The newspaper was sentenced by the Maduro regime to pay Diosdado Cabello $13.3 million dollars.
By Jose Melendez / Havana Times
Venezuelan journalist Miguel Henrique Otero Castillo, president and director of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, is living between a dream and a nightmare.
Committed to his unrelenting struggle to exercise journalism with freedom, he dreams that the day will come when the ruling regime in his country will fall and that, across its front page, the newspaper will publish: “Venezuela returns to democracy.”
Faced with the daily reality of an empowered and unshakable political structure, he fears that the day will come when the Venezuelan government achieves one of its goals: to completely extinguish freedom of expression and of the press in Venezuela.
“We will continue to resist,” said Otero, 74, from Madrid in an interview with El Universal. He describes the drama of El Nacional due to the permanent harassment of Diosdado Cabello, the number two man of the Bolivarian revolution installed in 1999.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court, loyal to and controlled by Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, sentenced the morning newspaper on April 16 to compensate Cabello with $13.3 million dollars for slander.
Cabello sued the newspaper for libel in April 2015 for reproducing a story from the Spanish newspaper ABC. The article reported that the powerful politician was under investigation in the United States for alleged ties to drug-trafficking.
The ruling of the Supreme Court was on civil proceedings, because the criminal one is still pending. Cabello, a legislator and lieutenant, confirmed that if “El Nacional” refuses to compensate him, he will claim the company’s assets.
Founded in 1943, El Nacional suspended its print edition in 2018 due to a lack of paper and due to the acute political, institutional, and socioeconomic crisis in Venezuela.
“I left Venezuela, and I have not returned, at the time Cabello filed the lawsuit. I was outside when (in May 2015) they dictated preventive measures. That is Venezuelan justice: someone from the Government initiates a trial and they immediately impose preventive measures,” he recalled.
The measures, still in force, include freezing assets, prohibition of leaving the country and to report weekly to an authority.
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