Chavez in driver's seat as he silences his critics

Another humid night in Caracas, and in a cafe off Avenida Francisco De Miranda a television glows in the corner. President Hugo Chavez is making a speech.

The volume is too low to make out what he is saying, but he seems to be frowning. At a far table, Laureano Marquez, his back to the television, sips a coffee. It's been a long day and the newspaper columnist looks worried.

He is pondering a dilemma: should he - will he - quote Charlie Chaplin in his next column? Marquez, Venezuela's best known humourist and satirist, wants to cite Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator, the 1940 classic, including the line: "Dictators die and the power they took from the people will return to the people."

The columnist shifts in his seat. "The problem is 'dictators die'. Not my own words, but the Government could interpret them to mean I'm calling for the President's assassination.

"I don't think it's worth the risk."

Marquez has learned to be careful when satirising Venezuela's mercurial leader. A recent whimsical piece imagining the country post-Chavez was branded a "fascist" call for a coup, terrorism and genocide.

Another Marquez column in 2006, a fictitious Christmas letter from Chavez's daughter Rosines, earned the newspaper Tal Cual a criminal charge and a US$50,000 ($71,400) fine, a hefty sum for a shoestring operation.

"Humour is an act of reflection and exposes the contradictions and ridiculousness of those in power," said Marquez. "This Government tries to control it through intimidation and fear."

Whether Chavez can take a joke has become a deadly serious issue. Critics say the treatment of satirists exposes a wider drift towards authoritarianism which could seal the fate of South America's flagship socialist revolution. A crackdown on independent radio and television stations is muting opposition voices at a crucial moment.

Mounting economic and social difficulties are fuelling protests in Andean towns, Caribbean ports and the capital, Caracas. For Chavez, this represents a threat to his stated aim to rule for several more decades.

"The degree of Government intolerance of criticism has reached the point where any type of opposition may be identified as a subversive act," said Catalina Botero, special rapporteur on freedom of expression of the Organisation of American States (OAS).

"It is not easy to express yourself freely when you know you could be ... subjected to criminal or disciplinary proceedings which could lead to jail or bankruptcy." Humour and satire inspired special ire, she said. "They are labelled outright terrorist acts."

It has been a rough time for the President. The OAS's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a 319-page report which painted an alarming picture of repression and intolerance in Venezuela.

Chavez responded by calling the organisation a mafia and its leader "excrement".

The former tank commander got another broadside from a Spanish judge who accused Venezuela's rulers of collaborating with Eta and Farc terrorists. Chavez said the judge was part of a Yankee imperialist conspiracy.

The central bank revealed the economy shrank 3.3 per cent last year, confirming worsening stagflation. An opinion poll by the Venezuelan Institute for Data Analysis found 62 per cent thought the country's situation was negative and 54 per cent had little or no confidence in Chavez, a gloom driven by water and electricity shortages.

After 11 years in power Chavez is not about to fall. Astute and charismatic, he has weathered many crises and has strong cards to play.

He remains popular with many of the poor for spending oil revenues on social programmes. Chavista loyalists control the armed forces, national Assembly, courts, electoral agency and state oil company.

A new class of "Boligarchs" - politically connected tycoons named after the independence hero Simon Bolivar - have their wealth and power invested in Chavez. The question is not if the President will hold on. It is how.

Part of the strategy involves neutering critical voices on the airwaves.

Last July, the Government shut 32 radio stations, citing regulatory infractions, and warned it had a further 208 in its sights.

In January, it temporarily pulled the plug on RCTV, a cable channel, over its refusal to broadcast Chavez speeches. In 2007, the Government did not renew RCTV's terrestrial broadcast licence, citing its support for a 2002 coup which briefly ousted Chavez. It limped back as a cable network.

The last critical television voice, Globovision, appears in limbo. Chavez has repeatedly threatened to close it. Now a possible truce has been brokered. The channel has continued attacking Chavez but there is a suspicion it will gradually soften its coverage.

Chavez had a legitimate grievance over the private media's backing of the 2002 coup but that did not justify the "slow grind of indirect and direct repression against the media", said Robert Shaw, of International Media Support, a Denmark-based watchdog.

The President dominates the airwaves. As well as a Sunday radio and television show, which lasts up to eight hours, he routinely uses a law which obliges all channels, state and private, to interrupt programming to transmit his speeches live.

Rod Stoneman, executive producer of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a documentary sympathetic to Chavez, lamented state TV's "old East Europe style", but said Western media had its own bias. "There is a tendency to exaggerate problems."

Eva Golinger, an author and editor of a state-backed newspaper, Correo del Orinoco, said Venezuela had ample freedoms and media organisations got into trouble only when they broke the law.

One thing both sides agree on is that satire is thriving. "Tonnes of it," said Golinger. "A flowering," said Marquez.

The Tal Cual columnist often makes his points through offbeat topics, such as Tutankhamun, and refers to Chavez by other names, such as Esteban. "It's a code, but people know what I mean." Even so, he says, self-censorship has become the rule.

The paper's director, Teodoro Petkoff, calls the President Chacumbele after a self-destructing, ne'er-do-well figure of Cuban lore. One cartoonist, Roberto Weil, depicts the President's head as a military boot.

Reality has a habit of catching up with the caricatures. Chavez, long depicted as a wannabe Fidel, recently declared himself a Marxist and brought in a Cuban minister, Ramiro Valdes, to tackle an electricity crisis.

The opposition, long tarred as Americanised elites, sometimes step from central casting. "We are from the elite, we have to be sincere about that," said Cristobal Arraiz, 22, a student activist. "But the values we are fighting for are universal."

The restaurant's TV screens change from the four-hour Chavez speech to a sports channel on which a man with bulging veins throws weights over a net before wobbling away, exhausted. A satirist could have had fun linking the two.


Chequered career:

* President Hugo Chavez - who by law can rule indefinitely - has played a role in two political coups.

* In 1992, he led the Army in a failed coup d'etat against former President Carlos Andres Perez.

* Ten years later, he was briefly deposed when elements of the Venezuelan military staged a two-day revolt. Chavez supporters took to the streets in their thousands and the rebellion collapsed.

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