...ist ein tapferer Mann, der eigentlich keine Politik machen wollte.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa über Marcel Granier, Chef von Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s Cool Hero

“Granier and his TV network are profoundly deserving of the solidarity they are getting from millions of Venezuelans and from governments, international bodies and world leaders who are denouncing the heinous act against this 54-year-old institution that employed 3,000 workers. RCTV, the flagship of the 1BC corporation, is the latest chapter in a long tradition of civic virtue turned into political necessity at a time of extreme peril to a nation’s freedom. The decision, a few days ago, by Venezuela’s Supreme Court—the institution that should have reversed Chavez’s diktat—to confiscate RCTV’s broadcast equipment, adding insult to injury, exemplifies the circumstances that have made Granier and his journalists a reference for those desperate to find something or someone who embodies justice in Venezuela.

RCTV had the perfect leader in these extreme circumstances: a serene man who never flinched in the face of awesome forces—not when Chavez promulgated the Law of Social Responsibility and amended the penal code a couple of years ago to muzzle the broadcast media, not when government-organized “Bolivarian circles” attacked his employees, not when his coffin was paraded through the streets as a death threat.

Chavez is right to fear such a man. Granier tripled his company’s investments in Venezuela when everything told him he might come to regret that decision, and, through critical journalism and entertainment, managed to command 44 percent of the national audience. In characteristic spirit, Granier said, “We will go back to work on Monday even if we are off the air and people cannot see what we are doing.” In Chavez-land, such a man is indeed intolerable.”