I en artikel i tidskriften Time om presidentvalkampanjen i Venezuela uppmärksammas hur de statliga medierna använder antisemitisk och homofob agitation för att demonisera den sittande presidenten Hugo Chavez utmanare Henrique Capriles:

As former TIME Venezuela reporter Charlie Devereux writes in an insightful piece for Bloomberg this week, Chávez’s vast state-run media apparatus is already working overtime not just to defeat but to demonize the 39-year-old Capriles in fairly slanderous fashion. Some of the uglier examples:

Two days before the Feb. 12 opposition primary, Chavista talk-show host Mario Silva, already notorious for his anti-Semitic rants, took the homophobic route. On the state-run Venezolana de Televisión (VTV) network, Silva told viewers that 12 years ago Capriles was caught engaging in oral sex with another man in a car on a Caracas street at 1 a.m. Silva held up a document that he claimed was a police report, which has since become available online – but it rather ham-handedly identifies only Capriles and not the supposed other man. The 2000 cop report has been rendered even more dubious by the fact that the Caracas precinct where it was supposedly filed won’t confirm its existence. Capriles denies any such incident ever took place.

But that doesn’t mean the Chavistas aren’t flirting with the anti-Semitic gambit too. A day after the primary, the website of the state-run Radio Nacional de Venezuela published an article headlined “The Enemy is Zionism,” which calls Capriles a tool of Israel because he’s met in the past with a group representing Venezuela’s Jewish community – which is the sort of thing Capriles does because, although he is Roman Catholic, his maternal grandparents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. Other state-run media have run similar pieces.

Chávez has insisted in the past that his government’s anti-Israel stance shouldn’t be equated with anti-Semitism. Still, high-profile Chavistas often cross that line, as when Silva in 2009 made a point of noting that two opposition student leaders had Jewish last names – “So right away you can see the problem,” he said – or last year, when Manuel Anteliz, a reporter for the state-run Telesur network, ridiculed Maickel Melamed, a disabled Venezuelan running in the New York City Marathon, suggesting Melamed would be a “street cripple” begging for money if he weren’t a “fashionable…mediagenic millionaire Jew.” (Melamed is Jewish but not a millionaire.)

Läs även Matthew Fishbane i Tablet som påminner om att detta inte är den första antisemitiska kampanjen i Venezuela under Chavez styre.