DORAL Venezuelan Web radio struggles

Eduardo Plomo, left, Paul Sfeir and Donatella Ungredda conduct their nightly talk show 'A Little Time with You' on Radionexx.com.

A struggling Doral station keeps Venezuelans in their South American country informed about what's happening there as President Hugo Chávez cracks down on press freedoms.
Posted on Mon, Apr. 07, 2008
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BY CASEY WOODS
cwoods@MiamiHerald.com

RONNA GRADUS/MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Eduardo Plomo, left, Paul Sfeir and Donatella Ungredda conduct their nightly talk show 'A Little Time with You' on Radionexx.com.
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Venezuelan Paul Sfeir, music producer and online radio pioneer, leans toward the computer screen in his Doral studio and points to the screaming headline on a blog that calls him a coup-plotter and an ``immoral bastard.''

''It's all lies,'' says Sfeir, the owner of Radionexx.com, an online radio station dedicated to challenging the leftist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. ``I learned a long time ago not to pay attention to it.''

Right now Sfeir has more immediate enemies. Among them: the rent and the electricity bill. The station, on which thousands of Venezuelans depend, is struggling to survive.

With the Venezuelan government forcing opposition voices off the air and pressuring others into self-censorship, reliable information on events in the South American country can be hard to come by. Thousands depend on Sfeir's scrappy operation to pierce that news vacuum.

Listeners in Venezuela dial a local number that rings in the South Florida studios, providing an immediate outlet for local reports. During the student protests last fall, the Venezuelan government at times insisted there were no protests in smaller Venezuelan towns, but calls to the station from those places told a different story -- one of burning tires and dissent.

Sfeir and his wife started the station in their garage four years ago, eventually bankrolling its expansion to the small warehouse studio with more than $150,000 from the sale of the family's Doral home. Now the cash has run out.

Other fundraising attempts have failed. Because it is controversial, Venezuelan businesses inside the country will not advertise. U.S. foundations have turned down grant requests. Many of the Venezuelans living in South Florida fled their country's ideological controversies and left family behind and so they shy away from politics.

Without a cash infusion, the station will go dark within a few months.

''They want someone to take on Chávez but they don't want to do it themselves because they're terrified,'' said Sfeir, 42, a lanky man with a handlebar mustache and a quick laugh. ``Their fear makes them passive.''

Chávez has steadily squeezed press freedom, most dramatically with his refusal to renew the license of opposition television station RCTV last year -- effectively shutting down the nation's most popular channel. The move sparked massive student protests.

Chávez has since threatened the remaining opposition station, a 24-hour news channel called Globovisión that is generally only available to those with cable or a satellite antenna.

ALTERNATIVE VOICE

Chávez regularly takes over the private news outlets to broadcast political speeches -- a practice known as a cadena or chain. He has racked up 1,000 such hours since 1999.

During those cadenas, and in periods of high national drama, Radionexx's audience skyrockets. The Web traffic monitoring company Alexa reports that 97 percent of the station's listeners are in Venezuela.

On the day of the Dec. 2 referendum on Chávez's proposed constitutional reforms, Radionexx operated 24 hours straight, receiving 4,000 phone calls and eight million hits, Sfeir said.

''People in Venezuela turn to Radionexx in times of crisis,'' said Ernesto Ackermann, of the local activist group Independent Venezuelan American Citizens. ``All of us listen to Radionexx because it is the only way to know what is happening in Venezuela.''

With Venezuela passing through a relatively tranquil moment, the station draws about 3,500 listeners to its live daily shows, Sfeir said.

Human rights activist Patricia Andrade uses her weekly Behind Bars show to give updates on the cases she has filed before the Inter-America Court of Human Rights on behalf of some Venezuelan prisoners.

In the weeks before the December referendum, Johann Peña dedicated several of his Dossiers programs to a crash course in ``How to conspire against Chávez and survive the attempt.''

A former police officer in Venezuela, he taught listeners ways to foil surveillance attempts. He suggested chemicals that would help them overcome the effects of tear gas. He described how to send messages covertly by taping notes to park benches and tables.

REACHING OUT

The most popular program is Sfeir's own A Little Time With You evening show. The freewheeling affair ranges from the ruckus -- Sfeir and his co-hosts joking about Chávez's nursing habits as an infant -- to the serious, such as an interview with U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on her efforts to have the State Department declare the Venezuelan government a sponsor of terrorism.

The main attraction on Sfeir's program and others, however, are the calls from Venezuelans living there. Listeners complain about the violent crimes, the four hours they spent in line trying to buy milk or the arrest of a student protester they just witnessed. There are many regulars, with on-air nicknames such as ''Franky Boy,'' ''The Cousin,'' and the James Bond-esque ``Max 5.''

With people calling in from countries including Qatar, Spain and the United Kingdom, the station has also become a fragile link between the scattered branches of this newborn diaspora.

During a fundraising drive to buy school supplies for the children of prisoners, a woman called Andrade from Holland, frustrated that there was no way for her to easily donate from Europe.

With the affection Radionexx commands in Venezuela and abroad, Sfeir's frustration with its current financial plight is palpable.

''Everyone says we always are the best, we are the only station that is still truly free, that we are the voice of Venezuela,'' he said.

``They say they depend on us, but we need to be able to depend on them. We need their help.''