While the Venezuelan press remains relatively free under President Hugo Chavez, journalists there face a climate of increasing violence and intimidation, with death being the tragic result for some.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Nancy Cecilia Flores still trembles when she recalls how a gunman unloaded eight rounds into her father, Jesús Flores Rojas, a well-known journalist in this oil city.

It was 8:50 p.m. on Aug. 23. They had just returned from the pharmacy in her father’s prized possession, a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu. A young man approached as they entered their driveway, motioned for her to remain silent, then he did his work.

“He died immediately from the first bullet to enter his head,” Ms. Flores, 21, a soft-spoken chemistry major at a university here, said of her father. He was the third journalist killed in Venezuela this year, and the fifth since the beginning of 2002.

Though it is not clear that they were all related to the journalists’ work, human rights groups say, the killings and other aggression toward journalists point to a trend in which threats and intimidation have become all too common, even in what remains a flourishing free press under President Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Flores Rojas’s case has not been solved, and no evidence suggests the killing here and other incidents were orchestrated by Mr. Chávez’s government, whose political allies control this southeastern inland city. But the recent killings have heightened concern over the ability of journalists to do their jobs without retribution.

“The murder fits a pattern of falling within a gray zone in which the death of a journalist can seem as if it were a random crime,” said Ewald Scharfenberg, executive director of the Institute for Press and Society, an organization in Caracas that examines press freedom issues.

Opponents of the Venezuelan leader, particularly in the United States and the Bush administration, routinely criticize the state of press freedom under Mr. Chávez, who faces a presidential election on Dec. 3, with most polls showing him leading his opponents.

But the environment for the news media here remains exceptionally freewheeling and boisterous, even if somewhat tension filled. While the spate of killings this year has focused attention on the issue, killings of journalists in Venezuela trail those in Colombia and Mexico.

Tensions between the government and news organizations seem to have eased since the months after a short-lived coup in April 2002, which briefly removed Mr. Chávez and appeared to have had the blessing of some established news media groups and the Bush administration.

But Mr. Chávez and his policies are still pilloried daily on television, radio and in established daily newspapers in Caracas that are largely controlled by an elite at odds with his socialist-inspired policies. Meanwhile, pro-Chávez news organizations, many flush with government advertising, attack the political opposition with equal vehemence.

Beyond this vibrancy, however, is a pattern of confrontation that has become a defining feature of relations between the government and the news media in recent years. Mr. Chávez sometimes sets the tone, with senior officials repeating his assertions that his administration is under siege by entrenched media interests.