Hugo Chavez and Owen Arthur Learned From The Best!
When Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur recently warned the country’s largest newspaper to be careful about printing advertisements for the government’s political opposition, he wasn’t doing any more or less than than that grand old expert in media censorship, Fidel Castro. Castro has the art of oppressing journalists down to a science. His thugs still drag off hundreds of people every year for “reeducation” or “disappearing” and the Cuban media never reports a word of it.
But while the Cuban dictator has been ruthless in shutting down opposition or critical media, his two students Hugo Chavez from Venezuela and Owen Arthur from Barbados have learned to use more sophisticated methods to achieve the same goal.
Where Castro violently shuts down “unauthorized” libraries to keep his population from learning anything about how free societies are run, Owen Arthur merely fails to fund public libraries so they either fall down or become useless by reason of lacking books. Barbados has lots of money to spend, just none on books and education, you see. With hundreds of millions blown on cricket parties and new stadiums but no books, Owen at least has one half of the standard “bread and circuses” formula perfected.
Where Castro sends soldiers to drag offending radio journalists into the street, Owen Arthur merely calls his lawyers and quick as a monkey – the radio station pays tens of thousands of dollars and promises to never again ask how it is that a Government Minister can become a millionaire in three years of (ahem) “public service”. So a word in public from the Prime Minister to the Nation Newspaper is to be feared by the editors and staff – because if Owen Arthur stops the government advertising dollars to that newspaper, it won’t take long before the place shuts down.
In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has made it difficult if not impossible for a major opposition newspaper to buy paper… and that takes care of that. No soldiers, no men in the middle of the night beating journalists – just turn off the supply of newsprint.
There is really little difference in the end between using soldier thugs, lawyer thugs, or paper-supply thugs to control the news media. None of the three amigos, Castro, Chavez or Arthur, have any doubts about what they want to accomplish.
Chavez and especially Arthur are just more sophisticated about achieving their goal.
Herald Tribune: Venezuela newspaper blames government for lack of dollars to buy newsprint