He's Baaack

by Howard Altman

My old buddy, Alberto Giordano, is back online and that’s very good news for some people and very bad news for others.

It’s good news for most of Latin America and anyone who questions how our government operates down there. It’s good news for anyone who has doubts about the so-called war on drugs (remember that?) and the way corporate media covers the world.

It's bad news for the people who don't want you to know what's going on in Latin America. It's bad news for those who want no light shed on drugs or revolution. It's bad news for the Bush administration, which did its best to topple President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

And very bad news for guys like Peter McFarren, the former AP correspondent in Bolivia, who resigned after being outed by Giordano for lobbying the Bolivian government on behalf of a $78 million water project that would have benefited a charitable organization he headed in a country that newspapers worldwide depended on him to cover.

Watch out, America. As of February 16, Alberto Giordano is back with his website, www.narconews.com.

He's on a mission.

To change the way news is gathered and distributed.

In the interest of full disclosure here, Giordano and I go way back.

He worked for John Kerry in '84. I volunteered for Kerry's U.S. Senate primary opponent Ed Markey, who eventually dropped out.

Years later, we were both stablehands in New Mass Media's Advocate chain, he in Springfield, I in New Haven.

He's posted a number of my stories, including City Paper's investigation -- www.citypaper.net/articles/072700/cs.cover1.shtml -- into claims that the CIA stepped into a Philly narcotics operation to help out a U.S.-backed Dominican Republic political leader who was raising campaign funds in the U.S. by selling drugs here and in New York and Massachusetts.

The claims are backed up with boxes of documents that paint a very unfortunate portrait of how our government manipulates Latin America for its own gain.

(And before you Republicans go off in a huff, the story in question concerns the administration of Wild Bill Clinton, the hedonistic hillbilly from Arkansas whose wife and vice president received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from DR political party members who were being investigated by the DEA at the time. We had no problem running that story, so stop moaning about the freakin' liberal press, will ya?)

Things haven't changed much since that story ran in 2000.

It's just the kind of nonsense Giordano still sees all over Latin America, which is one of the reasons he is back from a four-month hiatus he was forced into by dire financial circumstances.

"A common theme in every country we cover is the misbehavior of the State Department and U.S. Embassies meddling in all these places," Giordano writes. "There's a group of extremists in charge -- Otto Reich and former Jesse Helms aide Roger Noriega at the top -- who seem to be living in the 1950s, obsessed with any political leader or social movement in Latin America that doesn't seek the crucifixion of Fidel Castro as its first priority. They've made a mess of U.S. relations with the most democratic governments in the hemisphere. They've completely dropped the ball on the opportunities for good relations with Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who has emerged as the spokesman for all South America on international trade agreements and other matters. The disgraced ex-president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada, who resigned last October after his country revolted, provoked by a massacre he authorized, fled to Miami: That the U.S. would give refuge to this war criminal has further inflamed the region's view of Washington.

"And of course they're all obsessed with President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They've tried various routes to a coup d'état: the military, in April 2002; the economic sector, in December 2002; and a constant mediatic coup attempt through the commercial media in Venezuela. Why? This is senseless. Since the 1998 election of Chavez, Venezuela has advanced faster and farther than any other country in terms of human rights and authentic democracy. Venezuela also has the largest petroleum reserves in the region. Washington should be making friends with Chavez, especially given the instability of Middle East and Asian oil sources."

The only way to help change any of this is to shed some light on the subject, says Giordano.

But those whose jobs have ostensibly been to shed that light have failed.

"This is really a crisis time for U.S. correspondents in Latin America," writes Giordano. "Narco News, I'm pleased to say, came along four years ago and started offering the first scrutiny of these lazy, dictation-taking correspondents who, in previous years, lived more like viceroys, controlling the news and information from these lands."

To counter that, Giordano says he is creating a new journalistic paradigm.

"We have to change the culture of journalism," he writes. "We have to pull it back from the abyss of careerism and mercenary thinking."

Giordano helped found the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism (SAJ), "which trained 30 scholars from all over the hemisphere in not only the tools of practicing journalism, but the philosophy and ethics that are necessary to do it well and right." With good fortune and good funding, SAJ can train another crop of new journos this year.

Here's to doing journalism well and right, which is essential now more than ever.

Welcome back, Alberto Giordano.

Keep fighting the good fight.