Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

So here is UK’s esteemed Sunday publication Observer with a major ‘revealed’ story: turns out Chavez has been filling Venezuela’s coffers not from the sale of the $100 a barrel petrol, but with money made shipping cocaine for the Colombian rebel group, FARC. A revelation made by a personality no less than the Food and Cuisine columnist John Carlin for the paper, and based on evidence no less credible than the testimony of four anonymous former guerrillas. But in case you thought the ‘former guerrillas’ — if they exist — would be making such claims in the interest of self-preservation in an unforgiving climate which would otherwise ensure their certain elimination at the hands of the paramilitary death squads, rest assured, Carlin has more. He also spoke to ‘high-level security, intelligence and diplomatic sources from five countries’, all unnamed of course, ‘some of them face to face in Colombia and London’. Presumably including ‘high-level security, intelligence and diplomatic sources’ from Colombia, a government with known hostility towards the Chavez government, and London, where the foreign office actually celebrated when Chavez was briefly overthrown by a coup d’etat. ‘All of them insisted on speaking off the record’, he tells us. By this time, even the most avid neoconservative would have tuned out.

Here is where it gets more curious. Carlin tells us he originally published this impeccable piece of ‘investigative’ journalism at the ‘centre-left’ (in the same sense that Tony Blair was centre-left) Spanish newspaper El País (The report he tells us was denounced in apparently the customary ‘leftist’ way as “part of a ‘racist’ and ‘colonialist’ campaign against Venezuela”.) Relations between Spain — another country which had welcome the coup and more recently whose King was involved in a verbal spat with Chavez — and Venezuela are hardly cordial, but if this isn’t really the racist and colonialist campaign against Venezuela, what would explain Spain’s largest circulation daily commissioning a UK tabloid’s food and cuisine columnist to write an unsubstantiated smear?