Tuesday, May 29, 2007

[freedom] of speech

Years ago, I remember hearing about a situation involving our sisters in another Latin American country. They ran a small radio station in a remote area, and the station provided a certain amount of time on a regular basis for the local people, indigenous substistence farmers, to go on the air with whatever message they had at heart. At the time, there was a lot of discontent (no doubt very well founded), and some of the peasant farmers had messages that demonstrated leftist influence. The government was so threatened by these poor people, marginalized and barely surviving, that they came in, shut down the station and put the nuns in jail for a day or two before sending them away.

There's something of a rerun going on now in Venezuela. The people got a new socialist TV station this week, after Hugo Chavez's media henchmen refused to allow the nation's oldest station to renew its license. The "reason" was that children were being corrupted by the telenovelas. According to Chavez and Company, the airwaves are really being given back to the people.

They just can't use them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for the interesting blog about the pathetic situation in Venezuela.
great punch line by the way, Sister. spqr

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your comments. It is really sad to see my country and other parts of the world under the same situation.
raquel