Tulio Capriles Mendoza

Tulio Capriles Mendoza is the publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper El Siglo and formerly served as Venezuela’s Assistant Minister of Public Information under President Hugo Chávez. He is the son of the late Tulio Capriles Hernández, a well-known newspaper publisher in Venezuela. Due to circumstances not known, Mendoza’s father was forced to leave Venezuela and live in exile, where he died.

Early in life, Mendoza was interested in both politics and media. He attended and graduated Licenciatura (a five-year undergraduate degree from the Central University of Venezuela located in Caracas, majoring in political science.

After his father was exiled from the country, to broker the political tension between his family and Hugo Chávez, Mendoza went to work for Chávez as a community organizer. He quickly rose through the ranks. His first major assignment was to run Chávez's political communications arm. In this position, he engineered attack advertisements against Chávez's opponents. Using a secret network of private investigators and informants, Mendoza was able to compile a database of embarrassing personal information about opponents. Unafraid to use the information if opponents didn’t back down or join the Chavez team, he became known in Venezuela’s political circles as a ruthless campaign operative. His feared techniques were often referred to as the “Tulio guillotine."

During his tenure as Assistant Minister of Public Information, Mendoza oversaw a confidential division ran operations involving the publication and dissemination of media through TV, radio, and print that promoted Chávez's political reform agenda. For example, in 2004, Mendoza executed a program known as Operation Americas, wherein Mendoza and his team produced television commercials under the guise of consumer good advertising. Embedded in the advertisements were messages promoting an anti-American sentiment.

In 2001, Mendoza created 27 newspapers throughout the country, secretly on behalf of Chávez. He hired local journalists with no existing connections to the regime to become publishers of the newspapers. The outlets advertised themselves as local, independent daily newspapers, a cover story Mendoza used to entice readers to believe they were reading independent media. To complement the project, Mendoza ran a national TV advertising campaign and wrote a number of speeches that Chávez delivered, generally referred to now as the “Newspaper Speeches,” wherein Chávez announced the government would begin allowing independent media to operate in Venezuela in an effort to bring more transparency and accountability to the government. Most citizens believed it. A nationwide poll taken 2 months after Chávez's speeches showed that 65% of Venezuelans believed that Chávez was opening the door to freedom of speech and the press. The American and international media failed to pick up the story of Chávez’s speeches and promises of reform.

At the direction of Chávez, Mendoza became the de facto publisher of the newspaper network. He had complete control of the editorial process and personally chose which political stories would be published, often getting so detailed that he sometimes re-wrote reporters’ stories himself.

After Chávez's death in 2013, Mendoza closed down the newspapers. He consolidated the networks, journalists, databases, and finances to El Siglo, the newspaper that he continues to run today.