It
might seem cavalier for an academically credentialed anthropologist
to assert political influence on the population he is supposed to be
studying; however, Goette-Luciak’s activities fit within a long
tradition.
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
7 - Objective journalistic promoters of the “resistance”
Earlier
this summer, Goette-Luciak was in the thick of the most intense
fighting between opposition gunmen and Sandinista-aligned forces. It
was in Masaya, a city where the opposition had seized and cordoned
off entire neighborhoods in an attempt to declare a junta.
As I
found when I visited Masaya a month later, the opposition had waged a
campaign of terror against Sandinista supporters, burning their
homes, kidnapping, beating, torturing and even killing them, while
laying siege to the local police station. In one of the most gruesome
incidents, an unarmed community police officer named Gabriel Vado was
kidnapped by opposition gunmen, dragged to death from the back of a
truck, and torched on camera while slumped before a roadblock.
There
was virtually no mention of the opposition’s ongoing campaign of
terror in Goette-Luciak’s June 23 report for The Washington
Post, which he co-authored with Houck of the arms industry-funded
Defense One. Instead, Goette-Luciak painted the gunmen as valiant
resistance fighters and promoted their call for the U.S. to send them
heavy weapons: “Several asked a reporter whether President Trump
would send support to the resistance,” he wrote.
To be
sure, Goette-Luciak was far from the only Western media figure to
embed with the armed opposition in Masaya and trumpet its gallantry.
Some of the most overtly pro-opposition messaging arrived courtesy of
a reporter named Tim Rogers. An American who spent years publishing
news of interest to the local emigre and tourist population, Rogers
emerged this year as a ferocious promoter of the armed opposition.
In
Masaya, Rogers seemed to throb with admiration for the masked gunmen
manning the barricades.
While
characterizing the opposition as “an unarmed population,”
Rogers glorified the lethal weaponry they deployed from behind the
roadblocks. Goette-Luciak’s now-deleted photo gallery at the Edge
of Adventure demonstrated that the gunmen not only toted homemade
mortars, but assault weapons and handguns as well.
Like
Goette-Luciak, Rogers’ cheerleading for the armed opposition was
rewarded with bylines in mainstream publications from Public Radio
International and The Atlantic, where he claimed Nicaragua was
a “failed state” that was undergoing “democratic renewal”
thanks to the push for regime change. He was ultimately hired as the
Latin American editor of Fusion, a website owned by the
Israel-American oligarch and Democratic Party mega-donor Haim Saban.
There, Rogers produced a viral propaganda video likening the
Sandinista movement to ISIS.
The
out-of-the-blue emergence of figures like Goette-Luciak and Rogers as
correspondents for legacy Western publications can not be viewed as
an aberration or mistake. In Nicaragua, as in so many other countries
targeted with regime-change operations, outlets like the Guardian,
New York Times and Washington Post seem to demand on-the-ground
coverage that reinforces the regime-change agenda.
And so
they credentialed opposition publicists as journalists, instilling in
them the illusion of their own professionalism. “I think I’ve
come to realize the value of objective and impartial journalism,”
Goette-Luciak said in his Edge of Adventure interview, “and I no
longer consider myself as an activist for or against any particular
cause.”
***
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