Globovision reaches 42% of households with a television set, and Mr. Zuloaga is proud of its record. “Chávez has done everything he could to try to close Globovision or try to change its attitude,” he says, but “he has not been able to do this. . . . Globovision is the only independent station that remains critical of the government.”

Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of a private television station critical of the Venezuelan government, has fled the country to avoid an arbitrary arrest.

Mr. Zuloaga says Chávez’s sinking popularity has intensified his resentmentof the news station. “The quality of Venezuelan life is deteriorating considerably, at the same time one of the biggest corruption scandals has come out with 70,000 tons of food rotting in the ports. We have problems with electricity, problems with water, the highest crime rate of any place, with 150,000 violent deaths in the last 10 years. The Chávez government has infringed almost every article of the constitution.” Globovision is the only station reporting all this, he says.

Mr. Zuloaga has already been arrested once. That was after a March meeting of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) in Aruba, where, he says, some 10 people who work for the Venezuelan government, the television regulator, and one state-owned television channel showed up uninvited. One of them went to the microphone and accused Mr. Zuloaga of promoting what Mr. Chávez likes to call the “coup” in 2002.

Mr. Zuloaga felt that “the accusation of being part of a coup that never existed, done in public, being recorded” could not be left unchallenged. “So I got up and said there was no coup and that what happened was that Chávez ordered the military to fire on the people that day.” Mr. Zuloaga believes what happened that day was a popular uprising against 49 new laws—including an aggressive assault on private property—that Mr. Chávez was getting ready to ram through.

About a week after the Aruba meeting, Mr. Zuloaga was arrested by military intelligence and charged with slander. He spent three hours in a Caracas jail and believes that “international pressure” from a host of different places got him out. But he says the charge was never dropped.

To explain what happened next it is necessary to recall a charge against him in May 2009, when he was accused of “hoarding” automobiles on his property. (Venezuela has a shortage of automobiles.) “After nine months of investigation,” he says, “the government could not prove any crime. The file was put in a box and taped up.”

Shortly after Mr. Zuloaga was released from prison in March because the Aruba slander-gambit had failed, Mr. Chávez announced he was not done with Mr. Zuloaga. “In one of these interminable meetings that he broadcasts for hours, in one in which the chief justice and the head of the district attorney’s office were present, he said ‘how come this Globovision is allowed to keep saying things against the people, the government and me? How come the president that criticized me and said all these things about me is still free?'”

A week later, Mr. Zuloaga says, “we got information, from the inside—because not everyone who works for the government is pro-Chávez—that the attorney general had requested the [hoarding] file from 2009.

“And they reopened the case. Without changing one line to that file, they ordered that we [Mr. Zuloaga and his son] be put directly in jail. They ordered that we be put in a jail called La Planta, which is famous for being one of the most dangerous prisons in the Americas. Just two weeks ago there was a riot there and 15 people were killed.” That’s when they fled.

Mr. Zuloaga says the human-rights commission has received his petition and he is challenging Mr. Chávez to respond. “Come here and prove [I committed a crime],” he says, “because in Venezuela it is not possible to have an impartial trial.”

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com