We won’t get fooled again? HAH!
You know how to tell George W. Bush is lying? His lips move.
You would have thought that the U.S. press learned its lesson. Don’t believe what governments say, when common sense tells you its bullshit.
What’s frustrating… especially for those of us who comment on, and pay attention to, Latin America is the willingness of both corporate media and otherwise intelligent commentators and Latin-watchers… is that despite knowing the Bushistas fed everyone a line of bullshit about Iraq and “weapons of mass destruction” and the “axis of evil” that otherwise sensible people were completely willing to buy a story about the Colombian Army attacking a FARC encampment over the border in Ecuador (which killed several Mexican students) — and discovering laptop computers that spilled all kinds of e-mails supposedly detailing an “international axis of evil” between Latin American governments at odds with the Bush Administration, international terrorist organizations and cocaine dealers. The very fact that this “confirmed” Bush Administration policy towards Latin America (continuing to prop up the Uribe Administration in Colombia, and simultaneously deny and justify attempts to undermine the elected governments in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia… and discredit the left in Mexico) should have made Latin American commentators and writers dubious.
The idea that laptops would have survived a direct missile hit was itself a questionable, but even Latin American commentators were willing to buy the tale. The technical questions were supposedly put to rest when Interpol investigators said the e-mails in question were not added after the attack… though no one outside the lefty blogosphere seemed to notice that Interpol did not say the e-mails were on the computers, simply that they couldn’t prove they were forged after a given date.
And even that story… which would have required believing that a couple of guys in the jungle were contracting with foreign intelligence services and suborning heads of state … should have been questioned. No one did.
I don’t know what happened. Even the “respectable” Latin Americanists — including the scholarly and “neutral” websites — bought the e-mail story and… now are ignoring what should be painfully obvious. They were fed lies, and are unwilling to admit that our assumptions about Latin America are wrong. The left is not “growing” through some devious plot, but simply organizing and winning elections; our Colombian allies are a bunch of opportunistic crooks; and the ready availability of narcotics in the United States is not some convoluted plot involving foreign evil-doers, but the result of U.S. failure to come to grips with their own problems; and there is no international terrorist network — just common interests among various groups.
A captain and antiterrorist investigator of the DIJIN, the Colombian equivalent of the FBI, Ronald Ayden Coy Ortiz, who wrote the report on the computer which the Colombian army claimed to have found in the encampment of Raúl Reyes, declared under oath before the Inspector General that he did not find any e-mails in the said computer. “Only Microsoft Word documents”, according to a report by Canal Uno, a Colombian TV station.
Upon being asked to “inform the office if you (the DIJIN) find any archives corresponding to e-mails sent or received by Raúl Reyes”, Capt. Coy responded, “We have not found any e-mails up to now. We have found a great many e-mail addresses, but Reyes stored the information in Microsoft Word format.”
The government of Colombia has maintained until now that the computer contained thousands of e-mails sent by the FARC leader, who died in an illegal bombardment of his encampment in Ecuador, in March.
mexfiles.net 