They point out deterioration of the concept of democracy

Journalists from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua denounced the hostile environment in which they work due to pressure from their governments against freedom of expression, and warned that the concept of democracy deteriorates when authoritarian regimes appropriate and distort it.

On the first day of activities of the International Forum on Electoral Journalism and Integrity, organized by the National Electoral Institute (INE), Yoani Sánchez, a Cuban journalist and author of the Generación Y blog, assured that “the concept of democracy deteriorates when it is appropriated by the authoritarian regimes, begin to use all the vocabulary of democracy to adjust it to processes of a populist, totalitarian or authoritarian nature”.

At the table “Exercise of journalism in different anti-democratic contexts in Latin America”, Cindy Regidor, a Nicaraguan journalist exiled in Costa Rica, explained that in her country a narrative of communication control is used so that national authorities are the ones who “attribute the right to say that the dissidents violate sovereignty and to determine who is and who is not a citizen”.

Cindy Regidor, who is also a correspondent for France 24 in San José, Costa Rica, affirmed that “in Nicaragua’s official propaganda there is a subversion of all these terms, it is really tiring and outrageous to see Vice President Rosario Murillo, who directs communication , corrupting all these terms of peace, human rights, crimes against humanity of which they are accused as a government for the repression of 2018 ”.

Challenges of the profession

For his part, Víctor Amaya, a journalist from Venezuela and founder of the fact-checking platform Espaja.com, stated that a decade ago there were 50 print media in that country, and currently less than 20 subsist, in addition to the fact that, by government order , more than 100 radio stations stopped broadcasting in the first 10 months of this year alone.

He explained that the challenge of journalism in authoritarian governments is to “participate in dialogue and promote conversations, debates and shed light on a clear and real narrative” and understand “that authoritarianisms learn from each other with propaganda mechanisms.”

The Argentine journalist, Diego Fonseca, pointed out that the most significant authoritarian populism is in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and warned that it is not the only ones because “there are experiences of populism that do not reach dictatorships without restrictions and are created under the façade of democratic fiction, are the so-called competitive authoritarianisms as in the case of Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador”.

Diego Fonseca, who is also the author of the book Amado Líder, an essay on the dangers of populism in Latin America, the United States and Europe, highlighted that “populism is the product of a democratic failure, and if it exists it is because at some point everything that preceded it has failed”, hence the population “chooses democratic fictions”.

Víctor Amaya realized that citizens have felt betrayed by democracy due to the precariousness they suffer in terms of security, poverty, education and health, but “jumps into the void should be avoided where the remedy can be worse than the disease.”

jorge.monroy@eleconomista.mx