Jesus Medina used a fake identity to flee from Venezuela to Colombia by walking across the border like thousands of compatriots.
A journalist for Dolar Today, an independent online publication in Venezuela, Medina said he was persecuted by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for six years.
He was imprisoned for nearly three years between 2017 and 2020 in a high-security military jail awaiting trial.
Last year, a court absolved Medina of charges of inciting hate, a charge that is often leveled at journalists.
However, after Medina was cleared, he said the government ordered that he face a retrial. He denied all charges. At this point, he decided he had to leave his country, his girlfriend and family behind.
Medina arrived in Bogota, Colombia, on September 15 to begin a new life. He currently is searching for work and a permanent place to live.
His story is typical of other journalists who have left Venezuela in the wake of a crackdown by the Maduro government against the media and political activists after disputed presidential elections on July 28.
Several journalists have been detained, while others face travel bans. Reporters covering politics are looking for innovative ways to stay under the radar and keep covering the news.
Two AI journalists, called La Chama or “The Girl,” and El Pana (Venezuelan slang for “friend”), were created as part of Operation Retweet by Colombian organization Connectas, Reuters reported.
The initiative aims to publish news from a dozen independent Venezuelan media outlets and to help protect reporters amid a government crackdown on journalists and protesters.
Electoral officials and Venezuela’s top court declared Maduro the winner of the election with 52% of the vote, Reuters reported.
But the opposition says voting machine receipts show a landslide victory for their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, who fled to exile in Spain.
Some Western governments, including the United States, have alleged electoral fraud.
A United Nations report last week alleged escalating government repression since the election, including the arrest of minors. The Venezuelan government rejected the claims.
The Venezuelan government in Caracas and its embassy in Madrid did not respond to VOA requests for comment on Medina’s case nor on repression of the independent media.
‘Repression has gotten worse’
Medina, 42, who works for Dolar Today, an online independent newspaper that reports on national and international news and sports, has been a reporter for 14 years.
“The repression has gotten worse since the election in July,’’ he told VOA by telephone from Bogota. ‘’It has been brutal. They are arresting more people. They [the government] cannot bear that the opposition won the election. It is a dictatorship.”
Luis Gonzalo Perez, a Venezuelan journalist who was part of the press team covering opposition leader Maria Corina Machado during the election campaign, went into exile recently after what he claimed were “repeated threats” from the Venezuelan government and its secret services.
“Hello to my family, friends, followers who have been paying attention to my work in the last few months in Venezuela,” Perez said in a message posted on Instagram.
“I had to make the decision to leave Venezuela. I find myself in exile like millions of Venezuelans. This was never in my life plans, personal or work plans, to have to leave under force, against my will.”
Clavel Rangel, a Venezuelan journalist, went into exile in Miami in 2020 when she was accused of libel over articles she wrote with another journalist about the metal sector in southern Venezuela.
She said the latest crackdown against the media marks a new level of repression against independent journalists on the part of the government.
“For the first time, Maduro’s government decided to steal a competitive election, and this was marked by a new level of repression at all levels, where the media did not escape the crackdown,” Rangel told VOA. “They entered a new era of totalitarianism after years of autocracy because it is the only way to maintain power.”
Rangel said 16 journalists currently were under arrest in Venezuela, with nine detentions coming after the election.
“The moment marks a clear ‘before and after’ in the timeline in the repression against the press,” she said.
Rangel noted research by the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, a nongovernmental organization that monitors the media in Venezuela, that showed about 350 journalists had left the country in recent years.
‘Constant and ruthless attacks’
Carleth Morales, founder of the association of Venezuelan journalists in Spain, Espana Venezuelan Press, told VOA that journalists had been leaving the country since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power in 1999.
“We have undergone about 25 years of constant and ruthless attacks on media freedom. The Venezuelan Nacional College of Journalists said more than 400 media have closed in the past two decades,” Morales said.
“We don’t have a free press or jobs in the sector. The online media, which are a reference in journalism, are led by exiled journalists.”
In 2000, Morales said, Chavez first started threatening the media, marking “a macabre line of self-censorship” and leading to the first wave of exiles.
In 2004-2005, with the government’s passing of the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, a large number of reporters left the country because of the censorship and the threats of jail, she said.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Press Association considered the legislation to be a “gag law” that violated the freedom of the media.
In 2007, Morales said another wave of journalists went into exile after the government tightened control of television channels.
When the media covered 2014 citizens’ protests, several journalists were arrested and foreign journalists were expelled, she said.
In Spain, the largest wave of Venezuelan journalists arrived in 2015, and this rose again in 2017, Morales said, after further waves of repression against the media following their reports about opposition protests and interviews with government critics and independent analysts.
