Journalists Under Fire: Chronicles of Repression in Maduro's Venezuela (2024-2025)

Venezuela's July 28, 2024 presidential election was supposed to be the country's turning point. Instead, it became the signal for the most ferocious assault on the press in its modern history. In the months that followed, Nicolás Maduro's regime jailed journalists, shuttered radio stations, blocked social networks and news websites by the dozens, and forced reporters into hiding, exile, or silence.

Journalists Under Fire is the definitive, day-by-day chronicle of that repression. Drawing on documented reports from IPYS-Venezuela, Espacio Público, PROVEA, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN Fact-Finding Mission, and Venezuela's embattled independent press, veteran journalist Eladio Rodulfo González assembles a case-by-case record of what happened to freedom of expression in Venezuela in 2024 and 2025. Every entry is dated, sourced, and named - from the ten-day ban on X that never ended and the blocking of 79 websites and servers, to the 20 radio stations taken off the air and the reporters charged with "terrorism" and "incitement to hatred" for simply doing their jobs.

Inside, you will find:

• The complete chronology of the post-election crackdown, from July 28, 2024, to June 2025
• Detailed case files on the journalists arrested, disappeared, or forced into exile - among them Ana Carolina Guaita, Roland Carreño, Rory Branker, Nakary Mena, Julio Balza, and Leandro Palmar
• The mechanics of the digital blackout: DNS blocks, VPN shutdowns, platform bans, and the "VenApp" denunciation application
• The repressive legal architecture - the NGO Law and the Libertador Law - and the UN's finding that political persecution in Venezuela constitutes crimes against humanity
• First-hand reporting from Venezuelan media operating under siege

This is the book for journalists, human-rights defenders, researchers, and every reader who wants to understand how a government silences the truth - and what it costs the people who tell it. If you care about press freedom anywhere, read what happened in Venezuela when the press became the story.

Eladio Rodulfo González, who signs his prose and verse works with both surnames, was born in the hamlet of Marabal, later converted into a parish of the same name in the Mariño Municipality, Sucre State, Venezuela, to Guzmán Rodulfo and Nicomedes González. The latter died when he was a young child, and he never saw her even in a portrait. He was raised by his father's second wife, Martina Salazar. He was born on February 18, 1935. He holds a degree in Journalism from the Central University of Venezuela, is a social worker, poet, and cultural researcher. With his wife, Briceida Moya, he fathered Gabriela Lucila, Juan Ramón, Gustavo Adolfo, and Katiuska Alfonsina, named after the poets Gabriela Mistral, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and Alfonsina Storni. In his early years, he worked as a clerk in the warehouse of his father, an oil worker for the Creole Petroleum Corporation in Lagunillas, Zulia State, where he began his high school studies at the Colegio Santa Rosa de Lima, which he continued at the Alcázar and Juan Vicente González high schools and the National School of Social Work, both located in Caracas. He was also co-founder of the Juvenile Division of the now-defunct Technical Corps of the Judicial Police and the Nueva Esparta Section of the National College of Journalists, where he served on the boards of directors of several secretariats and also chaired the Journalist Social Security Institute. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the now-defunct School of Journalism of the Central University of Venezuela, later transformed into the School of Social Communication, on October 9, 1969. He later completed postgraduate studies in Public Administration, specializing in Organization and Methods, and a course in Cultural Research. He also took police courses in Washington, D.C., and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.