How to Investigate in Venezuela and Other Hostile Media Environments

Venezuela is one of the most challenging environments in which InSight Crime works. Years of economic, political, and legal harassment have stifled the country’s independent media, with journalists increasingly the target of persistent human rights abuses and repression. InSight Crime is a black-listed media outlet in Venezuela, meaning that our website is often blocked and our investigators have to adopt a very low profile in the country.

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Because reliable information is hard to find, our on-the-ground approach to investigation is particularly important in Venezuela. But an investigation here is also incredibly complicated. So how do we operate in such an environment?

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Safety comes first. Journalists and researchers disproportionately rely on fieldwork in environments like Venezuela’s, but the scoop is never worth a life - yours nor your source’s. We have a duty to protect those who have the courage to speak out.

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The risk of detention in Venezuela is high for those who oppose the Maduro regime.? One of the many safety precautions we take in reporting on Venezuela is publishing under an anonymous byline - the Venezuela Investigative Unit.

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Sources must be given the same courtesy. Our recent investigation into Omar Prieto, the corrupt former governor of Venezuela’s northwestern state of Zulia, relied heavily on the first-hand accounts of primary sources. We made sure that anyone who spoke to us understood how the information would be used and determined how they would be cited. Of more than 100 people we interviewed, few chose to speak on the record out of fear of repercussions.

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Safety online is less obvious, but as important as safety in the field. The social media accounts of powerful political and criminal figures can be a treasure trove of information, as was the case with Prieto and his inner circle, whose reputation for violence ruled out in-person interviews. But researchers and journalists targeting such figures must remember that their digital footprint can be tracked, and they must be diligent about taking basic measures, like using a virtual private network (VPN), ensuring two-factor authentication, and, where necessary, encryption.

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Data is a key strut of investigative journalism. Many authoritarian regimes, including Venezuela’s, do not collect or publish data that may reflect poorly on them. In such cases, researchers and journalists need to be proactive about seeking out alternatives. In searching for data to illustrate spiraling police abuse under Prieto’s tenure as the “Gangster Governor” of Zulia, InSight Crime turned to local NGO reports, parsing through years of data in PDF-embedded tables to find, pull, and clean up the numbers.

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Get creative to ensure journalistic obligations are met while keeping the team safe. In the case of the Prieto investigation, our challenge was to give everyone we named an opportunity to reply. Even though most were public figures and government officials, writing to them required a passport or national identification number - out of the question for security reasons.

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To get around this, we attempted to send as many letters as possible through social media, using institutional accounts not tied to any one InSight Crime investigator. Many failed to go through, so on a second attempt, our co-director and, for security reasons, the public face of the Venezuela Investigative Unit, Jeremy McDermott, sent the letters through WhatsApp, using numbers provided to us by our sources. Although all of the letters arrived, only one person chose to respond.

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To see the final product of this investigative process or learn more about the powerful Venezuelan figures we tried so hard to reach, read our investigation “The Gangster Governor of Zulia: The Rise and Fall of Venezuela’s Omar Prieto.”