Published at: 26/06/2024 09:00 PM

(BBC, 2-12-2021 + EL NACIONAL, 8-6-1961)

• Documents declassified by the BBC, between 2019 and 2020, revealed how British intelligence services created and orchestrated an operation aimed at economically blowing up El Nacional.
• One of the files exposed to the public light reads verbatim: “Last year (1961), through twisted means, this intelligence office persuaded the main economic organizations to stop publishing advertisements in El Nacional.”
• This forced the largest newspaper in Venezuela to change its editorial line and remove Miguel Otero Silva from its management.
• On March 14, 1963, the newspaper El Nacional published the change of its board of directors, the appointment of its new director, Raúl Valera, (attorney in charge of Nelson Rockefeller's business conglomerate), and the adoption of a new editorial line.
• In this way, Miguel Otero Silva, proud of Venezuelan literature, founder of the chair of humor, and majority shareholder of the El Nacional Publishing Company, was exonerated from his own information project.
• Since then, the impartial and plural editorial line, respectful of the diversity of Venezuelan thought and behavior, was changed to one complacent to the repressive politics of Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni.
• The documents declassified by the BBC revealed how an advertising boycott was implemented to strangle revenues and twist its editorial line.
• On December 3, 2021, the secret MI6 files were published, which revealed how Otero Silva was forced to sell part of his shares and resign from management; all power was transferred to Raúl Valera, Nelson Rockefeller's agent.
• The news published in March 1963 did not say, however, that these changes had been forced by a brutal advertising boycott to which that newspaper had been subjected for two years and to which, after almost going bankrupt, it had finally given up accepting the departure of its founder, editor-in-chief and co-owner: the renowned Venezuelan writer.
• The campaign against the newspaper was framed at a particular moment in the Cold War, when Western powers tried to contain the expansion of communism in Latin America after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, on January 1, 1959.
• Leslie Boas was in charge of the Information Research Department (IRD) in Caracas, a secret office of the British Foreign Office dedicated to propaganda tasks in the 1960s.
• The IRD collected information on pro-communist groups and personalities, and at the same time, it generated anti-communist information material that it then provided to media, personalities and other organizations, who distributed them as if they were their own.
• Boas was also responsible for the IRD for the rest of Latin America, so he not only led this operation in Venezuela, but he also articulated a large number of covert propaganda actions in many other countries in the region.
• In a report, dated May 25, 1961, and classified as “top secret”, Boas informed London about the “satisfactory” evolution of the operation against the Caracas newspaper.
• “As you know,” he said, “El Nacional was the newspaper with the highest circulation in Venezuela, whose owner and most of its workers were communists and sympathizers [of communism] and it is also the headquarters of the Communist-dominated Venezuelan Press Association.”
• “As you also know, we have been unable... to manage to place anti-communist material in the newspaper or even (...) material that would have been considered useful for the United Kingdom and for Western ideas. Therefore, we have taken the line that if you cannot make the newspaper cooperate, it would be better to try to weaken it,” Boas wrote, referring to the motivations behind the operation (source: BBC News).

Mazo News Team