Venezuelan Media Speaks Language of Silence

For the past two decades, Venezuelans have discussed what they would do on the day. The most popular answer, by far, is to get insanely drunk. Some people have kept special bottles of liquor stored for years, waiting for a celebration they feared wouldn’t come in their lifetime.

Cue January 3: the day news broke that the United States military had captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The day had come. And while millions of Venezuelans in exile popped the champagne and danced on the streets, Venezuelans in Venezuela remained largely low profile as a new wave of repression threatens their livelihood.

Explaining Venezuela to people who haven’t lived there can feel like speaking in a language that doesn’t exist anywhere else. For us, that language is silence. We had to learn it when censorship and repression became state-mandated. When our own started disappearing and showing up in prisons. When even sending a text wasn’t safe anymore.

That’s why this moment looks so quiet inside Venezuela, and so loud outside of it.

This contrast isn’t accidental. It’s the product of the system working exactly as designed, and to understand this well-oiled dissent-squashing machine, it helps to look at one of its earliest and most persistent targets: the free press.

The forced closure of private television network RCTV in 2007 marked the beginning of the chavista regime’s war on independent media. Since then, its tactics have expanded and adapted for the digital era.

In an article for Wired, journalist Lisseth Boon compiled the numbers of Venezuela’s decimated media landscape: over 400 news outlets have closed in the past two decades, 61 independent digital outlets are blocked, and several social media platforms like X, WhatsApp, and Instagram have been denounced by the regime, precisely because they remain one of the last accessible channels of communication for ordinary Venezuelans.

When the few remaining traditional media outlets are heavily controlled by the state, the damage goes beyond censorship. Over time, many Venezuelans have learned to treat the press as another arm of propaganda, or worse — as a threat. Suspicion became the default setting. For chavismo, that erosion of trust is one of its most effective victories: it isolates people not from information, but from one another.

And when pulling the plug isn’t enough, chavismo escalates.

Under both Chávez and Maduro, the state has routinely incarcerated people who defy it or are simply inconvenient. But the regime’s definition of a “threat” has never been limited to political adversaries.

So far, the government has released a significant number of jailed journalists and media workers. According to press freedom groups, 19 journalists and press workers were released, leaving 5 imprisoned out of the 24 who remained. However, like other political prisoners, they are subject to cautionary measures that prevent them from making public statements. 

At its peak, Venezuela’s political prisoner count surged into over 900, and human rights groups like Foro Penal have repeatedly warned that the true number is both high and difficult to verify, precisely because the state refuses transparency. In practice, the only reason we know anything is that volunteers, journalists, and human rights defenders have built unofficial databases to document what the regime will not.

People often speak about Venezuelan journalism as if it’s extinct, but that isn’t true. There are still journalists inside the country. Like so many Venezuelans trying to survive, they’ve simply adapted: reporting anonymously, protected by their newsrooms, and often represented by editors who had no choice but to leave after years of threats, harassment, and criminalization.

When they found themselves out of the woods, those journalists found ways to go back to their bold reporting.

On the night of January 3, as Venezuelans woke up to explosions and low-flying aircraft over Caracas, a group of journalists in exile coordinated a live broadcast that lasted roughly 10 hours, bringing together reporters, analysts, and experts across outlets to confirm what was happening in real time. Some viewers joined easily. Others relied on VPNs. But the larger point is that the broadcast existed at all.

That same instinct has driven some of the most innovative journalism Venezuela has produced in recent years. In 2025, a coalition of Venezuelan newsrooms was recognized with Spain’s King of Spain Journalism Award for Operación Retuit, a project that used AI-generated anchors to deliver news written and verified by real journalists, while protecting reporters on the ground from persecution.

This is what so many outsiders miss when they ask why Venezuelans inside the country aren’t reacting “loudly” right now. For those of us in the diaspora, speaking in full volume feels like a duty to the people who are still forced to survive by blending in.

Daniela Tabata Bottini is a Venezuelan journalist and immigrant based in Southern California. She is passionate about politics, immigration, human rights, and pop culture.

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