During one of his interminable appearances on national television, Hugo Chávez demanded to know last month why Guillermo Zuloaga, the majority owner of Venezuela's last opposition television station, was not in jail. "How is it possible that he can accuse me of such things and walk free?" the strongman demanded.
The answer is fairly simple: Zuloaga's statements about Chávez were hardly criminal, and years of government investigations had turned up nothing else prosecutors could plausibly use against him. But that, of course, was not the response of Chavez's henchmen. Within days of the broadcast, an investigation against the businessman that had been abandoned was reopened; charges were filed. On June 11, a judge ordered Zuloaga arrested and confined to one of the country's high-security prisons.
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