Free Speech / the Venezuela case

Once again our friend @theycallmedan calls us with another of his initiatives to expose outstanding issues in our social and personal situation. On this occasion the theme he raises is Freedom of expression, nothing more and nothing less, the divine allegory of freedom.

Fuente

In today's troubled world we live immersed in a maze of information that emerges, flashes and disappears with amazing speed. Every day communication devices are loaded with thousands, trillions of messages of different natures that often do not give us a chance to process the substance of what we see or hear.
At the speed we are going, it is humanly impossible to discern between the true and the false. In these days enslaved to the supremacy of vertigo, equanimity is an outburst. These are times when the real is confused with the non-existent; the true becomes illusory (and vice versa); the simulated seems trustworthy. On many occasions, lies go viral while banished truth starves in the streets. The rapidity of information that surges into the digital jungle that remains the world often becomes an obstacle to separating the wheat from the chaff.
Today, more than ever, we can sing with Enrique Santos Discépolo that the world is a mess, even if the mess does not come from the world, strictly speaking, but from human nature.

Fuente

In Venezuela, in spite of all the internet maremagnum where we can navigate beyond heaven and earth, it is a great fortune to still have those social networks that have managed to survive the communication censorship that the political commissars have charged as a penance to the great majority of the Venezuelan social body. Although they have also imposed many barriers to broadcasting in the network of networks and many citizens have ended up in jail for the simple act of writing a tweet that has displeased the picky dome of power.

Let's remember that for several years the regime implemented a policy of extermination through its agencies and corporations to end the free press and the result of this dastardly machination is now the almost total disappearance of the written press. The mission of suffocating all those publishers who did not bow to authoritarian orders was successful for them. Not only were the newspapers denied the possibility of acquiring foreign currency to replace the raw material (newsprint, ink, spare parts for equipment, etc.) but also absurd sanctions were applied for any reason that nested in the heads of the authoritarian egg and a witch-hunt was applied against companies or institutions that advertised their products in those media that did not comply with the current regime.
In the case of the city where I live, Cumaná, capital of the state of Sucre, from a dozen newspapers that circulated regularly a couple of lustrums ago there is not one left. Not a single one. For years we've had our Ink-less fingers, unfortunately. There is not a single printed news organ left that covers the sorrows, messages and vicissitudes of a population of around half a million inhabitants.

Fuente

Freedom of expression is a human right as stated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

A similar scenario occurs with many open-signal radio and television stations that, for reasons similar to those of the written press, have had to disconnect their antennas and turn off their microphones because they do not have the financial capacity to renew their equipment with new technologies and the few independent media that have managed to survive have to manage the airwaves hertzianas and the repeaters between fear and self-censorship.
So the radio spectrum is practically colonized by stations leaning on the officialdom and its trickery. At the same time, there is a great proliferation of channels in the radio space for religious groups to proselytize. The radio of free opinion is closed to the common citizen. Submission and noise have taken over the radio spectrum in Venezuela.

Fuente

In these days of total confinement at home because of the coronavirus pandemic coupled with the very complex national crisis, I am re-reading that chapter of great beauty embodied, with letters of glory, in Don Quijote de La Mancha, when the celebrated gentleman speaks to Sancho Panza with these words:

Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that the heavens have given to men; with it the treasures that the earth holds cannot be equaled, nor the sea conceals; for freedom as well as for honor life can and must be ventured, and, on the contrary, captivity is the greatest evil that can come to men.

Just as the sun rises for all, so does the sun set for all, even for the big heads who swarm and swell in the ostentatious bedrooms of power while Venezuela remains in a deafening muteness from dawn to night and lies in its manger of silence.

Because I believe in the words of the ingenious gentleman
I know that freedom will soon shine again in all Venezuela.

Gracias por leer
_{Note: The translation has been made through DeepL}