There is a record of my position regarding Julian Assange and his Wikileaks. What I hadn’t published until now is that I tried to make contact with Assange, as well as people from his organization, to obtain all the cables related to Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. My attempt was motivated by an article by Pedro Burelli, titled “Wikileaks and the Venezuelan Embezzlement,” published in the newspaper El País. It’s worth noting that this newspaper was one of the four initially chosen by Assange to publish, bit by bit, the diplomatic cables from the State Department.
In the aforementioned article, Pedro argued the following:
…I would like to express my deep surprise at how a series of cables from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, concerning information obtained from high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Energy and the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, were edited by you. These cables expose crimes against the Venezuelan public treasury committed with the knowledge or under the orders of President Chávez and/or the Minister of Energy and head of PDVSA, Rafael Ramírez.
I completely agree with this argument, as no matter how much editorial manipulation Assange may have orchestrated with the editorial team of El País, it still remains a crime to be aware of illegal activities and not report them properly. That a Spanish newspaper, aware of possible criminal activities, takes the liberty to interfere in matters beyond its purview by preventing the publication of information that could legally and criminally implicate chavista figures suggests complicity in these acts.
In light of this, I sent an email to several journalists, bloggers, and media owners in Venezuela to collectively request from Assange and Wikileaks the release of every cable related to Venezuela. This request was sent directly to Wikileaks ([email protected]), to Assange’s lawyer here in the UK (Mark Stephens), to Assange’s spokesperson (Kristinn Hrafnsson), and to a journalist from Aftenposten (Jan Gunnar Furuly), a Norwegian newspaper that was subsequently leaked the complete database. It goes without saying that none responded to our request. In fact, none of the emails sent to Wikileaks, its employees, collaborators, or lawyers received any reply. I mistakenly thought that Assange would accept our request, given that he was invited to participate in the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, where he could have met some of the people from the small group I mentioned and would thus be aware of the Venezuelan political situation.
It is well-known that Assange only sympathizes with his own cause. And as a testament to the saying “God makes them, and they stick together,” the news that Assange allegedly “does not trust Venezuelan media” was announced by Fidel Cano, director of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, who also reported that 16,000 cables, some related to Venezuela, had been handed over to him by Assange. My opinion regarding the hypocritical complicity with which successive Colombian governments handle Hugo Chavez’s relationships with Colombian narco-terrorist groups is also public. Therefore, I was not surprised at all that Assange supposedly favored Colombian media.
However, as time goes on, Assange’s position as a so-called redeemer of global freedom is becoming increasingly unsustainable. We now learn that Assange paid €2,000 to a character named Israel Shamir, identified in leftist publications as a neo-Nazi and anti-Semite, to take and deliver cables to none other than Aleksander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator.
Given these circumstances, I see it as an honor that Assange does not trust journalists, bloggers, and media from Venezuela. His support for dictators, media outlets, and countries complicit in narco-terrorism places us at opposite ends of the political, social, and human spectrum.