After approval following initial debate a year ago, on 12 January 2024 the parliamentary review process of the “Law on Control, Regulation, Performance and Financing of Non-Governmental and Related Organisations” resumed with the opening of a public consultation process. Dates for the consultation process, however, have not been made known and available to the public.

Since its presentation before parliament, the debate on the bill has been stigmatising in nature, depicting civil society organisations that carry out social, humanitarian and human rights work as “enemies of the country”, accusing them of using “illicit funds” to “finance terrorism”.

The legislative initiative grants the Executive Branch faculties to supervise, inspect, control and penalise organisations and their affiliates via legislative and oversight powers. These powers subject non-governmental organisations to the discretionary interests of the ruling government, violating their independence and autonomy.

The initiative imposes obligations to provide “information regarding the constitution, statutes, activities and origin, administration and destination of an organisations’ resources,” with specific details required regarding sources of funding. These requirements would be introduced within a context in which this type of information has been used to pursue and criminalise sectors critical of the government.

Transparency is a fundamental pillar of civil society work and is carried out as a matter of best practices. The obligations contained within this legislative initiative, however, are being imposed within a framework that lacks clarity regarding the institutional guarantees required to effectively provide respect and protection for the right to freedom of association.

Venezuela is in the midst of a structural crisis that negatively impacts guarantees relating to social, economic, civil and political rights. The consequences of this crisis are having an impact across the region, with the displacement of millions of people to other Latin American countries. Thousands of people within the country receive necessary social and humanitarian assistance to address complex humanitarian needs. If this legislative initiative receives approval the work of organisations that provide this assistance will be severely curtailed. In addition, under this legislation, any initiative that operates in a manner that is autonomous and independent from government interests would automatically be suspected of carrying out criminal activities. This would include the work of social, religious, union, educational, community, environmental and neighbourhood organisations, collectives and movements, among others.

Venezuelan organisations are already subjected to a series of registration activities and must comply with their financial obligations. There is already a restrictive regulatory environment in place, under regulations such as the Law against Organised Crime and Terrorism Financing or Administrative Ruling No. 002-2021, among others. These regulations effectively impede organisations from registering or updating their documentation. Within this scenario, there have been arbitrary interventions in civil society associations, and activists and rights defenders have been criminally persecuted. This situation has progressively worsened in the lead up the electoral process scheduled for 2024.

We call on the international community to support actions that prevent this and other similar legislation from moving forward in the region. The goal of these types of legislation is to take away freedoms in our countries. Initiatives of this sort feed into stigmatising narratives and encourage more restrictive and anti-democratic actions. If this bill is approved, the work of non-governmental organisations in Venezuela will be even more limited and threatened, which could trigger an escalation in criminal persecution of activists and rights defenders.

Recovery of democracy requires the active defence of civil society. Individuals, organisations, collectives, initiatives and movements, with their varied and unique mandates, can quell restrictive and illegitimate practices that seek to diminish institutions in order to preserve and concentrate power in the hands of a few at the cost of respect for the rights of all.

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Venezuelan authorities must immediately release freelance environmental journalist Luis Alejandro Acosta and drop all criminal charges against him, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

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.

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Authoritarian regimes have long had a complicated relationship with media and communications technologies. The Unfreedom Monitor is a Global Voices Advox research initiative examining the growing phenomenon of networked or digital authoritarianism. This extract is of the executive summary of the report on Venezuela, from the series of reports to come out of the research under the Unfreedom Monitor. Read the full report here.

Since 2007, democracy and freedom of expression in Venezuela have been disrupted through severe censorship and legal strategies against traditional and independent media, and the reductions of separation of powers to the point where they are practically nonexistent. In this context, the role of digital and social media are fundamental elements to overcome the government’s dominance of print and broadcast media and evade the censorship established by the Venezuelan regime.

However, the use of digital tools to fight back against repression has been accompanied by another phenomenon: the use of these very tools of digital communications to repress citizens. This is the effect of “networked authoritarianism.” The use of digital media to guarantee access to information has been met by the government’s disinformation campaigns, internet blocking and judicial persecution of journalists and activists that investigate Maduro’s government or talk about the humanitarian emergency. Internet blockades and censorship of digital media don’t only affect journalists and human rights defenders: they also control and silence opinion and public discussion, the diffusion of free and diverse thought, and inhibit the work of opposition politicians, human rights defenders, humanitarian workers, activists, public personalities, and citizens in general that question and report the actions of the Venezuelan regime.

Surveillance without legal justification, arbitrary monitoring of citizens, and the use of technology to manipulate election results have also changed the political and social landscape in Venezuela, and have established a surveillance state focused on the persecution and criminalization of dissident voices.

The key motives for digital authoritarianism in Venezuela are focused on the crackdown on opposition political actors and dissident voices, the distribution of propaganda to justify and falsify support for Maduro’s government, and the use of technology to falsify the numbers of such support. In this sense, identification systems have also been used to discriminate between Maduro’s critics and supporters.

Venezuelan dissident voices have been largely ignored since the early 2000s, despite substantial political and civil coordination against Chávez’s and Maduro’s authoritarian practices. It must be noted that political and civil structures are both equally stigmatised, criminalised, and persecuted by security bodies and legal institutions across the country.

Read the full report here.

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Venezuelan digital rights activists have suspected surveillance practices and unjustified monitoring of private communications in Venezuela for years but had little evidence until June 2022. That month, Telefónica, the parent company of Movistar Venezuela, published a transparency report. It revealed data pointing to a mass surveillance program using systematic and unmethodical interceptions of their customers’ private communication by order of Venezuelan government entities.

According to the report, Telefónica intercepted — by order of Maduro’s administration — the communications of more than 1.58 million Movistar subscribers in 2021. That is 20.5 percent of Movistar telephone and internet accounts. They intercepted or “tapped” calls, monitored SMS, shared people’s locations, and monitored their internet traffic. The number of lines affected by interceptions has increased sevenfold since 2016, when there were 234,932 access breaches.

At the time, Telefónica’s report sparked a huge conversation about digital authoritarianism and privacy in Venezuela, but most importantly, it highlighted the extent of Maduro’s government surveillance and persecution of dissident voices. The intimidation, persecution, arbitrary detention, mistreatment, and torture of activists, humanitarian workers, journalists, and citizens have been widely covered in the latest UN Fact Finding Mission Report, published in September 2022. Venezuela’s authoritarian government under Nicolas Maduro dates back to 2013, with the election of Nicolás Maduro after Hugo Chávez died. This had a big impact on the country’s digital media ecosystems.

Telefónica’s report adds that Movistar Venezuela did not receive interception or metadata collection requests through judicial orders, as stipulated by Venezuelan law, but rather from the police, the military, and other entities such as the General Prosecutor’s office (Ministerio Público), the Criminal Scientific Investigations Agency (Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas Penales y Criminalísticas or CICPC), and even the National Experimental Security University (Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Seguridad).

Communication metadata is information about communication beyond its content. For example, who a user is calling, the location and duration of the call, routing information, or the client’s personal data. The Telefónica report identified 997,679 lines (13 percent of Teléfonica’s lines) affected by metadata requests.

Governments often argue that the interception of communications can be a legitimate tool to investigate serious crimes. However, digital rights activists argue that these powers must be used in accordance with national and international laws, human rights standards, and due process in order to protect citizens’ rights. The government did not react to Telefónica’s report.

In Venezuela, orders to intercept communications must come from the courts. There are particular exceptions in case of emergencies and flagrant crimes for which the CICPC can directly request communication companies to intervene. Still, in these cases, a prosecutor must be notified, and their approval must be included in the investigation file. Venezuelan laws also stipulate requesting the prosecutor to maintain transparency and legitimacy throughout the process. The legal framework to intervene in private communication is established in the Organic Code of Criminal Procedure, articles 205 and 206. For metadata interceptions, requests must go through Administrative Ruling No. 171 and Article 29 of the law against kidnapping and extortion.

The large number of intercepted lines highlighted in Telefónica’s report indicates more than an unusual amount of emergency cases; for many, it points to the systematic abuse of civil and digital rights. Although this is the first time there is relevant evidence of the scale of the issue, VE sin Filtro, an NGO focused on digital rights and internet restrictions in the country, registered similar interceptions in their 2021 annual digital rights report.

VE sin Filtro’s report draws attention to a specific incident: the WhatsApp account of a Venezuelan NGO, which was used to communicate with victims of state violence, was hacked. “Unlike the cases we usually see, none of the users had been tricked or subjected to a phishing attack. This incident was probably perpetrated by or in coordination with state agents, which is not usually the case with fraudsters or other types of attackers. The incident occurred while Venezuela was being investigated by the International Criminal Court Prosecution Service and the UN Council on Human Rights was working on its fact-finding mission,” the report said.

Telefónica also reported that the Venezuelan authorities filed to block 20.5 percent of websites. For context, Germany requested 0.11 percent, Spain 0.05 percent, and Brazil 0.28 percent. Many other Latin American countries did not file any requests at all.

For rights activists, Telefónica’s data compounds other human rights violations in Venezuela at the hands of Maduro’s government. Marta Valiñas, president of the UN Fact-Finding Mission, says: “Our investigations and analysis show that the Venezuelan state uses the intelligence services and their agents to suppress dissidence in the country. This leads to the commission of serious crimes and human rights violations, including acts of torture and sexual violence. These practices must cease immediately and those responsible must be investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the law.”

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On 24 January 2023, the Venezuelan National Assembly approved, on first reading, a proposed “Law for Inspection, Regulation, Operations and Financing of Non-Governmental and Related Organisations.” The presentation of the proposed legislation to parliament was followed by stigmatising discourse from government officials, characterizing civil society organisations that promote human rights or carry out social or humanitarian work as “enemies of the homeland.” 

Venezuela is undergoing a structural crisis that has been negatively impacting the economic, civil, political and human rights of the country’s citizens for several years, with consequences at the regional level as well, due to the displacement of millions of people to neighbouring countries. This situation is being addressed by civil society organisations via social and humanitarian assistance. The proposed law could restrict the essential work of these organisations. 

At the time of publication of this statement, the text of the bill has not yet been made public. It did, however, receive immediate approval after submission, without having been debated by the National Assembly. The bill’s submission also failed to comply with the process stipulated in the Constitution for the treatment of legislative initiatives. 

Civil Society Organisations in Venezuela are already subject to a series of registration requirements and must comply with financial commitments. However, compliance is actively hindered by the State, through its complex and inaccessible records and registration systems.

The proposed law grants legislative and inspection powers to the Executive Branch to supervise, scrutinise, audit, and sanction organisations and associated parties. These powers will make the very existence of civil society organisations dependent on whichever government is in power, which infringes on their autonomy and independence. 

In addition, the law, if approved, will require organisations to provide information regarding their constitution, statutes, activities, administration, where they are based, and where their resources are destined to go, along with precise details regarding their sources of financing. This would be taking place within a context where this type of information is used to persecute and criminalise those who criticise the government. 

Transparency is an essential pillar for the work of civil society organisations, and forms part of best practices, but the compulsory aspects of this law must be framed by clear institutional guarantees that effectively respect and protect freedom of association. 

We call on the international community to actively support all efforts to prevent this and other similar legislation from proliferating in the region, as they weaken an already vulnerable civic space. These types of initiatives feed into stigmatising narratives and promote further actions in the same vein, driven by powerful sectors with motives that are increasingly anti-democratic. If this bill gains final approval, the work of non-governmental organisations in Venezuela will come under threat, which would increase restrictions on the already narrow civic space in the country.

A healthy democracy requires the work of all sectors of civil society—individuals, organisations, movements and collectives—to keep policies that seek to diminish their foundations in check. The goal of such policies is to diminish legitimate mechanisms, draining them of substance and converting them into instruments for preserving and increasing power, sacrificing those whose only aim is to legitimately exercise their rights. 

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Venezuelan authorities must drop their criminal investigation into two editors, three reporters, and an administrative employee of the El Nacional news website and allow them to continue their work free of intimidation, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

On Wednesday, January 25, officers of Venezuela’s investigative police unit detained El Nacional news editor José Gregorio Meza and human resources manager Virginia Nuñez, according to news reports and Miguel Enrique Otero, the president and editor of El Nacional, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Officers brought them to the attorney general’s office in Caracas, where they were questioned about a recent article and released.

Authorities also sent citations to appear at the attorney general’s office to Otero and El Nacional reporters Carola Briceño, Hilda Lugo, and Ramón Hernández, all of whom are based outside of the country and do not plan to comply with the summonses, Otero said.

“Venezuelan authorities’ latest attempt to intimidate journalists at El Nacional by threatening them with criminal investigations is completely unacceptable,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Authorities must drop their criminal investigations into the two editors, three reporters, and the human resources manager of the outlet, and allow them to practice journalism freely.”

The citation sent to Otero, dated January 17 and which CPJ reviewed, said he was to be formally charged but did not specify what crime he was alleged to have committed. Otero added that the other journalists were cited the same day.

Otero told CPJ that authorities have threatened Briceño and Hernández’s relatives in Venezuela in retaliation for their journalism.

Police questioned Meza and Nuñez about an article alleging that President Nicolás Maduro’s son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, who is also a politician, was connected to two Venezuelans sanctioned in 2020 by the U.S. Treasury Department for their alleged involvement in illegal gold mining.

CPJ’s calls and text messages to the attorney general’s office and President Maduro’s press office were not answered. CPJ could not find contact information for the president’s son.

The criminal investigation is the latest move by Venezuela’s authoritarian government against El Nacional, founded 80 years ago in Caracas, which used to be one of the country’s largest-circulation and most influential newspapers. However, a newsprint shortage and government harassment, including fines, defamation lawsuits, and the seizure of its building and printing presses in 2021, forced El Nacional to become a web-only news operation with many journalists and editors living in exile.

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The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) denounces the collaboration of private telecommunications companies with the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro to censor and block media outlets on the Internet and to intercept the telephone communications of journalists, opponents, and citizens critical of the regime.

In several sections, the IAPA indicated that this collaboration between governments and private companies violates the Declaration of Salta of Principles on Freedom of Expression in the Digital Era. For example, the IAPA document states, “Content blocking and filtering through government controls in the digital space constitutes prior restrain according to the American Convention on Human Rights provisions.” In addition, the Declaration states that “Widespread surveillance is unacceptable” except “in cases where the provisions of human rights conventions are pursuing a legitimate goal.”

On the other hand, the Declaration emphasizes the role of technological intermediaries, warning them that they “must be committed to respect and promote freedom of expression and must not yield pressures from governments and other powerful groups.” Furthermore, it adds, “Their policies and criteria used to restrict content circulation must be clear and transparent” and, “They must also establish good practices to safeguard personal data and the privacy of those persons who utilize their platforms and services.”

A transparency report by the private company Telefónica, Movistar’s parent company in Venezuela, released by the organization Ve Sin Filtro, shows that the telecommunications company carries out massive espionage, telephone interceptions, and digital blockades ordered by the Venezuelan government. The Telefónica document revealed that more than one million telephone or Internet accounts were tapped, and 30 websites were blocked by order of the government in 2021.

The president of the IAPA, Jorge Canahuati, expressed “indignation at the massive violation of the freedom of expression and press freedom of citizens and the media, practiced in collusion with transnational companies to maintain the official information policy of censorship.”

Canahuati, CEO of Grupo Opsa, from Honduras, wondered, “if the same private companies that yield to the political pressures of the Venezuelan government and without any judicial order block Internet sites would be capable of carrying out such actions in countries with democratic governments.”

The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and editor of the Argentine newspaper La Voz del Interior, Carlos Jornet, said: “In addition to depriving citizens of their right to be duly informed, the blocking of media sites, threatens the sustainability of newspaper companies since they cannot be a vehicle for advertising messages, their only source of income, which in some cases leads to economic asphyxiation.”

Miguel Henrique Otero, the president and editor of the newspaper El Nacional and Vice-chairman for Venezuela of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, has said that “private telecommunications companies should have coherent policies in all the countries in which they operate.” In his IAPA reports, he said that “companies should comply with international law to protect freedom of expression.”

The IAPA press freedom report of last April denounced: “These blockades are carried out without judicial authorization – in a discretionary and arbitrary manner.” Likewise, the issue was addressed in a conference on “The condemnable cyber aggression against media and journalists,” organized by the organization last February.

Some organizations estimate that more than 110 newspapers were closed or forced to close by the government in the last decade. In addition, a report by IPyS Venezuela indicates that more than five million Venezuelans live in “information deserts,” territories where little or no local information is produced.

Among other local media blocked are the portals of El Nacional, La Patilla, El Pitazo, Armando.info, Efecto Cocuyo, Runrunes and international media such as CNN en Español; Infobae and Todo Noticias, from Argentina; RCN, Caracol TV, NTN 24 and El Tiempo, from Colombia. According to Ve Sin Filtro, in 2021 some 68 portals were interfered with, 45 of them media outlets.

In addition to Movistar and the state-owned Compañía Anónima Nacional Teléfonos de Venezuela (Cantv) and Movilnet, the IAPA has also denounced the actions carried out by the private mobile and Internet operators Digitel, Supercable and Intercable.

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• Expressly criminalizes non-governmental organizations;
• Subjects international cooperation to “guidelines dictated by the president of the Republic”; and
• Excludes human rights as legitimate objectives of such cooperation.

The proposed law would create a state body mandated with unilaterally managing funds and establish a new registry that would require companies to provide information about funding agents, the uses of the resources received, and the personal details of beneficiaries, including victims of serious human rights violations. If organizations fail to meet these requirements, they could be declared illegal and their members could face legal action. Thus, we would soon see in Venezuela the same process we are seeing in Nicaragua, with organizations being shut down and activists being criminalized.

In this context, millions of people would lose the direct and indirect benefits provided by assistance programs, humanitarian aid, social development, and restored access to basic social and economic rights, including access to water, education, health, food, and sports. Moreover, this would obstruct the human rights advocacy work that civil society organizations conduct and which makes it possible to hold authorities accountable and provides protection against state abuses. In this sense, we are concerned, in particular, over the impact this law could have on the right to freedom of expression.

We are worried that this initiative falls under the same practices denounced in other countries in the region, such as Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, which seek to criminalize and eliminate sectors committed to securing, promoting, and defending human rights. A trend toward discrediting civil society is observed in Mexico, Brazil, and El Salvador, and it could be replicated by other governments that deploy stigmatizing discourses and promote increasingly undemocratic practices.

To ensure a healthy democracy, we need to protect civil society’s capacity to operate, by fostering the conditions for it to be strong, rich, and diverse. Thus, we Al Sur; Alianza Regional por la Libre Expresión e Información;  IFEX-ALC and  Voces del Sur call on:

– Civil society in the region to denounce this and various initiatives aimed at restricting the civic space in our countries, to be alert to stigmatizing practices, to promote solidarity, and to speak out against and vigorously reject these actions that undermine the right to defend human rights.

– The region’s states to emphatically reject attempts aimed at limiting the civic space and to recognize the importance of social and civil organizations in the construction of a solid and lasting democratic society.

– The Venezuelan authorities to comply with national and international legal standards and refrain from using legal means to criminalize, persecute, and outlaw the autonomous and independent work of social and civil organizations.

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By John Otis/CPJ Andes Correspondent 

After seven years of painstakingly building up its audience, Crónica Uno, one of the only high-quality news websites that caters to poor and working-class Venezuelans, was recording up to 15,000 unique page views per day. But after private internet service providers (ISPs) teamed up with Venezuela’s authoritarian government in February to block Crónica Uno and three other independent news websites, that figure plummeted to 5,000 overnight.

“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.”

John Otis, CPJ’s Andes correspondent for the Americas program, works as a correspondent for Time magazine and the Global Post. He authored the 2010 book Law of the Jungle, about U.S. military contractors kidnapped by Colombian rebels, and is based in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Fresh blocks on a handful of Venezuela’s few remaining independent news websites are a troubling sign of escalating press censorship, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

Journalists and experts say private internet service providers (ISPs) are censoring the sites for the first time, though they have been unavailable on state-run networks for years.

On Tuesday, February 1 private ISPs Movistar, Digitel, Inter, NetUno, and Supercable began blocking access to news websites Efecto Cocuyo and Crónica Uno and EVTV Miami, a streaming station that reports on Venezuela, according to Venezuela Sin Filtro, a watchdog project that monitors internet censorship.

“This is a total blockage,” Celina Cárquez, editorial director of Crónica Uno, told CPJ via messaging app. “The links do not open. This has never happened to us before.” Efecto Cocuyo and EVTV Miami also reported on their websites that the blocking had been extended to more networks.

“We are very concerned to see private firms apparently carrying out state censorship,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Authorities in Venezuela have decimated the traditional media landscape, and independent news websites are among the only sources of information left.”

CANTV, the state-run ISP, has blocked various news websites that are critical of the country’s authoritarian government for more than 10 years, but they remained accessible on the 25% of residential internet connections provided by private companies until recently, Andrés Azpurua, coordinator of Venezuela Sin Filtro, told CPJ via messaging app.

During regional elections last November, private ISPs blocked 35 independent news websites. It is unclear how many remain blocked to the general public, as some private ISPs allow access and others do not.

Luis Carlos Díaz, president of the Venezuelan chapter of Internet Society, which promotes open access to the internet, told CPJ by messaging app that private ISPs are under government orders to block these websites and that non-compliance could lead to their closure.

“This is a very serious attack on press freedom because it will cause these news organizations to lose part of their audience and then to lose financing,” Díaz said.

CPJ called each of the five companies but the phone rang unanswered. CONATEL, the government telecommunications regulator, has not spoken publicly on the recent string of blockages and CPJ’s calls, and email seeking comment were not answered. ISPs have a strong tradition of not speaking about their relationship with the government, according to Diaz and Venezuela Sin Filtro.

The National Union of Press Workers, a Venezuelan press freedom association, denounced the blockages on Wednesday in a Twitter thread, saying that the government of President Nicolás Maduro has spent years clamping down on news websites to “limit access to objective news.”

Independent news websites have become more important in Venezuela, as President Nicolás Maduro’s government moves to reduce the influence of independent newspapers, TV, and radio stations through fines, defamation lawsuits, advertising boycotts, closures, and other measures, according to CPJ research.

Over the past years, CPJ has documented the blockage of independent news websites in Venezuela.

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