WASHINGTON – Get ready for a Spanish-language Al-Jazeera.

That is how many are describing Telesur, a new project from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez. He plans to use the new satellite news channel to wrest viewers from Univision and the Spanish-language CNN and promote his vision of South American unity.

In an interview with The New York Sun, the new general director of the start up station, Uruguayan-born Aram Aharonian, said it would be similar to Al-Jazeera in its emphasis on a populist perspective that will likely clash with American efforts to win hearts and minds in the region. And like the Arabic station that was funded initially by the Qatari government, it is the hope of Telesur’s board that it will soon be flush with South American petrol dollars as investors.

“We are trying to show our point of view about our realities and truth and in this sense it is similar,” Mr. Aharonian said. “Al-Jazeera wants to show the Arabian point of view and Telesur wants to show the Latin American point of view.”

But the similarities between Qatar and Venezuela do not stop with the parallels between both countries’ ambitions to launch popular news stations. Like many Arab leaders, Mr. Chavez has recently signed a slate of laws that further restrict freedom of expression in his country – including freedom of the press – leading critics to question his recent venture into regional broadcasting.

The Americas program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Carlos Lauria, told the Sun yesterday that he considered Mr. Chavez’s latest venture to be “hypocritical.”

“The project is very preliminary, it is in its origins, but it is clear that Chavez has used state media to promote the government’s agenda,” he said. But what concerns Mr. Lauria, who was also critical of the privately owned press outlets that have criticized Mr. Chavez, is a slate of reforms to the criminal code published last week and a new content law passed in December that increase fines for journalists who defame public officials. “We sent a letter to the Venezuelan government, saying that these legal developments could seriously restrict press freedom,” he said. “We think this is an attempt to regulate journalism in Venezuela.”

While Mr. Chavez still presides over a country with more political freedom than those ruled by the varied despots of the Arab world, he has steadily sought to exert even greater power over his opposition, particularly since an attempted coup in 2002. Charges are still pending against the group that organized a referendum he ultimately defeated on his presidency in an appeals court. The charge against them is that they accepted public funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. Many journalists complained in August of intimidation from pro-Chavez forces and their complaints have not been investigated. With the revisions to the criminal code published last week, slander against public officials is punishable by a jail term of up to 15 years. The new code is vague, making the dissemination of “false information” a punishable crime.

At the same time, Mr. Chavez has strengthened ties with America’s enemies in the Middle East. In 2000, he was the first world leader to break the U.N. embargo on Iraq and visit Saddam Hussein. During a visit this month to Iran he said publicly “Iran has every right, like many other countries have done, to develop its atomic energy and continue its research in this field.” While in Iran, he signed 20 separate cooperation agreements with the regime the State Department still considers the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.

So far, the Venezuelan government has sunk a mere $2.5 million into Telesur, which is short for Televisoria Del Sur, or television of the south. However the station is trying to solicit funding from other governments in region and state-run oil concerns.

In the interview yesterday, Mr. Aharonian said that he was not concerned about accepting money from Mr. Chavez, who has used his own state-run television stations to target his political opponents. In response to the question yesterday he asked, “If you receive money from a corporation or industry, are you independent? Can you make a bad story about the financers or industries behind your paper?” Mr. Aharonian, who was critical of his native Uruguay’s government when it was a dictatorship, also offered no opinion on Mr. Chavez’s new press laws, saying that the station was interested in a pan-regional approach to news.

Instead Mr. Aharonian focused on the kinds of news he wanted his station to cover. “We will cover water resource issues for example,” he said. “We want to present the kind of context that is missing from the other television stations.” In an interview he gave to a Web site sympathetic to Mr. Chavez, Venezuelananalysis.com, he said the new satellite station was akin to a conglomeration of the thousands of independent small community news outlets already in Latin America.

Other Venezuelan broadcast industry analysts, however, do not share Mr. Aharonian’s optimistic outlook for the station. “Chavez says this is a new television service that would unite the newscasts of all of Latin America. But this is going to be sponsored by him, a satellite news station for Chavez,” a Venezuelan media consultant, Bernice Rangel, said in an interview.

Ms. Rangel is a former senior adviser to the Cisneros Group of private media companies, which have sponsored media that has been critical of Mr. Chavez. She said that in one of Mr. Chavez’s weekly rants he referred to the chairman of the company as a “horseman of the apocalypse.”

“In the long run Telesur is worrying. This will create an opinion matrix that says American development is an enemy of people of Latin America,” she said.