On September 1, 1933, a twenty-seven-year-old typographer named Eladio Alemán Sucre printed the first edition of El Carabobeño out of a bookstore in Valencia, Venezuela. Juan Vicente Gómez had been ruling the country for twenty-five years and had been closing newspapers and jailing journalists for most of them. Within his first year, Eladio was arrested for twenty-five days, then exiled to Havana. He came back two years later, kept printing, and ran the paper until he died in 1984.
My grandfather Eduardo Alemán Pérez took over that year and ran it for thirty-seven years through Caldera, Chávez, and Maduro. Three national journalism prizes. An Inter American Press Association excellence award. He died in 2021. In March 2016, when Maduro's state newsprint monopoly cut the paper's allocation to zero, El Carabobeño printed its last daily edition. The cover was painted black with a single headline. Zarpazo a la libertad. A blow against liberty. It has been digital-only since.
In November 2023 the government ordered every major Venezuelan internet provider to block the website. Around one hundred thousand people still read the paper every day, almost all of them through VPNs from inside the country. The paper's response is one line. No estamos caídos, estamos bloqueados. We are not down, we are blocked.
I did the full redesign and digitalization. The brief was the obvious thing. The paper has to read like a paper. Editorial hierarchy strong enough to do its job from a phone, on a bad connection, behind a VPN, in a country that is trying to make it unreachable. Ninety-two years of refusal, the fourth generation's contribution to the same fight.