The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who spent some of his happiest years chronicling life in Caracas, once declared journalism “the best job in the world”.
Not so if you are reporting on today’s Venezuela, where journalists are feeling the heat as the South American country lurches towards full-blown dictatorship under President Nicolás Maduro.
In the four weeks since Venezuela’s disputed election, local journalists have come up with a distinctly 21st-century tactic to avoid being arrested for reporting on 21st-century socialism: using artificial intelligence avatars to report all the news Maduro’s regime deems unfit to print.
In daily broadcasts, the AI-created newsreaders have been telling the world about the president’s post-election crackdown on opponents, activists and the media, without putting the reporters behind the stories at risk.
Carlos Eduardo Huertas, the director of Connectas, the Colombia-based journalism platform coordinating the initiative, said far from being a gimmick, the use of AI was a response to “the persecution and the growing repression that our colleagues are suffering in Venezuela, where the uncertainty over the safety of doing their job … grows by the minute”.
Huertas said the increasingly authoritarian climate under Maduro meant that “being on camera is no longer so sensible”. The solution was to create virtual journalists to conceal the identities of the real reporters who were making the news.
The initiative involves about 20 Venezuelan news and factchecking outlets and about 100 journalists who share content, which is turned into daily newscasts presented by avatars called La Chama and El Pana, which roughly translate as Bestie and Buddy.
In the debut broadcast this month, the female presenter, Bestie, explained how they hoped to spread the word “about what is really happening in Venezuela”.
“But before we go on – in case you haven’t noticed – we want to let you know that we aren’t real,” the avatar added, before announcing the latest, all-too-real statistics about Maduro’s crusade to stamp out dissent. “In less than two weeks more than 1,000 people have been detained and at least 23 killed during protests,” Bestie said. The numberof detained now stands at more than 1,400.
The name of the AI journalism project, Operación Retuit (Operation Retweet), is partly an ironic reference to the name Maduro’s regime has given to his harsh crackdown on opponents: Operación Tun Tun (Operation Knock Knock).
At least nine journalists are among the prisoners, according to the Venezuelan journalist’s union, SNTP. One of them – the 26-year-old sports reporter and photographer Paúl León – was taken by police while filming peaceful protests and later accused of terrorism, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 30 years.
On Sunday, the prominent entertainment journalist Carmela Longo was taken from her home in Caracas by police after being sacked from her pro-government newspaper, Últimas Noticias.
The need for virtual-reality newscasters is easy to understand given the political chill that has descended on Venezuela since Maduro was first elected in 2013, and has worsened in recent days.
“Sources are not talking. Journalists are forced to work anonymously, sometimes in hiding, concealing their identities out of fear of government retaliation. Social media accounts have gone silent … vital parts of the news ecosystem, like X, have been blocked,” the Venezuela-focused website Caracas Chronicles reported last week.
This month the former head of the state-controlled broadcaster VTV, Vladimir Villegas, claimed about 100 of its employees had been sacked after messages considered hostile to the government were found in their WhatsApp chats.
The second episode of Operation Retweet tackled a particularly dangerous topic given the severity of the government clampdown: it questioned official attempts to blame the opposition – which Maduro accuses of trying to launch a fascist coup – for many of the post-election deaths.
Contrary to government claims, Operation Retweet’s collective investigations suggested state security forces were largely responsible for the body count.
“All of the victims were killed with firearms and, according to witnesses, the suspected culprits were police officers, soldiers or paramilitary groups which here in Venezuela are known as colectivos,” the male avatar, Buddy, told viewers.
His female co-host said most victims were under-30, while a 15-year-old teenager had also been killed. “They came from working-class communities and they had ordinary jobs such as barbers, caretakers, students, construction workers, street hawkers, motorcycle taxi drivers and sports coaches,” the avatar added. “In just a few days … at least 15 children were orphaned.”
Huertas, the Colombian journalist, likened his Venezuelan colleagues to firefighters who were risking their lives for democracy.
“If there’s a fire, you want to see firefighters at the scene. Well, now there’s a fire [in Venezuela] and there are many firefighters present,” he said, celebrating Venezuela’s talented and committed press corps.
Despite the dangers, “[they] are there on the frontline, doing the work that society needs them to”, Huertas said.
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