Published at: 17/06/2026 09:00 PM

(BBC, December 2, 2021 + El Nacional, June 2, 1961)

• Documents declassified by the BBC between 2019 and 2020 revealed how British intelligence services orchestrated an operation aimed at economically strangling El Nacional, to bring about the dismissal of its founder Miguel Otero Silva.
• One of the files released to the public light reads verbatim: “Last year (1961), through twisted means, this intelligence office persuaded the main economic organizations to stop publishing advertisements in El Nacional.”
• This forced the largest newspaper in Venezuela to change its editorial line, abandon impartial reporting and remove Otero Silva from its management.
• On March 14, 1963, El Nacional announced the change of its board of directors with the appointment of lawyer Raúl Valera as its director, who in turn was the representative of Nelson Rockefeller's companies in Venezuela. The adoption of a new drafting statute was announced.
• In this way, Miguel Otero Silva, proud of Venezuelan literature, founder of the chair of humor and majority shareholder of the publisher El Nacional, was exonerated from his own media outlet.
• Since then, the editorial line that is impartial, plural, objective, respectful of the diversity of Venezuelan thought and behavior was changed to one complacent to the shameless repressive policy of the governments of Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni.
• The documents declassified by the BBC reveal how an advertising boycott was implemented to strangle revenues and twist its editorial line
• On December 3, 2021, the secret files of MI6 were published, which revealed how Otero Silva was forced to sell part of his shares and resign from the management of the first newspaper with national circulation; all power was transferred to Raúl Valera, Nelson Rockefeller's agent.
• The news published in March 1963 did not say, however, that these changes had been forced by an advertising boycott to which that newspaper had been subjected for two years and to which, after almost going bankrupt, it had finally given up accepting the departure of its founder, editor-in-chief and co-owner: the renowned Venezuelan writer.
• The campaign against the newspaper was framed at a particular moment in the Cold War, when Western powers tried to contain the expansion of communism in Latin America after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959.
• Leslie Boas was in charge of the Information Research Department (IRD) in Caracas, a secret office of the British Foreign Office dedicated to propaganda tasks in the 1960s.
• The IRD collected information on pro-communist groups and personalities, and at the same time, it generated anti-communist information material that it then provided to media, personalities and other organizations, who distributed them as if they were their own.
• Boas was also responsible for the IRD for the rest of Latin America, so he not only led this operation in Venezuela, but he also articulated a large number of covert propaganda actions in many other countries in the region.
• In a report dated May 25, 1961 and classified as “top secret”, Boas informed London about the “satisfactory” evolution of the operation against the Caracas newspaper.
• “As you know,” he said, “El Nacional was the newspaper with the highest circulation in Venezuela, whose owner and most of its workers were communists and sympathizers [of communism] and it is also the headquarters of the Communist-dominated Venezuelan Press Association.”
• “As you also know, we have been unable to manage to place anti-communist material in the newspaper or even material that would have been considered useful for the United Kingdom and for Western ideas. Therefore, we have taken the line that, if you cannot make the newspaper cooperate, it would be better to try to weaken it,” Boas wrote referring to the motivations behind this covert operation (source: BBC News).

Mazo News Team