Why being a satirist is no joke in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

Students protest against the suspension of the RCTV network in Caracas. Photograph: JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images

Another humid night in Caracas, and in a cafe off Avenida Francisco De Miranda a television glows in the corner. President Hugo Chávez is making a speech. The volume is too low to make out what he is saying, but he seems to be frowning. At a far table, Laureano Márquez, his back to the TV, sips a coffee. It's been a long day and the newspaper columnist looks worried.

He is pondering a dilemma. It sounds frivolous: should he – will he – quote Charlie Chaplin in his next column? Márquez, Venezuela's best known humorist and satirist, wants to cite Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator, the 1940 classic, including the line: "Dictators die and the power they took from the people will return to the people." The columnist shifts in his seat. "The problem is 'dictators die'. Not my own words, but the government could interpret them to mean I'm calling for the president's assassination." He shakes his head. "I don't think it's worth the risk."

Venezuela's version of Armando Iannucci has learned to be careful when satirising Venezuela's mercurial leader. A recent whimsical piece imagining the country post-Chávez was branded a "fascist" call for a coup, terrorism and genocide. "It justifies the use of social violence, of civil war, as a way to take power," said Blanca Eckhout, the communication minister. She demanded prosecution.

Another Márquez column in 2006, a fictitious Christmas letter from Chávez's daughter Rosines, earned the newspaper Tal Cual a criminal charge and $50,000 fine, a hefty sum for a shoestring operation. "Humour is an act of reflection and exposes the contradictions and ridiculousness of those in power," said Márquez. "This government tries to control it through intimidation and fear."

Whether or not Chávez can take a joke has become a deadly serious issue. Critics say the treatment of satirists exposes a wider drift towards authoritarianism which could seal the fate of South America's flagship socialist revolution. A crackdown on independent radio and TV stations is muting opposition voices at a crucial moment. Mounting economic and social difficulties are fuelling protests in Andean towns, Caribbean ports and the capital Caracas. For Chávez, this represents a threat to his stated aim to rule for several more decades.

"The degree of government intolerance of criticism has reached the point where any type of opposition may be identified as a subversive act," said Catalina Botero, special rapporteur on freedom of expression of the Organisation of American States (OAS). "It is not easy to express yourself freely when you know you could be… subjected to criminal or disciplinary proceedings which could lead to jail or bankruptcy." Humour and satire, which by nature involved exaggeration and provocation, inspired special ire, she said. "They are labelled outright terrorist acts."

It has been a terrible week for the president. The OAS's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a 319-page report which painted an alarming picture of repression and intolerance in Venezuela. Chávez responded by calling the organisation a mafia and its leader "excrement". The former tank commander received another broadside from a Spanish judge who accused Venezuela's rulers of collaborating with Eta and Farc terrorists. Chávez said the judge was part of a Yankee imperialist conspiracy.

The central bank revealed that the economy shrank 3.3% last year, confirming worsening stagflation. An opinion poll by the Venezuelan Institute for Data Analysis found that 62% thought the country's situation was negative and 54% had little or no confidence in Chávez, a gloom driven by water and electricity shortages which have plunged cities into darkness and closed factories. Protesters interrupted a Chávez rally with a cacerolazo, a banging of pots and pans. It seemed metaphorically appropriate that amid all this the Avila, the forested mountain which hulks over Caracas, began to burn. A drought has made it a tinderbox and blazes erupt almost daily, the flames licking up the slopes.

After 11 years, in power Chávez is not about to fall. Astute and charismatic, he has weathered many crises and has strong cards to play. He remains popular with many of the poor for spending oil revenues on social programmes which brought health clinics and subsidised food stores into the barrios, the slums which ring every city. Chavista loyalists control the armed forces, national assembly, courts, electoral agency and state oil company. A new class of "Boligarchs" – politically connected tycoons named after the independence hero Simón Bolívar – have their wealth and power invested in Chávez. The question, for now, is not whether the president will hold on. It is how.

Part of the strategy involves neutering critical voices on the airwaves. Last July, the government shut 32 radio stations, citing regulatory infractions, and warned it had another 208 in its sights. In January, it temporarily pulled the plug on RCTV, a cable channel, over its refusal to broadcast Chávez speeches. It was the channel's second closure. In 2007, the government did not renew RCTV's terrestrial broadcast licence, citing its support for a 2002 coup which briefly ousted Chávez. It limped back as a cable network.

The last critical TV voice, Globovisión, appears in limbo. A shrill news channel which makes Fox look tame, Chávez has repeatedly threatened to close it. Now a possible truce has been brokered. The channel has continued attacking Chávez but there is a suspicion that it will gradually soften its coverage, as did two other formerly outspoken channels, Televen and Venevisión.

Chávez had a legitimate grievance over the private media's backing of the 2002 US-backed coup but that did not justify the ensuing "slow grind of indirect and direct repression against the media", said Robert Shaw, of International Media Support, a Denmark-based watchdog group.

The president, a talented media performer, dominates the airwaves. In addition to a Sunday radio and TV show, which lasts up to eight hours, he routinely uses a law which obliges all channels, state and private, to interrupt programming to transmit his speeches live. Since taking office he has "chained" networks more than 1,923 times, the broadcasts exceeding 1,252 hours, equivalent to 52 days. State TV is sycophantic and depicts Venezuela as a socialist utopia-in-progress under threat of imminent US attack. A chat-show, The Razorblade, airs clips of opponents' intercepted phone conversations, sometimes spliced with recorded animal grunts. Rod Stoneman, executive producer of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a documentary sympathetic to Chávez, lamented state TV's "old East Europe style", but said western media had its own bias. "There is a tendency to exaggerate problems." Context — such as Chávez's repeated electoral mandates to transform the country in the face of opposition from traditional elites — was often neglected, said Stoneman.

Eva Golinger, an author and editor of a state-backed newspaper, Correo del Orinoco, said Venezuela had "ample" freedoms and that media organisations got into trouble only when they broke the law. In the case of Márquez, prosecutors had not acted on the government's complaints. "Nothing has happened. He is still there. And yet there is a campaign to discredit and demonise the government. Why? To justify foreign intervention and regime change."

One thing both sides agree on is that satire is thriving. "Tonnes of it," said Golinger. "A flowering," said Márquez. The Tal Cual columnist often makes his points through offbeat topics, such as Tutankhamun, and refers to Chávez by other names, such as Estebán. "It's a code, but people know what I mean." Even so, he says, self-censorship has become the rule. "You can say what you want, but you don't know what price you may pay; that's not freedom."

Tal Cual's director, Teodoro Petkoff, calls the president Chacumbele after a self-destructing, ne'er-do-well figure of Cuban lore. One cartoonist, Roberto Weil, depicts the president's head as a military boot. One website, elchiguirebipolar.com, runs spoof stories. It has just launched a cartoon, Presidential Island, which maroons Latin American leaders in a parody of the TV series Lost. The YouTube link has had more than 200,000 hits.

Reality has a habit of catching up with the caricatures. Chávez, long depicted as a wannabe Fidel, recently declared himself a Marxist and brought in a Cuban minister, Ramiro Valdés, to tackle an electricity crisis. The opposition, long tarred as Americanised elites who prefer burgers to arepas – a popular snack consisting of a corn bread bun with a savoury filling – sometimes step from central casting. "We are from the elite, we have to be sincere about that," said Cristóbal Arraiz, 22, a student activist munching supper in TGI Fridays in an upscale Caracas neighbourhood. "But the values we are fighting for are universal."

Beside him Nicolás Cárdenas, also 22, nodded. As head of the Metropolitan university's student council, he is part of a nationwide student movement whose protests often end in arrests and riot police teargas. "I feel that if I don't fight for my country I could lose my country. This could end in dictatorship."

Cárdenas had a BlackBerry and was eating a bacon burger with Jack Daniel's sauce, but was closer to Venezuela's pulse, he felt, than a president who lived in a palace and preached the need for a "new socialist man" to a nation addicted to baseball and shopping. "Chávez is a good talker, but after all this time he can't hide the failures. He can't keep talking about the things he's going to do. People have had enough."

The restaurant's TV screens, recently filled with a four-hour Chávez speech, now showed a sports channel in which a man with bulging veins throws weights over a net before wobbling away, exhausted. A satirist could have had fun linking the two programmes, but with the volume low diners barely noticed the change.