Venezuela will host 7th Conference of Information Ministers from non-aligned countries, July 2-4

Caracas Daily Journal: Venezuela will host the seventh conference of information ministers from the non-aligned countries in Margarita Island between July 2 and 4, and the theme for discussion will be building a new order of international communications. The conference was announced on Thursday at a press conference by Communications and Information Minister Andres Izarra, accompanied by Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro at the Foreign Ministry.

The new order envisages more equitable flows of information, pluralization of content, democratization of information, access to the same and to the capacity to produce messages, according to reports from the state media.

"Margarita will become the epicenter of the discussion of topics of great importance such as the case of the media dictatorship and the construction of a new order in this sector," Izarra said, cited by state television channel VTV. Venezuela would be fertile land for such a discussion, he continued in a reference to the political crisis in which President Hugo Chávez was briefly out of power in April 2002 and the two-month national strike around the turn of 2002-03.

Venezuela, he said, was "perhaps the only country in the world that suffered a coup d'etat propelled by private communication media, a country that lived with 64 days of media terrorism on the part of private communication media while the process of the petroleum sabotage developed," VTV quoted him as saying.

Izarra went on to list steps that Venezuela had started to take in terms of the new order, such as founding the regional broadcasters, Telesur and Radiosur, whose experience he said would be extended to the non-aligned countries, Venezuela joining a planned News Agency of the Non-Aligned headquartered in Malaysia, and the establishment of a network for these countries to exchange material.