While doing background research for this chapter I'm writing on my visit to Venezuela, I found the following Hugo Chavez quote in Chavez: Venezuela and the New Latin America (2005) written by–no kidding–Che's daughter Aleida Guevara:

I remember Venevision, a TV channel that was the spearhead of the coup d’etat; well, in the early days, I was practically king of Venevision. As president-elect, they invited me to participate in a four hour TV program. They even managed to find a photo of me when I was about two, together with my brother Adan, the only photo of me as a baby, naked and covering my private parts with a handkerchief. I was tiny and had hardly any hair. The program presenter, who these days is anti-Chavista through and through, commented, “How cute the president was, how cute he was.’ The whole scene was embarrassing, and it was their plan to lure me over to their side. Yet that little beast [in the photograph] turned out to be a hell of a beast, and little by little he cut them off. The majority [of those people]—rats—were cornered in their own lair, their own trenches, which is where we have them today.

There probably hasn't been much hope for opposition media in Venezuela for a long time–Chavez, to use his own analogy, wasn't likely to corner a bunch of rats in a trench and then spend the rest of his Little Beast life keeping one eye on the edge to make sure nothing was crawling out. As Blanquita Cullum pointed out earlier this year (and do read the entire piece), Chávez is "very concerned about his image, manufactured by Venezuela's government and pro-government media, as a democratic leader." The destruction of the opposition , then, cannot be a one day task, at least not if you want to keep Jimmy Carter servile in your corner. The RCTV shutdown is the template, not the endgame.