Carlos Ciappina is the Secretary of the School for Journalism and Social Communication at the National University of La Plata, which awarded Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez its Rodolfo Walsh Award for Popular Communication in 2011. According to Ciappina, the right to communication means not only free speech, but also access to the means of communication.

Regional elections do not usually attract international media headlines. But Sunday’s gubernatorial race in Venezuela was not a typical regional election. This was the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999 in which he was unable to actively campaign in an election.

On December 8, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez announced that his cancer has returned. Unlike past announcements, this time around Chávez publicly acknowledged that his odds of survival may not be great. Chávez took the astonishing, and quite unprecedented, step of naming a successor, foreign secretary Nicolas Maduro.