The president of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP), Alejandro Aguirre, said in an interview published in Brazilian newspaper O’Globo that Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is trying to follow “Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chávez” after the comments that Lula has lately made over freedom of the press.

After considering them as a direct attack on the media sector, which criticizes Lula’s administration, Aguirre told reporters that the president’s remarks are “something dangerous.”

Lula had recently said during public appearances that some sectors of the Brazilian media are acting “like political parties,” and added that “freedom of the press is a right that belongs to the people and not to the government.”

Aguirre went even further and said that “it is obvious that we are before a government that’s following the steps of other Latin American governments, like Chavez’s in Venezuela, and Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, by developing some tough attitudes against the independent media that does not stay on the government’s course.”

“Unfortunately we had cases of democratic governments within the region that at some point began to act in an authoritarian manner to control the media, particularly those media groups that want to maintain an independent line.”

It was last Saturday, when during an election rally with the presence of Dilma Roussef, the ruling party’s candidate, Lula said that the Roussef’s victory on next presidential elections will represent “a noisy defeat” for those media sectors always criticising his administration.

“We are going to beat some newspapers and magazines that behave like a political party but don’t have the courage to say that they truly are a political party or to openly tell which candidate they support.”

Likewise, Lula warned that freedom of the press strengthens democracy, but cannot be used to spread lies: “Freedom of the press does not mean they can make up things every day.”

Source: Buenos Aires Herald (Argentina)