The controversy “Hate Law” that governs in Venezuela and to which Nicolas Maduro alluded this Sunday in a radio interview with a Buenos Aires media outlet, in which he spoke about the attack suffered by Cristina Kirchner, was described from the outset by opposition sectors as a form of censorship because of the limits it imposes on the press.
The norm was approved in November 2017 by the National Constituent Assembly (ANC). The full name is Law against hatred and for peaceful coexistence and empowers the authorities to punish citizens with prison or with fines and media closures “that promote hatred and racism.”
The law punishes up to 20 years in prisonl Acts of discrimination based on race, social background or political ideology, in addition to contemplating the closure of media outlets and parties that promote “fascism.”
“Who publicly (…) incite hatreddiscrimination or violence against a person or group of people due to their actual or presumed membership in a certain social, ethnic, religious, or political group (…) will be punished with 10 to 20 years in prison,” the article states. 20 of the law.
The text also provides for the possibility of punishing police and military personnel who do not prosecute these hate crimes with sentences of 8 to 10 years in prison, the same measure that will be applied to health personnel who discriminate when providing care.
Nicolás Maduro with Cristina Kirchner
The standard was an idea of Nicholas Maduro proposal on the occasion of the anti-government protests that took place between April and July 2017 in Venezuela and left more than 120 dead, dozens injured and detained.
Article 10 of the initiative declared September 21 as the National Day of Peace and the month of May of each year as the national month for the promotion of peace, coexistence and the fight against intolerance.
According to the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad Venezuela (IPSyV), during the first three years of the rule’s validity “at least six media outlets and 17 press workers -for a total of 23 affected- have been intimidated, accused, threatened and prosecuted for hate crimes.
In February of this year, meanwhile, there was a strong controversy when the Venezuelan government ordered the arrest of a 72-year-old woman for making a series of jokes comparing Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez and various Venezuelan officials with arepas, in a video that It went viral on TikTok. She was charged with promoting and inciting violence.
For Maduro, the attack on Cristina “is the result of an accumulation of hate campaigns”
“I do not get out of my astonishment with what happened to Cristina Kirchner. This assassination attempt has marked the entire continent and alarms go off. What happened, why did it happen? It is incredible that this type of attempted assassination happens in the 21st century,” Nicolás Maduro said this Sunday in an interview with Radio 10.
“In 2018 I experienced an assassination attempt. The material authors were captured and they told where they trained,” Maduro compared, who also linked these attacks to so-called “hate speech.”
“It is the result of a accumulation of hate campaigns, exclusionary polarization, psychological warfare. The people who run big media outlets and networks know the influence hate campaigns have,” she said.
Nicolás Maduro defended his “Hate Law”.
“No medium is prohibited”
There the controversy arose ‘Hate Law’, approved in 2017 in the Caribbean country and that places strong limits on media and social networks. “Enforcing the law is very important. The message of multiplication of death symbols is the worst thing that can happen to a society. The violence comes back to them,” he said.
Maduro denied that there are prohibitions on the media in his country, as denounced by the opposition.
“No media outlet is prohibited in Venezuela, but there are rules because hate messages have limits in the media and networks,” he said, before launching a curious comparison with pornography.
“What there are are rules of the game. Pornography, for example, is prohibited. It is a limit that is established. Hate messages are prohibited,” he said.
Finally, he analyzed that “the media have their laws everywhere. Social networks respond to regulation in the United States and the European Union only. In the rest of the countries they do what they want, they follow the guidelines of the billionaire tycoons “.