Challenging Chavez's grip on Venezuela

[Commentary] During one of his interminable appearances on national television, Hugo Chávez demanded to know last month why Guillermo Zuloaga, the majority owner of Venezuela's last opposition television station, was not in jail. "How is it possible that he can accuse me of such things and walk free?" the strongman demanded. The answer is fairly simple: Zuloaga's statements about Chávez were hardly criminal, and years of government investigations had turned up nothing else prosecutors could plausibly use against him.

But that, of course, was not the response of Chavez's henchmen. Within days of the broadcast, an investigation against the businessman that had been abandoned was reopened; charges were filed. On June 11, a judge ordered Zuloaga arrested and confined to one of the country's high-security prisons. By then, the 67-year-old owner of Globovision, an all-news channel that is now the only alternative in Venezuela to government propaganda, was no longer in the country. Like Globovision's minority owner, another businessman whose bank was taken over by the government three days after the arrest warrant, Zuloaga sought refuge in the United States. Last week he and his son, whose arrest was also ordered, were in Washington, where they were considering making a request for asylum. "It never crossed my mind that I would be forced to live someplace besides Venezuela," Zuloaga told me in an interview. "But I can't be of much help to anyone if I am in a high-security prison. And I think it's public knowledge that all of the institutions of justice in Venezuela are controlled by the president." Zuloaga's own cases offers vivid proof of that. Judges who have dared to rule in his favor have been summarily fired; charges have been blatantly concocted to serve Chávez's whim. The case that forced him into exile concerns not the criticism the caudillo complained of but a claim that the broadcaster, who also owns a car dealership, was guilty of "hoarding" his inventory -- a charge so ludicrous that Chávez's own attorney general had dropped it, before scrambling to revive it after the televised diktat.