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Catherina

(35,568 posts)
Thu Apr 25, 2013, 12:58 AM Apr 2013

Chronicle of a lie foretold: or, how I failed to stop Spain’s rightwing press from intervening in...

Chronicle of a lie foretold: or, how I failed to stop Spain’s rightwing press from intervening in the 2013 Venezuelan presidential election

Asa K Cusack 22 April 2013

I replied to individual tweets with my concerns. But I have 50 followers; they had hundreds of thousands. I was like a cartoon character plugging holes in my boat as the water rose around my ankles.


On the eve of Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela, a damning story appeared about the corrupt relationship between the left-wing candidate Nicolas Maduro and Latin American sporting icon Diego Maradona. The right-wing Spanish newspaper ABC ran the story, and it spread like wildfire across the internet, reaching millions in Venezuela during elections that Maduro won by less than 300,000 votes. The only problem is that the story was a complete fabrication and ABC knew it.



It all started with a piece on the ABC news website (above) on Friday April 12, two days before Sunday’s election, claiming that Diego Maradona had been paid two million dollars to support Maduro during the final rallies of his campaign. This went unnoticed at first, but on Saturday it began to gain traction. Since I research and report on Venezuelan politics I happened to be on Twitter when the story really started to take off in the early evening, with Venezuela’s most popular newspaper Ultimas Noticias tweeting it to 860,000 followers at 7:41pm.

It struck me as strange. Maradona is a leftist by conviction; he has a tattoo of Ché Guevara on his right shoulder; he hobnobs with Fidel Castro for fun; why would he need to be paid to support Maduro? I also knew this story could do major damage. Venezuelans are mobilophiles and on the day before a crucial election everybody would be rooted to Twitter, Facebook, and news websites. The country’s most trusted newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, had already validated the story by republishing it and tweeting it to nearly one million people in a country with only 19 million registered voters. And the story itself had mass appeal: corruption, politics, celebrity, and Latin American football, all rolled into one!

Tracing the story back, I found that ABC was citing The Guardian as its source, though it provided no link to their original report. Googling the Guardian piece brought up nothing, which seemed impossible if it really existed. Searching by site and date to make sure, I found only two articles; neither contained this accusation.

At 8:35pm I cautiously started to question the accusation on Twitter. I tweeted the Guardian in an effort to establish whether there ever had been any such story, and to warn them that their name was being abused by ABC. I tweeted Ultimas Noticias telling them to double-check the story, hoping they could quickly correct their earlier tweet. I even tweeted Maradona himself. No response.

Taking a new tack, at 8:50pm I decided to seek clarification from ABC via the story’s own comments section. I posted a question via Disqus (as used by The Independent) asking for the original source, and the comment went up on the site. The next time I checked back it was gone.

Increasingly certain that the story was false, I tried to alert the Venezuelan government via the communications minister Ernesto Villegas, state TV channel Telesur, and government news agency AVN. Even if they couldn’t halt the spread of the story, I figured, they could at least deny it. No one responed.

In the meantime more major media had picked up the story. Venezuela’s equivalent of the Financial Times, El Mundo, had tweeted it (175,000 followers), as had Latin American news network NTN24 (430,000) and prominent opposition supporter [link:http://|José Rafael Marquina] (473,000), amongst many others. The genie was out of the bottle. At 10:16pm I tweeted to no one in particular:

“Watching unstoppable propagation of apparently false #Venezuela story about #Maduro paying $2m for Maradona support; alarming how easy it is”

The story was also flying high on Facebook, appearing at one point on the main page of salsa superstar Willie Colon (who has 500,000 likes). And it had now reached the rest of Latin America through innumerable reproductions on innumerable websites; search for "Maduro Maradona" on Google Venezuela and you’ll see. Even Clarín, the newspaper of record in Maradona’s own Argentina, had republished the story. Worse, more and more respectable papers began to refer to each other’s versions of the ABC story instead of to the ABC story itself – “Clarín, ABC, El Mundo, and The Guardian confirm Maradona was paid $2m to support Maduro!” – insulating the vacuum at its core from public scrutiny.

I replied to individual tweets with my concerns. But I have 50 followers; they had hundreds of thousands. I was like a cartoon character plugging holes in my boat as the water rose around my ankles. My last card was to get western Venezuela supporters involved, so I fired off tweets to Owen Jones, Eva Golinger, and the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Nada. Defeated, I quoted Winston Churchill and went to bed: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on"

On the morning of the election, I found that the lie had continued to prosper. After making a few final attempts to let people know, I gave up. At the time I, like everyone else, expected a Maduro landslide. The Maradona story was irritating, but I didn’t expect it to be significant. I was wrong. In the end Maduro won by less than two percent, giving the opposition the chance to use concocted fraud allegations to undermine his legitimacy both at home and abroad.

The impact of this one fabricated story is impossible to gauge, but I saw with my own eyes that many thousands were receiving it, reading it, and sharing it. Some will follow more than one of the Twitter accounts mentioned above and others will have been away from Twitter, but the numbers are still staggering. And they exclude the unquantifiables: Facebook, internet searches, normal news browsing, word of mouth, and the Venezuelan’s weapon of choice Blackberry messenger. The accusation will surely have galvanised opponents: “let’s get this crook out!” And it could easily have swayed some of the hundreds of thousands who chose to stay at home this time, or the 700,000 who switched allegiances after voting for Chávez in December. Control of the largest oil reserves in the world rests on this election; deliberate interference in it is no small matter.

So was this deliberate? Where did the accusation come from in the first place? And who’s to blame? The short answer: ABC.

First, ABC is virulently right-wing and has perhaps the most violent record of attacking the Chávez government of any foreign media outlet; quite an accolade. In recent months alone they have claimed that a comatose Chávez was to have his life-support turned off, that he was preparing "a network of armed commandos" for an opposition win, and that he was linked to drug-trafficking. On April 19 ABC’s Caracas correspondent Ludmila Vinogradoff even tried to pass off photos of police repression in Egypt as evidence of a Maduro crackdown in Venezuela. They have motive and a bad track record.

Second, ABC knew the story was false on the same day it was published, even promising to remove it at that point (12 April). One conscientious Argentine tabloid, Perfil, had taken the two minutes required to shake the story’s foundations and immediately confirmed with ABC that no underlying Guardian article existed. This was two days before the election, yet the story remained online throughout the build-up and on election day itself. Then there was my own notification via the comments section, which was hastily erased. Early on 17 April I even called the ABC Sports Desk myself to enquire about the story’s original source; they acknowledged that it was false and said that they would take it down. As of 21 April, it remains online with 3600 Facebook shares plus 1700 tweets (and counting). These figures include only the original article and not the hundreds of derivative versions all over the internet, many of which have impressive sharing stats of their own.

But where did the accusation come from in the first place?

Perfil were able to trace it back as far as the young Colombian football blogger and law student Salvatore Marcenaro. In their version, he tweeted it to 90,000 followers on April 11 with no substantiation, the accusation then being broadcast further afield by a right-wing radio presenter in Argentina. But Marcenaro struck me as an unlikely fantasist or slanderer. His tweet history reveals that he is partial to Chávez’s nemesis, former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, but his real passion is clearly football. For him Maradona was the draw, not Maduro.

Unlike Perfil, I managed to make contact with Marcenaro, who revealed that he first heard the accusation from Palermonline, the news blog of a well-heeled district of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Palermonline had published the original story late on 10 April, the same day that Maradona arrived in Venezuela. I wrote to the site’s editor, Pablo Rubin, seeking clarification, but received no reply. Instead, the story was hurriedly removed (screengrab below).



Of course, neither Rubin nor ABC was alone in conspiring to inflate this empty story beyond all proportions, and this is the most depressing part of the whole affair. There was no reason to believe the story was grounded in fact; the sources turned out to be non-existent or weak, the premise illogical and the motives for spreading a false story at this time obvious. Yet regional media unquestioningly peddled it around the continent. The Venezuelan opposition, meanwhile, consumed it and regurgitated it with alacrity. In Venezuelan politics the truth is too often immaterial; “give me a useful lie any day!”

Much as foreign commentators like to trumpet the role of social media in the Arab Spring, this account shows that they can be abused just as forcefully in states where spring is but a distant and unpleasant memory. The same commentators can be trusted to blather on about “institutions” until the cows come home, but if no one respects the rules of this game or any other, then everybody loses.

Asa K Cusack is a PhD candidate in the University of Sheffield's Politics department, specialising in Latin American and Caribbean political economy.

This article is published under a Creative Commons licence.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/asa-k-cusack/chronicle-of-lie-foretold-or-how-i-failed-to-stop-spain%E2%80%99s-rightwing-press-from-interven

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Chronicle of a lie foretold: or, how I failed to stop Spain’s rightwing press from intervening in... (Original Post) Catherina Apr 2013 OP
Stunning how easy it is for right-wingers to pull off their crimes. Judi Lynn Apr 2013 #1
The Guardian has been almost as bad as the New York Slimes and the BBCons Peace Patriot Apr 2013 #2
Excellent post. Excellent insights. Thank you for sharing all of this Catherina Apr 2013 #3
Thanks! Uribe's name turning up in this account was a red flag to this "Taurus"! Peace Patriot Apr 2013 #4

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
1. Stunning how easy it is for right-wingers to pull off their crimes.
Thu Apr 25, 2013, 02:09 AM
Apr 2013

That is only one of their skills, from their dirty repertoire which goes, obviously, all the way to murder, assassination, congenital social perversion. They get power, but they have to steal it, and they use it against the people who are so much cleaner in spirit than they are.

What a dirty shame.

The author, Asa Cusack traced it back all the way to the beginning, but they timed it so by the time anyone could learn how false it was, it would be too late to correct, and offer the truth to the public they had deceived.

That's why it's so important for people to look more deeply beyond the surface of everything, or they will be mocked by those who only intend to deceive others, to lie their asses off forever just because THEY ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH to earn respect themselves.

They have to cheat, they are NOT going to become good people and earn what they get. They are the ultimate, natural, eternal parasites, utterly useless to the human race, only useless to others like themselves who also are living life from the dark side.

Peace Patriot

(24,010 posts)
2. The Guardian has been almost as bad as the New York Slimes and the BBCons
Thu Apr 25, 2013, 02:08 PM
Apr 2013

on the Latin American Left. They are the "guardians" nothing, or rather the "guardians" of transglobal banksters and war profiteers, just like the rest of them.

So it surprises me not at all that the Guardian did nothing to correct this critically timed slander of Maduro.

As for Venezuelan, South American (particularly Argentine) and Spanish media moguls, we know what they are capable of, as to supporting, driving and even contriving coup d'etats against leftist governments. No surprise at all there. In fact, it would have been surprising if they HADN'T done anything scurrilous against Maduro at the last minute.

ALL of these 'news'/opinion generators, from the New York Slimes, the BBCons and the Guardian, to their South American counterparts, from the Associated Pukes and Rotters to the Wall Street Urinal, are liars, distorters, dis-informers and propagandists against the highly successful leftist democracy movement in Latin America. And it is quite obvious why: They serve the profit of the 1%.

It has been quite a revelation to me, to have followed the growth of this goddamned disinformation campaign, over the last decade--as icon after icon of honest, objective reporting fell before my eyes.

Mr. Cusick, in his last sentence, laments: "The same commentators can be trusted to blather on about 'institutions' until the cows come home, but if no one respects the rules of this game or any other, then everybody loses."

There are NO rules! That is what I have learned. "Western" journalism is lawless. It has gone to the "dark side." Also, not 'everybody' loses. Only the 99% loses. The 1% are doing very well, indeed.

I do think that efforts of independent investigation like Mr. Cusick's will win out, in the end. I have a lot of faith in human beings and their longing for the truth and for social justice and peace--a good life for all, an equitable human society. But we have an uphill battle to fight against many, many lies, spread by devious and powerful persons and groups, all for the profit of the 1%.

I applaud Mr. Cusick with all my heart! HE is the new icon of journalism--the independent investigator, the lone citizen outraged by some lie, who takes the time and effort to pursue it.

I want to make one criticism of his conclusions. The involvement of the Colombian football blogger, Salvatore Marcenaro, with Alvaro Uribe, may not be as innocuous as Cusick thinks.

---

"Perfil were able to trace it back as far as the young Colombian football blogger and law student Salvatore Marcenaro. In their version, he tweeted it to 90,000 followers on April 11 with no substantiation, the accusation then being broadcast further afield by a right-wing radio presenter in Argentina. But Marcenaro struck me as an unlikely fantasist or slanderer. His tweet history reveals that he is partial to Chávez’s nemesis, former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, but his real passion is clearly football. For him Maradona was the draw, not Maduro." --from the OP (my emphasis)

---

Uribe is a Hitlerian figure--insanely fascist--with close ties to Colombia's rightwing death squads and to major drug trafficking, throughout his career. He was the Bush Junta's "made man" in Colombia. He is responsible not only for a mountain of murdered bodies in Colombia but also for the brutal displacement of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands, in addition to many other crimes, including vast, illegal domestic spying--even spying on judges and prosecutors--while he was 'president' of Colombia, a junta that paralleled Bush Jr.'s. Colombia was run as a criminal organization during his tenure. And, very likely, the U.S. "war on drugs" was turned on its head, during his tenure, and became a "protection racket" for his and the Bushwhacks' favored drug lords.

Uribe and the Bush Junta contrived to nearly start a war between the U.S./Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela in 2008. But what is more pertinent here is that, in the aftermath of that incident--their bombing of a FARC hostage release camp just inside Ecuador's border, with 500 lb. U.S. "smart bombs"--Uribe claimed to have found the FARC commander's unscathed laptop in the ruins and that it contained "evidence" that the presidents of Venezuela and Ecuador were "terrorist-lovers" and were helping the FARC to obtain a "dirty bomb," amid other wild and since completely debunked accusations.

Uribe is a very dirty player on the order of Rumsfeld and Cheney, and has huge money behind him, and he is furthermore clearly receiving the protection of the Obama government for reasons we can only guess at (my guesses: 1) Bush Jr and junta complicity in Uribe's many crimes in Colombia, and possibly additional crimes authorized by them and committed by the U.S. military or its private contractors, and/or the U.S. ambassador; 2) drug trafficking by U.S. agencies to the profit of those agencies, U.S. banksters and other beneficiaries; and 3) fear--the Obama administration is covering up a hell-hole of U.S. crime, because they are fearful of the consequences if they don't.)

My rule of thumb for Bushwhacks is that, whatever they accuse others of doing, they are doing, or planning to do. It is a very useful rule of thumb for instantly understanding what is going on, and is, oh, 99% reliable.

Applying my rule of thumb to this situation (given Uribe's close ties to and resemblance to Bushwhacks): I would guess that Marcenaro (the Uribe sympathizer and football blogger) was the one who was paid (not footballer Maradona who endorsed Chavez's VP Maduro in the special election). In other words, the reverse of the lie is the truth. ("whatever they accuse others of doing....".)

Whether what Marcenaro did was worth $2 million to Uribe or someone else, who knows? But this is the sort of thing that disinformationist bad guys DO--thread the disinformation through innocent-seeming sources. They do it all the time through the corporate media--using corporate media's PAST reputation for reliability as a conduit for disinformation NOW. Look at what happened at the New York Times with the WMDs in Iraq! They were publishing Rumsfeld's lies as NEWS, day after day, in the drumbeat for war.

Using a football blogger--paying a football blogger to lie--would be child's play. Rumsfeld kindergarten.

One other example: The Bushwhackian "suitcase full of money" caper out of Miami, wherein a rich Miamian (two jaguars in the driveway) nicknamed "Guido" carried a suitcase packed with $700,000 cash through Argentine customs at the airport in Buenos Aires, in the weeks just prior to the Argentina election for president, which leftist Cristina Fernandez subsequently won. "Guido" got caught, and hightailed it back to Miami, where he became the "star witness" for a Bushbot U.S. attorney who filled the Miami Hairball (um, Herald) with headlines about the money being intended for Fernandez's campaign, from Hugo Chavez.

A Chavez government spokesman said they wouldn't have sent it through customs; they would have carried it on Chavez's official jet with diplomatic immunity the next day (when Chavez visited Argentina)--if they'd wanted to donate money. That's how ridiculous this caper was.

Obvious, contrived, absurd disinformation--done for the headlines, and these days, for the "viral" internet media, for promulgation.

Mr. Cusick follows the trail as far as he can...

---

"...I managed to make contact with Marcenaro, who revealed that he first heard the accusation from Palermonline, the news blog of a well-heeled district of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Palermonline had published the original story late on 10 April, the same day that Maradona arrived in Venezuela. I wrote to the site’s editor, Pablo Rubin, seeking clarification, but received no reply. Instead, the story was hurriedly removed (screengrab below)." --from the OP (my emphasis)

---

This matter needs further investigation. But, frankly, it may be dangerous to do so. Uribe and those he is connected to are without scruple as to murder, are easily able to operate in secret with massive funding and are immune to the reach of the law. Maybe this would be a project for crowd-sourcing or for Anonymous or for Wikileaks. (Does Marcenaro's bank account show a sudden ballooning of cash? Did he parents recently buy a mansion? That sort of thing. And, of course, who are the "players" at Palermonline and what are their political and underground connections?)

Cusick clearly shows the complicity of major media in the lie. The media, in cases like this, just has to bend over. They know ahead of time what their "line" has to be. Some media operatives may be getting "the word" (what to look for and promulgate) but probably there is no clear one-to-one trail in that tangled web.

Cusick, however, turns up that rare gem, what may be the original source in the media "chain." It might be possible to track that posting to its source, or at least get a sense of how Palermonline owners, employees and contributors fit into the picture. The originator of the lie (I mean, the real originator, not just a lackey who is earning fascist score points or being paid) may be very hard to identify.

Too many people have been murdered in the cause of truth in Colombia (and, indeed, in Venezuela, where the prosecutor investigating the 2002 coup attempt had his car bombed, with him in it). There have been many murders, by rightwing death squads, elsewhere in Latin America, as well (hundreds of journalists have been murdered in Honduras, for instance--another U.S./corporate-war profiteer project). So I'm not wishing this investigation on anybody. I am too worried that my guesses are true. And if some brave soul does undertake it, we owe him or her our support and whatever help we can give.

It just occurred to me that Venezuelan intelligence might be the best trackers of this lie and its lying liars. They have been damn good on the whole. They kept Chavez alive for over a decade, despite many an assassination plot. And South American countries have good cooperation on intelligence these days. It is one of the reasons that the U.S. government and those whom it serves hate leftist democracy in South America so much. They haven't been able to penetrate it, on the whole. Their nefarious, anti-democratic plots have largely failed.

I suspect a whole lot more than a football blogger plot, in Maduro's near loss of the special election (with every pre-election poll in Venezuela giving him a 10% to 20% lead a week before the vote). But who knows what this particular incident may turn up? It may be just one person or set of people doing their own little lying and slander thing for the fascist cause, or it could be the thread that unravels it all. I hope someone with adequate resources and adequate protection follows it up.

Peace Patriot

(24,010 posts)
4. Thanks! Uribe's name turning up in this account was a red flag to this "Taurus"!
Thu Apr 25, 2013, 03:09 PM
Apr 2013

I've followed Uribe's career pretty closely. Anyone with "allegiance" to him would be capable of being bribed and of lying for the fascist cause. The footballer seems to be the final link before the first posted source. He could well have been pointed to it. He is the original promulgator.

Uribe is a bad, bad dude--powerful and very well connected. If my read on his current cushy protection by the U.S. government is correct, his protector is Leon Panetta, Obama's first CIA Director, who has a a very interesting connection to Bush Sr. (he was a member of Bush Sr.'s "Iraq Study Group&quot . Panetta's motive in protecting Uribe would probably be covering up the Bush part of the Uribe/Bush Jr. crime wave in Colombia.

Cusick judges the football blogger and law student to be interested mainly in football and only incidentally in politics. Could be true. Could just be a fairly innocent lackey, or completely innocent, in this instance--with bad guy operatives picking up his post. But it needs investigation. Colombia's rich elite is not that big a group (basically, Colombia's 1%, with its interlaced criminal bosses). And this "law student" could be grooming himself to become part of Uribe's "return" to power when/if Jeb takes over here for Bush Junta II. Football may be a genuine interest of his but it could also be cover at the same time.

--------

Just want to give you a BIG THANKS for all your recent posts at DU! You are doing excellent work at informing people, in a media climate that is TOXIC on Latin America. It is such a good thing you are doing. I can't praise you enough!

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