Prettying the Farc

OLAVO DE CARVALHO
�poca, May 19, 2001

Translated by Assun��o Medeiros

They are trying to lighten up the bad impression of the involvement with drugs

The arrest of Luiz Fernando �Beira-Mar�da Costa in an encampment of Colombian guerrillas, with proof of exchange of drugs for guns, was maybe the most fearsome thing that has happened to the national Left since the death of Carlos Lamarca and Carlos Marighella (the two most famous left-wing Brazilian terrorists). Beira-Mar is a living file of the dangerous liaisons between bandits and the revolution, and because of that some journalists � always so anxious to search in the attics and basements for things to destroy the career of right-wing politicians � are so circumspect and evasive regarding the drug dealer. If he knew anything capable of incriminating Antonio Carlos Magalh�es, Paulo Maluf, or any other top right wing politician, the reporters would be on top of him day and night. Since what he knows is against the left, there are in the press people that even protest against the highlight the news of his arrest is getting from in some newspapers and magazines.�

Others are not content in simply suppressing the news: they move on to active misinformation. According to a note reproduced in several publications last week, the representative of the United Nations� Program for the International Control of Drugs, Klaus Nyholm, would have said that the Farc do not act as drug dealers, limiting themselves to charge a tax� �for all the cocaine that leaves Colombian territory�, and that the paramilitary troops of the extreme right, these are the ones that have direct involvement with drug dealing, from which they obtain from US$ 200 million to US$ 500 million per year.

The first part of this statement is true, but Nyholm made it long ago, for it was already used as a citation in a Noam Chomsky article from June 2000. With the falsified date, it serves now as a buffer against the impact of the evidence found with Beira-Mar. But who will this fool? Even if they did not participate directly in the drug dealing, the Farc would be even more criminal than the drug dealers, since they have dominated and reduced them to the condition of subjects, becoming the higher leaders and beneficiaries of this illicit commerce.�

As to the second part of the statement, Nyholm simply could not have made it. No one that did not intend to denounce himself as a liar or a mental retard would affirm that the Farc receive a tax �from all cocaine that comes out of Colombia� only to announce, right in the next sentence, that a considerable part of this whole comes from their greatest enemy. Because then the poor fellow would have to explain if the extreme right pays tax to the communist guerrilla or if they have invented a way to avoid paying their dues.��

Only the communist hunger to lie can make a journalist so blind to the puerile absurdity of what he invents.� However, it would be imprudent to explain through the radical ravenousness of isolated individuals the leftist bias that deforms a good part of the circulating news. The situation reflects a rational, conscious strategy, bent on the conquest of the media since the sixties, when the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, theoretician of the �occupation of spaces�, entered Brazil. In 1993, CUT (Central �nica dos Trabalhadores � Central Workers Union) already admitted to have in its payroll nothing less than 800 journalists � enough to produce seven editions per week of a weekly magazine like �poca! Add to that the ones that work for PT, for MST and the hundreds of millionaire left-wing Non-Governmental Organizations (without anything comparable, even remotely, counterbalancing this phenomenon on the side of the right) � and you will see the class of the journalists widely subjugated to the interests of a political faction that is not famous by the transparency either of its plans to pull down the state, or of the financial means they will use to do that.�

Regardless of their allegations of �ethics�, many left-wing journalists are going too far in the practice of the Leninist rule that the ends justify the means. Some of them are not even aware that what they are doing is evil and dishonest. They simply identify the right with evil and feel that lying against it is no sin. But �lying in defense of the truth� was the numbing pretext that led many good men to collaborate with the genocide of a hundred million victims.