had been an important source of independent news coverage for Venezuelans, Carlos Correa, director of the Caracas-based press freedom group Espacio Público, told CPJ. However, since 2010 at least 14 channels, including CNN and news stations from Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and other countries, have been taken off the air, according to the SNTP. The union noted that DW transmissions were also briefly blocked in 2019 following the station’s coverage of anti-Maduro protests.

The blockage of DW comes amid a wider government crackdown on dissent, including the arrest last month of a prominent critic of Venezuela’s powerful military and the expulsion of a United Nations human rights agency, as the country gears up for the scheduled July 28 presidential election, in which Maduro is seeking another six-year term.

CPJ’s calls to Venezuela’s Communications Ministry and Maduro’s press office went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On September 8, security forces detained Acosta while he was reporting on illegal gold mining in the remote Yapacana National Park in southern Venezuela, according to news reports and Marco Ruíz, general secretary of the Venezuela Press Workers Union.

On Tuesday, September 12, public prosecutors charged Acosta with promoting and inciting illegal mining, being in a protected area, and abetting criminal acts.

“The Venezuelan authorities must release Luis Alejandro Acosta at once and drop all charges against him,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s program coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, in São Paulo. “It is outrageous that a journalist doing his job should be subjected to such embarrassment by his country’s authorities.”

Acosta reports on environmental issues in southern Amazonas state, which includes the national park, and publishes reports and videos on his personal Facebook, which has 4,900 followers.

Acosta had been reporting on military operations against illegal mining in the area when he was detained, according to a September 10 thread by the National Union of Press Workers (SNTP).

“He was reporting on his own in a risky area,” Ruíz told CPJ via WhatsApp. “All the evidence suggests that he was arrested for his journalism.”

Carlos Correa, director of the Caracas-based free-speech organization Espacio Público, told CPJ by phone that Venezuelan troops have been accused of abuses and corruption in their crackdown on illegal miners and that “for the military, it would be very uncomfortable to have someone like Acosta reporting on what they’re doing.”

CPJ’s emailed request for comment to the press department of the Attorney General’s office in Caracas did not receive a response.

CPJ has recently documented a range of threats or attacks on journalists covering illegal mining and other environmental issues in the region.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“This has had a huge impact,” said Carlos Correa, director of the Caracas-based press freedom group Espacio Público and editor of Crónica Uno. Internet blocks “can easily reduce your traffic by half.”

Since Venezuela began cracking down on independent media in 2007, most internet blockages have been conducted by CANTV, the state-run ISP that now provides two-thirds of residential connections. But journalists and internet experts told CPJ that President Nicolás Maduro’s government is increasingly forcing private ISPs, which dominate the mobile phone market, to carry out press censorship by blocking Venezuela’s few remaining independent news websites.

The flurry of blockages in February stood out because, along with CANTV, they were carried out by the country’s main private sector ISPs: Spanish-owned Movistar and locally owned Digitel, Inter, NetUno, and Supercable, according to Venezuela Sin Filtro, a watchdog project that monitors internet censorship. Besides Crónica Uno, these ISPs blocked the influential news websites Efecto Cocuyo and El Nacional, along with streaming station EVTV Miami.

During the regional elections last November, private ISPs blocked 35 independent news websites, prompting criticism from the U.S.-based Carter Center and the European Union, both of which sent teams to Venezuela to monitor the fairness of the electoral process.

“While government-aligned news websites…were constantly accessible during the campaign in every state and through any Internet provider, websites of independent online media…were very difficult or impossible to access in 16 of the 23 states,” the EU observers wrote in their post-election report.

Venezuelan news organizations have responded by setting up replicas of their original domains, known as mirror websites; distributing written and recorded-voice news dispatches on WhatsApp, Telegram, and other social media platforms; and urging their audiences to set up virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the blocks.

Even with these measures, the blockages make it much harder for Venezuelans to stay informed and hurt the ability of news websites to build their brand and secure funding through advertising and donations, said César Batiz, editor of the Venezuelan independent news website El Pitazo.

He told CPJ that for the past five years El Pitazo has suffered on and off blockages from both CANTV and private ISPs. When the website was first blocked in 2017, El Pitazo’s traffic fell from 115,000 daily page views to 11,000. El Pitazo gradually recovered its audience thanks, in part, to the growing number of Venezuelans living abroad.

Batiz accuses private ISPs of doing the government’s dirty work and says they should be forced to pay damages to affected websites. He and other journalists are especially disappointed in Spain’s Movistar, the only international ISP in Venezuela. They say that Movistar, which dominates the market for mobile phone service, has more resources than Venezuelan companies and therefore more room to maneuver and resist government pressure.

“What I can’t understand is how a company with corporate governance and an ethics code that operates under the European Union principles of free expression is doing what it’s doing in Venezuela,” said Batiz, who in 2019 led a protest at Movistar’s Caracas headquarters.

Luz Mely Reyes, the top editor of Efecto Cocuyo, which is scrambling to recover readers after Movistar and other ISPs blocked the website in February, added: “Movistar should not serve as a tool for a government that doesn’t respect democratic norms.”

CPJs calls to the Caracas offices of Movistar, Digitel, Inter, NetUno, and Supercable were not answered. CPJ emailed the press department of Telefónica, Movistar’s Madrid-based parent company, but received no response. Pedro Marín, president of the Chamber of Telecommunication Service Companies, an industry group that represents Venezuelan ISPs, told CPJ via a spokesperson that he was too busy to talk.

Luis Carlos Díaz, president of the Venezuelan chapter of Internet Society, a global advocacy group that promotes unrestricted access to the internet, said it would be a mistake to come down too hard on private ISPs. He told CPJ that, like the news websites they block, these companies are also victims of government repression.

Rather than a formal judicial process, Díaz said private ISPs receive orders from the National Telecommunications Commission, known as CONATEL, to block websites. He described these orders as arbitrary administrative decisions with no legal recourse and noted that ISPs could face stiff fines, expropriation, or worse for ignoring them.

Over the past two decades, Venezuelan authorities have forced dozens of independent radio and TV stations off the air for criticizing the government, Díaz said. Last year, government officials seized the assets, including the printing press, of the independent newspaper El Nacional. In 2020, AT&T’s DIRECTV pulled out of Venezuela after it was ordered to carry two pro-government TV stations as part of its service and three of its sales executives were jailed for two months on charges of fraud and trying to destabilize the economy.

Private ISPs, Díaz said, “have a gun to their heads.”

CONATEL did not respond to CPJ’s phone calls and an email seeking comment. One industry insider, who was not authorized to talk to CPJ about censorship and therefore requested anonymity, said CONATEL nearly always relays its blockage orders to private ISPs over the phone to avoid leaving a written record.

“The companies want people to have access to all internet websites but if they receive a government order, they have to follow it,” the source said.

In 2019, El Pitazo gained access to an email in which CONATEL ordered the blocking of its domain. The Carter Center report on the November elections stated: “CONATEL has issued directives to black out and censor digital media.”

The only time the Venezuelan government has publicly acknowledged internet censorship came during a 2015 meeting with the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. William Castillo, who was then director of CONATEL, said that it had ordered the blockage of 1,060 web pages, including news websites, to “protect society.”

Andrés Azpúrua, coordinator of Venezuela Sin Filtro, told CPJ that private ISPs should be more transparent about why they are blocking websites, like the way Google notes when material is removed from its YouTube platform for copyright infringement. Instead, he said many Venezuelans remain in the dark about censorship, blaming the country’s notoriously slow internet speeds for their inability to access the news.

Díaz, of Internet Society, says the U.S. and other governments should consider sanctioning CONATEL officials, as he and other experts point out that there’s only so much private ISPs, which have struggled to survive amid Venezuela’s ongoing economic crisis, can do by themselves. If private ISPs take a bold public stand for free expression by defying government orders, they say, it almost certainly guarantees their shutdown – and less internet access for Venezuelans.

In the words of Azpúrua: “It’s better to have a censored internet than nothing at all.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by John Otis/CPJ Andes Correspondent.