Students clash with police over Chavez closure of TV station
Police in the Venezuelan capital on Monday fired rubber bullets and tear gas at university students protesting President Hugo Chavez's shutdown of a popular opposition TV station.
Several people were injured in the outbreak of violence, including a policeman whose leg was broken, a police official said.
Protests continued through the day Monday in Caracas and other cities after the openly anti-government Radio Caracas Television network went off the air at midnight Sunday, because the government refused to renew its license.
Mainly a broadcaster of comedies and drama serials, it was replaced by TVes, a state-backed "socialist" station which opened with cultural shows.
Late Monday protesters banged pots and pans and blasted car horns for the fifth straight day protesting the RCTV shutdown.
Protest marches were reported in Valencia, 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of Caracas, where police said six students were injured, four of them from bullets.
Students also protested in San Cristobal 650 kilometers (400 miles) southwest of Caracas and and Barcelona, 220 kilometers (137 miles) east of Caracas.
Thousands of students gathered at the Briones Plaza in eastern Caracas Monday chanting anti-government slogans in a largely peaceful protest throughout most of the morning. They were joined by white-collar workers from nearby buildings, journalists, and RCTV actors and staff.
In the Chacao neighborhood, students set tires and trash ablaze, and battled city police who fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd.
Armando Soto, with the metropolitan police, said police intervened when a "group of violent protesters began to throw rocks and bottles" at them.
Several people were injured, Soto said, one of them a police officer rushed to the hospital with a broken leg.
The RCTV closure brought sweeping denunciations from inside Venezuela and out.
One of the country's leading dailies, El Nacional, denounced it as "end of pluralism in Venezuela," and slammed the government's growing "information monopoly."
The archbishop of the city of Merida, Baltasar Porras Cardoso, compared Chavez to Hitler, Mussolini and Cuban leader Fidel Castro -- who is a close friend of the left-wing Venezuelan president.
"This is the first time in eight years (of Chavez as president) that the university students hold a massive protest," said Leopoldo Lopez, an opposition leader and neighborhood mayor.
Criticism of the RCTV closing came in from around the world.
The EU's German presidency said it worried Venezuela let the network's broadcast license expire "without holding an open competition" for a successor station.
The media rights group Reporters Without Borders said the move was "a serious violation of freedom of expression and a major setback to democracy and pluralism."
RCTV's former owner, Marcel Granier, said Chavez was driven by "a megalomaniacal desire to establish a totalitarian dictatorship" in an interview with US-based Univision television.
The US Senate last week unanimously approved a resolution condemning the move.
Meanwhile, Chavez supporters held a huge, night-to-dawn public party outside the network studios to celebrate the birth of the new "socialist television" and the end of the bitterly anti-Chavez media outlet.
TVes president Lil Rodriguez said the move reflected "our sovereignty."
RCTV, which aired soap-opera "telenovelas" and variety shows, had one of the largest audiences in Venezuela and is one of the few stations with national broadcast capabilities.
The government will now control two of the four nationwide broadcasters in Venezuela, one of them state-owned VTV.
Also Monday Venezuela levied charges against US cable network CNN for linking Chavez to Al-Qaeda, and against Venezuelan TV network Globovision for encouraging the president's assassination.
Information Minister William Lara showed at a press conference what he said was CNN footage displaying pictures of Chavez juxtaposed with those of an Al-Qaeda leader. CNN also aired a story about the Venezuelan protests using images taken in Mexico of an unrelated story, Lara said.
"CNN broadcast a lie which linked President Chavez to violence and murder," Lara said.
Lara meanwhile accused Globovision of encouraging Chavez's murder by airing footage of the 1981 assassination attempt on the late pope John Paul II.
AFP
