By Carlos Aznárez on January 14, 2020
The most devalued puppet in Washington has found a new formula to try to re-compose a space of certain media visibility. That’s right, it seems that Juan “self-proclaimed” Guaidó is trying to give the image of a tough guy, and has begun to shout before his increasingly scarce followers that he will try to “rescue” the Telesur signal “to put it at the service of truth.”
If this new hoax were not part of the permanent war that the United States is waging against the Bolivarian Revolution, this guy’s words would be laughable. But these announcements shouldn’t be taken as a joke, because behind them there will surely be a new onslaught against one of the few television channels in the world (and the only one in Latin America) that tells it like it is, that offers a microphone to those from below, to those who fight to be heard, to those who with much effort try to continue believing that humanity is not what Trump and his henchmen draw day by day.
Telesur has become, and this is something to be celebrated and defended, an essential tool in the field of information. It has been demonstrating this since its launch as a multi-state and multi-national channel. If it had not been for Telesur, several coups d’état that have taken place in the continent would have gone almost unnoticed. There were photographers and reporters showing the atrocities committed in Honduras when President Manuel Zelaya was violently removed from office, and it was again the Latin American and Caribbean channel that showed the world when the president surreptitiously entered the territory and reappeared in the Brazilian embassy.
What about Telesur in Colombia, in the times of Juan Manuel Santos ordering the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron (ESMAD) to repress the great demonstrations at the Agrarian Summit and, based on those images obtained by the communicators with no small risk to their lives, to be able to show to the world what was happening there. Then came the days and years of the FARC negotiations in Havana, or those of the ELN in Ecuador, the paramilitary massacres, the peace accords, the government’s betrayal of what was signed in Havana, and the repressive and authoritarian present of Uribism, in which thanks again to Telesur, we learned that the Colombian people do not stop fighting for a country with social justice.
It was Telesur who opened the eyes of many in the continent to discover and love the Revolution that Hugo Chavez developed in Venezuela and who reminds us day by day to admire the brave Venezuelan people who have filled the streets a thousand times in all these years. The channel’s reporters were the first to take to the streets to cover, at the risk of their lives, the death squads promoted by the fascist opposition. The channel renewed our hope that the Revolution still had much to do, when the crowds took to the streets to vote for the Constituent Assembly and defeated the fratricidal madness, the same madness that Guaidó continues to believe in and promote.
And once again Telesur was in the forefront of visualizing, for those who doubted, what was behind the famous “humanitarian aid” of the Yankees in February 2019. The one where they tried to sneak over the bridges near Cúcuta, which was nothing but a full-blown invasion. Madelain García was there, giving a beautiful lesson on what it means to inform, on the streets and putting yourself on the line, about the feat that the militias and the Bolivarian National Guard performed together.
The same can be said of the correspondent in Syria, Hisham Wannous, showing with absolute professionalism how much and how the people and their army fought to defeat ISIS, or the brilliant coverage on the Palestinian resistance facing the Zionist bestiality, the Otani invasion of Libya, where Rolando Segura’s coverage shone, or what is covered informatively in Lebanon and Iran.
I recently returned from Chile and there it was once again Telesur who was able to show the continent, thanks to a camera and a more than brave chronicler, what the repressive power of the Piñera-Pinochette police is against a people that has awakened forever. It was exciting to see Paola Dragnic, with her anti-gas mask, facing the criminal aggression of the Chilean “pacos” in the Plaza de la Dignidad, standing up to them next to the camera (I’m sorry I don’t have her name) and demonstrating that when there is a passion for telling the truth in favor of the people, there is no state violence that can make a popular communicator retreat. The same is repeated daily in Freddy Morales’ brilliant reports from Evo’s Bolivia, today in the hands of a fascist and racist dictatorship. Or in the tenacious work of the Argentine correspondent, where, facing censorship and the lowering of the signal by Macri’s institutional tyranny, Carolina Silvestre and Edgardo Estéban shouldered the task of maintaining the high level deployed since the channel’s creation. Or the permanent work of reporters like Adriana Sívori, from any Central American country or wherever the news needs its youthful power to be in the places where others (not those of Telesur) do not want to be sent.
That and much more is the channel that Guaidó wants to “rescue”: unique programs on TV in the continent, with brilliant presenters, reporters and analysts, who don’t repeat scripts like parrots, nor act under routine concepts, but rather strive to put passion into telling news that most media corporations ignore, deform or directly package. There are many who carry out this task, but we can summarize its effectiveness in the daily encounters on the screen with Tatiana Pérez and Abraham Istillarte.
Telesur is also those documentaries that we can’t see on most Latin American TVs (there are always exceptions such as the Argentine channel Encuentro). And something that is infinitely appreciated; on this channel we do not see those advertisements in bad taste, sexist, destructive of essential social values, misleading by painting unreachable worlds etc. No, on Telesur this does not happen, since they are replaced by positive images of our America, music or events of all the struggles and personalities of the Great Homeland.
For all these reasons, in the face of this new display of misery and revenge generated by guys like Guaidó (corrupt to the point of daring to steal from his own masters, an accomplice to terrorist actions and a self-confessed coup plotter), it is necessary for all of us who value the role played by Telesur to join forces and quickly prepare to multiply our actions in its defense. Above all, those of us who are popular journalists and analyists, who know how to value what it means to do journalism “in difficult times,” as Rodolfo Walsh taught us.
As the director of Telesur, Patricia Villegas (one of the great architects of all that the channel has become and is worth) said: “the deputy talks about what he does not know and clearly does not understand. Nor will he ever understand, we add, because scum like Guaidó, who at this point in time should be in jail, cannot imagine that by attacking Telesur he is causing thousands and thousands on the continent and in the world to close ranks so that the channel continues to be what it is: an instrument to defeat the darkness of censorship and media terrorism. #Long live Telesur.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation, North America bureau