‘The Al-Jazeera of South America’

Telesur is a new, independent South American cable news network. It has been called “the Al-Jazeera of South America” by both its allies and enemies. The comparison is apt. It arose under the pressure of similar conditions in the media in South America.

Telesur is part of the project of Bolivarian regional integration. The president of Telesur, Andres Izarra, who is also the Venezuelan communications minister, said, “We’re launching Telesur as an initiative to integrate through communication the different countries of the region. It’s a window, so we can get to know each other better.” (BBC online)

Telesur’s vice president and general director, Uruguayan journalist Aram Aharonian, who was in Chicago for the Global Fusion media conference Sept. 28-30, described Telesur as “the first counter-hegemonic telecommunications project known in South America.”

Telesur has been in the works for four years. Its first transmission was on July 25, 2005. By the end of this September, Telesur had more than 40 journalists working out of its home base in Caracas and in worldwide bureaus. Telesur is a joint venture of the Venezuelan, Cuban, Bolivian and Argentinean governments.

According to Aharonian, the guidelines for the editorial content of the programming are to include “nothing (that is) against regional integration or the struggle against neoliberal globalization.”

Telesur reaches between 3 million to 12 million viewers per day. In Aharonian’s words, “Telesur is an alternative to the hegemonic television of the north. Telesur is not the goal; it is the tool that shows that something like this is possible, that in a decade we can have 10 or 15 Telesurs, that we can have a democratization of the media.”

Workers World participated in an interview with Aharonian.

Workers World: On behalf of Workers World Party, I wanted to congratulate you and everybody else involved with Telesur on your success with the station. I know that you have a monthly magazine that’s published in Caracas called “Question.”

Aram Aharonian: We publish in Caracas and Buenos Aires, two editions of the same magazine. And we are trying to have a third edition in Europe and Spain now with “Question,” our monthly magazine. We had a weekly economic magazine. It was a real good experience because we were talking about the new economy, not the traditional economy; the economy of the people; the solidarity economy.

What is your opinion of the role of the media in the wars the U.S. has waged recently? What sort of impact do you see Telesur having on the U.S.’s plans for both Venezuela and Colombia?

We know they needed a dictatorship to impose their economic and political project, their imperialist project. Nowadays, they want to substitute, to change their military dictatorships for a media dictatorship. You have to remember that, back in 1991, Peter Arnett transmitted live in what we thought was the first Gulf war.

The media have been the most important missiles of the United States. In the case of Colombia and Venezuela, at this point, I don’t believe there is a real possibility of confrontation, open confrontation. We insist that we are a TV station that assists in the process of the integration of Latin America.

We rescue the common ideals, our common values of all the countries of the continent, our shared reality. The national TV in Colombia, and most international TV, too, hides the reality, the reality of internal conflict in Colombia. We can show what happens with the campesino communities, with Indigenous communities there.

We are going to keep showing the reality, what really happens there. I don’t believe there will be open, armed confrontation at this point, between the U.S. and Latin America. Of course, there are so many people who want it, the oligarchies and the foreign interests.

On the Telesur board, there are a lot of people who are very well known, people like Tariq Ali, Ernesto Cardenal ...

This is the advisory board, not the directors’ board.

Danny Glover is also on the advisory board, and he made a comment, I think it might have been last year. He said, “I do not see any Afro-descendants from this region on this advisory body, nor Indigenous people, and very few women. It is critical that we keep in mind who we are talking to.” To this President Chávez said, “Danny, I am with you.” Has Telesur started to address this problem in any way?

We know that the people exist, Indigenous people, Afro-descendants, whites, people of mixed heritage. Latin America is a mix of diversity. One thing that Telesur has put a lot of effort into is the non-discrimination policy against anyone. Perhaps at some point, we will show more documentaries on these minority issues, but we just don’t get them; people don’t send them.

We do not make documentaries. We receive documentaries from independent producers. For us it is so important to pay attention to Haiti. They had the first independent state in Latin America. It’s so important for us that as the Republic of Colombo in Brazil, as the struggles now of the community of Buenaventura port in Ecuador, there are separate communities of Afro-Americans—in all the ports of America.

When he [Danny Glover] came to our first advisors’ committee, he was working with us three days, three complete days, at the table, working, really working, with ideas, with experience. We had a great time.