Francisco Toro checks in from Venezuela, where he says the protesters are now playing right into the government’s hands:
The sites of ongoing unrest remain solidly concentrated in the middle class enclaves of the bigger cities, i.e., precisely where the government wants them.
Large, peaceful daytime demonstrations are followed every night by running battles around makeshift barricades, or guarimbas. This night-time ritual of improvised road-blocks, burning garbage, plastic pellets, tear gas and armed bikers in plain clothes involves many fewer people than the daytime protests. And yet, inevitably, the guarimba has come to define the current protest movement, giving it its flavor, its distinctiveness, its identity.
The peaceful daytime marches have broad public support, but only when they’re seen as demanding redress for failures of government rather than agitating for regime change. In the country at large, support for a coup is practically non-existent. For the communicational hegemon, it’s easy to disappear the large, day-time protests and paint the entire movement as the outcome of a tiny, violent guarimbero clique.
Katelyn Fossett examines how the government has tightened its grip on the media since 2002, when private news outlets were a driving force behind the attempt to oust Hugo Chávez:
Throughout the unrest, critics have been sounding the alarm about a government-coordinated “media blackout” designed to minimize coverage of the protests. Press freedom advocates say the government’s harsh treatment of private media organizations has led many newspapers, TV stations and radio broadcasters to effectively censor their own coverage and largely ignore the protests. Maduro took a news channel off the air after it broadcast coverage of the violence in mid-February. When Henrique Capriles Radonski, the country’s most prominent opposition leader and the runner up in last year’s presidential election, delivered a major speech two weeks ago, no network covered it.
It’s a far cry from the political muscle the private media flexed in 2002.
The Dish 