Leading article: A show of intolerance

Television has become the primary political battleground in Venezuela. At midnight on Sunday, Radio Caracas Television ended its final broadcast - a consequence of President Hugo Chavez's refusal to renew its public broadcasting licence. RCTV has already been replaced with a new state-funded channel that will, in the President's words, "better reflect society". The channel's closure brought some 5,000 anti-Chavez protesters on to the capital's streets. Ugly scenes followed as police tried to scatter them.

None of this came as much of a surprise. President Chavez has long detested RCTV, accusing it of helping to incite a coup against him in 2002. When he won re-election for a third time last December, he warned he would not be renewing its licence. The public knew this confrontation was coming.

We should be wary of regarding this as a typical case of autocratic suppression. Venezuela has long been a deeply divided country. And this is reflected in the public debate about broadcasters' rights. Many Venezuelans, like the President, genuinely wanted the closure of the station. And we should not ignore the fact that there were also rallies in favour of the President at the weekend.

Nor can we ignore the wider context. President Chavez has a convincing electoral mandate. His redistribution, since 1998, of the country's oil wealth in the direction of the deprived barrios and the rural poor, combined with his willingness to take on the wealthy elites, have begun to erode some of the staggering injustices of Venezuelan society. But those elites have not been shy of fighting back, not least through the privately owned media.

Yet the Venezuelan President is quite wrong to suggest that he is bolstering democracy by driving dissenting voices from the airwaves. As the free-speech pressure group, Reporters Without Borders, stressed yesterday, this silencing of an opposition voice is a clear violation of freedom of expression.

The social significance of President Chavez' intervention is great. RCTV was the nation's most watched channel. It was also the oldest private channel, dating back to 1957. But the political impact is even more significant. RCTV was the sole opposition-aligned station with a national reach. Now it has gone. All governments need media opposition to keep them honest. But it appears that President Chavez does not have much time for this concept.

Ominously, another Venezuelan TV station, Globovision, was accused yesterday - on what appears to be flimsy grounds - of calling for Mr Chavez's assassination. If this growing intolerance of opposition voices is an indication of the shape of things to come, Mr Chavez is taking his country down a dangerous road indeed.