Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 12th. I'm your host Anastasia Glova and I'm on the phone today with Cato adjunct scholar Carlos Ball.

Carlos formerly worked at the Venezuelan Daily Diario de Caracas and today he talks about

Hugo Chavez's announcement of massive nationalizations of privately owned Venezuelan

companies. I read your article on Cato's Spanish language website Elkato.org about your story at the Venezuelan

newspaper Diario de Caracas. Can you tell me what happened?

Well there was a long time ago back in 1987, I was editor of Caracas Daily,

or the Liorio of Caracas.

And the editorial policy was very critical of the government of the social democrat president Lucinci and he more or less accepted

our commentary and our criticism as long as it was done inside Venezuela but that that year it was March 1987 I represented Venezuelan

journalist at the Inter-American Press Association meeting in San

Antonio, Texas and I was speaking about freedom of the press in Venezuela.

And I accused the government of their very bad clan of installing a newsprint factory in Venezuela,

copying what the Mexican government was then doing.

They own Pipsa, the newsprint company in Mexico,

whose chairman was the minister of interior which in Mexico and

also in Venezuela is the head of the national police.

So newspapers that published things that the government didn't like, did not receive newsprint,

so they have to stop publication for a while.

Actually, they said that the truck carrying the newsprint to the paper got lost and couldn't

deliver it. Of course those were political lies and that was exactly the plan that

President Lucinci had for the newspapers in Venezuela, especially those that were critical of his regime.

So at that time in May of 1987, the broadcasting license of radio,acas television, the oldest radio and television

...