When journalism is exiled

It all began with some very strange powdered milk.

The substance was being distributed to low-income families across Venezuela as part of a domestic aid initiative by President Nicolás Maduro’s government. Known as CLAP and announced in 2016, the program was billed as an effort to provide essential food items to Venezuelans hit hard by the country’s economic crisis, some of them at risk of starvation.

But journalist Roberto Deniz and his colleagues at the independent investigative news site Armando.info soon realized something was wrong. They saw videos on social media of CLAP powdered milk, when mixed, appearing lumpy, oddly textured and decidedly un-milk-like. They heard reports of adults experiencing distended stomachs after drinking it; of small children becoming violently ill with diarrhea.

“It was the mothers from around the country who first started denouncing the terrible quality of the CLAP food, especially the powdered milk,” Deniz says of how the story first came to his attention.

As Deniz and his colleagues investigated, they found that some of the powdered milk provided through the CLAP program so deficient in calcium and high in sodium that a researcher they consulted said it couldn’t be classified as milk at all. And even worse, the program itself was enriching a close associate of Maduro’s, Alex Saab, who was operating at a huge profit while importing low-quality products to Venezuelan citizens.

The “food fraud” scandal was just one part of a larger international money-laundering operation that would land Saab on multiple countries’ most-wanted lists. His alleged crimes involved bank accounts in the U.S., and so Saab was indicted by the U.S. government in 2019 on money laundering charges related to alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

“This is an individual who is abusing the international financial system,” Marshall Billingslea, the former U.S. Treasury official who helped build the case against Saab, told FRONTLINE. “The things he was doing on behalf of Maduro were unconscionable.”

But where did Deniz end up after exposing the scandal? In exile, as a FRONTLINE documentary will relate when it premieres later this month.

As Deniz and his colleagues pursued this sprawling story of corruption involving Maduro’s government and faced threats and intimidation, Deniz made the hard decision to flee his country in order to keep reporting on the story.

Today, there is an arrest warrant out for Deniz in Venezuela. His family’s home has been raided, and he has been sued for criminal defamation by Saab, who pleaded not guilty to the U.S. charges, and last December was returned to Venezuela in a controversial prisoner swap. Deniz hasn’t set foot in his home country in more than five years.

Deniz’s story is part of a troubling trend that I want to draw attention to on this World Press Freedom Day: journalists, and by extension journalism, being driven into exile.

Earlier this year, the UN warned that the number of journalists and media workers being “forced to flee abroad to escape political persecution and legal and other restrictions in their own country” is rising. Reporters Without Borders has seen a “huge surge” in requests for help from journalists forced to relocate to other countries after facing threats. And Freedom House has reported that exiled journalists are increasingly being targeted by the governments they fled.

The dangers these trends pose affect the global public, not just journalists. If we don’t have journalists doing their jobs, whether in war zones like Gaza (where nearly 100 journalists have been killed in recent months) or in countries sliding toward authoritarianism, we don’t have a record of the facts on the ground. That journalistic record is something that can’t be replaced with anything else. Its absence harms us all, allowing disinformation, corruption and other abuses of power to proceed unchecked and benefiting only those people, governments and institutions that have something to hide.

Governments are well aware of this fact — and some of them, seeking to evade the accountability that independent reporting imposes, have been finding new ways to make independent reporting more difficult.

We have chronicled the complex and evolving threat environment facing journalists in multiple documentaries in recent years. “A Thousand Cuts” followed Maria Ressa’s fight against disinformation and intimidation in the Philippines. “Global Spyware Scandal” explored how the powerful spyware called Pegasus was used on journalists investigating government corruption in multiple countries, including Khadija Ismayilova in Azerbaijan and Carmen Aristegui in Mexico. “Putin vs. the Press“ profiled independent Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov amid a Kremlin crackdown that forced him to start a new publication based in Europe rather than Moscow. Our upcoming documentary on Deniz and his colleagues is the next chapter in this body of work.

“Professionally, I always say it’s been worth it,” Deniz says in the film of the price he has paid for his journalism.

But on a personal level, things are more complicated. 

“It’s like I’ve always said: It would have been easier to look away,” Deniz says.

On this World Press Freedom Day and moving forward, I hope we will all choose not to look away from the difficult stories that journalists across the globe are attempting to cover and uncover; from the fact that journalists are increasingly being driven into exile for their work; and from the inspiring reality that, despite everything, this essential work is continuing.

“From the outset, I understood that our strongest defense in this case was to persist in our investigation,” Deniz told me last week. “For us at Armando.info, despite the inherent risks, our core duty remains unveiling corruption within the Maduro regime, and holding those responsible to account.”

Raney Aronson-Rath is the editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, which is produced at GBH in Boston. The documentary chronicling Roberto Deniz’s saga, “A Dangerous Assignment,” debuts later this month.