Following the July 28 election, the Nicolás Maduro regime further tightened its grip on freedom of expression by imposing measures that experts say are unconstitutional. Among these decisions was blocking X access, which Maduro announced in an August 9 speech broadcast on television.
“X out of Venezuela,”, Maduro shouted as he announced a 10-day ban on the platform. Three days earlier, the autocrat banned the use of WhatsApp to public administration employees, including members of the police and military. His argument: The platform disseminates threats against security agents who violently responded against the protesters who took to the streets throughout the country to denounce his reelection.
“I am going to break relations with WhatsApp, because they are using it to threaten Venezuela, and then I am going to remove it from my phone forever,” he said. From that day forward, communications would have to take place on Telegram.
Through the regime-controlled media, Minister of Science and Technology Gabriela Jiménez said that starting on election day, all the regime’s websites had suffered some kind of cyberattack. Without offering proof, Jiménez said that on July 28 the National Electoral Council (CNE) and other sites of the regime were subjected to “30 million cyberattacks per minute.”
This narrative was used to justify the lack of disclosure of the election’s tally sheets. According to the Carter Center delegation that was invited to monitor the election, there was no evidence of any attacks against the CNE.
On August 12, the regime announced the creation of a National Cybersecurity Council. This decision was formalized a week later, through the publication of a presidential decree in the Official Gazette.
According to Laura Louza, coordinator of Acceso a la Justicia, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that acts as a watchdog of the regime’s rules and sentences, the creation of the National Cybersecurity Council is an attempt to give a certain institutional character to restrictions on freedom of expression.
“They want to give a legal framework to justify a series of arbitrary situations. Within the solutions proposed, decrees are issued on issues that should be regulated through laws,” Louza told Diálogo on October 9. “It’s something unconstitutional and contrary to human rights standards, because we are talking about freedom of expression.”
Upon learning of the content of the decree on the creation of the Cybersecurity Council, the NGO issued a statement in which it warned that the Maduro regime’s intention was not to protect the citizenry from computer crime, but rather to safeguard the interests of the regime, in a context in which its legitimacy is questioned nationally and internationally. “It’s not a legislation to say that there will be real educational and institutional issues. It is noticeable that they are going to limit what the citizen is going to say and sanction him,” Acceso a la Justicia said.
As of October 10, the Maduro regime was still expected to announce the first decisions related to the legal functioning of the Cybersecurity Council.
Closures and persecution
In 2024, the regime’s siege of the media and independent journalists increased, especially since the presidential campaign. According to the Venezuelan NGO Espacio Público, this year alone the National Telecommunications Commission blocked access to 14 news sites, including whistleblowers such as El Pitazo, Efecto Cocuyo, and Runrunes.
Since 2017, the regime has shut down or blocked more than 440 media outlets, Carlos Correa, director of Espacio Público, told Diálogo.
With the worsening of the political conflict, in the third week of September the regime incarcerated eight journalists, charging them with crimes such as terrorism or incitement to hatred. Two of them left the country due to persecutions.
“In Venezuela, there are 1,916 people detained for political reasons, 11 more than last week, when 1,905 people were detained for the same reasons,” Spanish news agency EFE reported on October 10.
“After the elections, detentions of journalists have generated a lot of fear and very serious things are happening. Journalists do not want to put their names on the byline, seeking protection. The production of truthful and timely information has been drastically reduced,” said Correa.
Persecution has reached a point where, “there is a crisis of confidence in the social fabric,” Correa added. As a such, people show extreme caution, even when commenting in forums or messaging platforms.
For Correa, restrictions on X and WhatsApp boost the use of other networks for the dissemination of information, such as Instagram and Facebook. “This is an open society that the dictatorship is trying to stifle, so that information does not circulate. But there is a lot of resilience; there is a great willingness to be informed,” he concluded.
