Magnicidio (Continuación)

Debaten los historiadores cuándo empezó la era Kennedy –juvenil y romántica, del rock y del pop-art, de la liberación femenina y de la revolución cultural, de los hippies y de las drogas–, si en el debate televisado entre el veterano vicepresidente y el joven senador o en el discurso de investidura de éste, anunciando a su país la «nueva frontera» a alcanzar, casi como en las películas del Oeste. Tengo para mí, sin embargo, que la verdadera era Kennedy empezó el día que le asesinaron, del que mañana se cumplen los 50 años.

Su presidencia, hasta entonces, había tenido más sombras que luces.…  Seguir leyendo »

"No sé si los criminales organizados pueden hacerle algo al Papa. Pero ciertamente lo están considerando".

Estas palabras, pronunciadas en una entrevista reciente por un fiscal italiano que trabaja en contra de la Mafia, no justifican del todo los alarmantes titulares que suscitaron alrededor del mundo, pero al mismo tiempo, sería precipitado desecharlas del todo.

El nuevo Papa representa una seria amenaza a algunos intereses criminales establecidos, en un momento crítico en la extensa historia de la relación de la Mafia con el catolicismo; un pasado marcado tanto por intimidad como violencia.

El problema de la Mafia italiana es tan antiguo como el estado italiano.…  Seguir leyendo »

At a packed conference in Ramallah today, the retired general Tawfik Tirawi, once head of the Palestinian Authority's feared West Bank intelligence, squarely pointed the finger at Israel for the assassination of Yasser Arafat. There are lots of reasons to suspect Israeli responsibility. The former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was vocal over the years in admitting he had tried but failed to kill Arafat. Israel had famously botched its 1997 attempt to poison the political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal. It appears logical for the PA – under Israeli military siege in the Muqata when Arafat suddenly became violently ill on 12 October 2004 – to claim Israel alone is to blame.…  Seguir leyendo »

In Yasser Arafat’s long and eventful life, during which he managed the unlikely transition from infamous terrorist mastermind to Nobel Peace Prize recipient, it would be an understatement to observe that he made a fair few enemies along the way.

So we should hardly be surprised that, following the less than convincing conclusion reached by a team of Swiss scientists that he was “probably” poisoned with polonium-210 – the same material used to murder the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 – the conspiracy theorists will now have a field day advancing their fanciful theories about how the Palestinian leader really met his end.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mohamed Brahmi, the left-wing politician who was assassinated outside his home here last Thursday, was born in Sidi Bouzid, the same town where a desperate fruit vendor set himself on fire in December 2010, triggering the Tunisian revolution — and the Arab Spring.

The Islamist party Ennahda, which governs Tunisia, has blamed the killing — as well as the assassination, nearly six months ago, of Chokri Belaid, a prominent human rights advocate — on a young weapons smuggler who has ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

But Ennahda itself bears much of the blame. It should be recognized, and condemned, for being the radical party that it is: a party that has created a climate of escalating fundamentalist violence that threatens the lives of liberal, left-wing and secular activists.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el curso de la investigación promovida por el Departamento de Criminología de la Universidad Camilo José Cela, dirigida por el doctor Francisco Pérez Abellán y con las aportaciones de los doctores María del Mar Robledo y Ioannis Koutsourais, se ha hecho público el informe sobre el estudio del cadáver momificado del general Prim desde la antropología forense. El cadáver tenía huellas alrededor del cuello que ahora se asegura podrían deberse a su estrangulamiento por una correa o cinturón. Se descarta que las señales se deban a otras causas; por ejemplo, a la propia práctica del embalsamamiento. En el féretro había tres vasijas colocadas en triángulo conteniendo un líquido amarillo, que para algunos podrían formar parte de un ritual masónico.…  Seguir leyendo »

Recientemente han aparecido distintos trabajos pretendiendo haber resuelto uno de los grandes misterios de nuestra historia todavía próxima: el asesinato del general Prim, siendo presidente del Gobierno, el 27 de diciembre de 1870. Después de estudiar tal tragedia accediendo a documentación inédita, y sin perjuicio de publicar en su momento un detallado estudio, adelanto algunas reflexiones al lector:

Prim, como la mayoría de los mortales, era hombre de luces y sombras, de valor e inteligencia y de gran ambición, concretada en el poder y en el dinero. Consiguió ambos objetivos; el segundo todavía perdurará entre sus descendientes, pero el poder es difícil conservarlo, y cuando estaba en lo alto de la cucaña, habiendo recogido el premio, el camino para recorrer era hacia abajo y hubo muchos intereses para que la caída fuese fulminante.…  Seguir leyendo »

Amid the shock and grief at a terrible murder, there is an angry accusation. When forthright opposition leader Chokri Belaid was gunned down in broad daylight outside his home in Tunis, furious protesters marched on the offices around the country of the ruling Ennahda party. Belaid's brother, Abdel Majid, accused the Islamist party – which dominates the three-way coalition government – of the murder. Ennahda has denounced the assassination. Chillingly, Belaid, a secularist and vocal critic of Ennahda, warned of the rise of political violence when he appeared on Tunisian TV the night before he was killed.

Jalila Hedhli-Peugnet, president of the NGO Think Ahead for Tunisia, reflected the prevailing sentiment on Wednesday when she told France 24 that Belaid "was not assassinated under the dictatorship of Ben Ali, now he is assassinated under the democracy of Ennahda".…  Seguir leyendo »

Libya lost one of its most ardent international supporters and a true friend last week with the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. The terrorist attack on the American compound in Benghazi is still being investigated, but it is clear that the perpetrators sought to derail Libya’s democratically elected government and to injure its vital relationship with the United States.

What’s also clear from counter-demonstrations that have taken place across Libya is that the Libyan people stand with the United States in support of democracy and in opposition to such horrific acts of terror.

Ambassador Stevens was a dear friend of mine, and he played a key role in helping to liberate Libya from the oppressive regime of Moammar Gaddafi.…  Seguir leyendo »

There is a black wall in a State Department lobby inscribed with the names of those who died while serving overseas. Every time I passed that wall after Al Qaeda blew up two American Embassies in East Africa in 1998, I thought of the 12 American and 32 Kenyan friends and colleagues who died on my watch as ambassador. I thought of my own journey that day down flights of stairs in the building next door to the embassy, after having been knocked out by the blast, of the people who risked their lives to save others, and of how we carried on under horrendous circumstances.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Wednesday morning, my colleagues and I were to meet in Benghazi with J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, to discuss a plan for a new division of emergency medicine at Benghazi Medical Center, the largest and most modern hospital in eastern Libya. The meeting never took place. The night before, militants laid siege to the American Consulate in Benghazi, killing the ambassador and three other Americans. The ambassador was taken, without a pulse, to the hospital we hoped to upgrade.

The draft agreement we were working on was the kind of visionary effort to improve life in Libya that Ambassador Stevens liked — in this case, a collaboration between doctors in Boston and Benghazi, brokered by a nongovernmental organization that a Libyan-American and I had organized after the recent revolution.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Obama administration may very well be right that the attack in Benghazi which claimed the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials was part of a pre-planned terrorist operation. It would have happened sooner or later regardless of any protests against an obscure anti-Islam film made in America.

The attack apparently occurred because in recent days, the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri posted a video online calling on Libyans to avenge the killing of al-Qaeda's second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi.

According to our own sources at Quilliam Foundation, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants prepared for a military assault.…  Seguir leyendo »

The assassination in Benghazi of the American ambassador to Libya is an appalling act – and one foreseen by his employers. On 27 August,the state department warned US citizens against all but essential travel to Libya, painting a picture of a country beset by increasing instability and fraught with danger.

"The incidence of violent crime, especially carjacking and robbery, has become a serious problem… Political violence, including car bombings in Tripoli and assassinations of military officers and alleged former regime officials in Benghazi, has increased. Inter-militia conflict can erupt at any time or any place in the country," the state department said.…  Seguir leyendo »

The best opportunity to definitively prove What Killed Arafat – the name we gave the documentary investigation that appeared on al-Jazeera earlier this month – is fast approaching. The lawyers of Yasser Arafat's family are calling for the appointment of an independent judge to look into the cause of his death.

The Palestinian president had arrived at the Percy Military hospital on 29 October 2004, following his unexplained deterioration weeks earlier. He fell into a coma and took his last breath there on 11 November the same year. In our film, we interviewed Swiss scientists who had discovered that elevated levels of polonium-210 in biological stains had come from the clothing Arafat had with him at the hospital.…  Seguir leyendo »

With the death of Oswaldo Payá, a key leader of the Cuban democratic opposition, Cuba has suffered what the writer Yoani Sanchez called “a dramatic loss for its present and an irreplaceable loss for its future.” The circumstances surrounding Payá’s death Sunday have sparked controversy similar to that caused in October by the death of Laura Pollan , the leader of the much-acclaimed Ladies in White, just weeks after she was attacked at a protest march by a government supporter.

The Cuban government said that Payá died in a traffic accident near the city of Bayamo when his car slammed into a tree, killing him and another passenger and injuring two others.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el 2013 se cumplirán 50 años del asesinato de Kennedy, y entonces, al igual que a menudo desde hace medio sigo, aparecerán nuevas versiones y/o revelaciones a propósito del curso exacto de aquellos acontecimientos. En tiempos recientes han surgido dos fundamentos nuevos, parcialmente conocidos, de una interpretación novedosa, antes suscrita únicamente por analistas fantasiosos y ahora por estudiosos serios. Me refiero en particular a Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intellligence Machine, el nuevo libro de Brian Latell, analista en jefe de la CIA para América Latina durante 30 años, y en menor medida al cuarto tomo de la biografía monumental de Lyndon B.…  Seguir leyendo »

Few events have been the subject of as many rumours and lies as the assassination on 6 April 1994 of Rwanda's President Juvénal Habyarimana. We may never know the identity of the assassins who fired the two missiles that blew his jet apart as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport; yet this one key event signalled the targeted elimination of Rwanda's political opposition, and triggered the genocide of the Tutsi people.

Since that night there has been a ceaseless propaganda war, with each side blaming the other for what happened. One version is that the rebel Tutsi RPF assassinated the Hutu president in a cynical bid to oust his regime; another version blames Hutu extremists who, faced with the possibility of power-sharing with the Tutsi minority, carried out a coup d'etat in order to create a "pure Hutu" state.…  Seguir leyendo »

El pasado agosto el Corriere della Sera habló del asesinato de Albert Camus a manos de la KGB. El diario italiano citaba al eslavista Giovanni Catelli, este citaba una entrada de los diarios del checo Jan Zabrana, y Zabrana, su encuentro con alguien próximo a la inteligencia soviética. Según esa versión, lo que fuera considerado en 1960 un accidente mortal de tráfico había sido, en el fondo, un asesinato político. Camus pagaba de ese modo su condena de la invasión soviética a Hungría y el apoyo ofrecido a Boris Pasternak para el Nobel.

"Escuché algo sumamente extraño de boca de un hombre que sabía muchas cosas y contaba con fuentes bien informadas", anotó Zabrana en su diario.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Lebanese authorities have received indictments and accompanying arrest warrants relating to the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others in a huge blast in Beirut.

An important milestone in bringing to justice those responsible for the terrible events of Feb. 14, 2005, has been reached. As we wait for the people accused to be arrested let us reflect soberly on the work of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

This is a decisive moment for the Lebanese, their state and for international justice. It is also a decisive moment for the region. Recent events across the Middle East show that the desire for justice and human dignity is universal.…  Seguir leyendo »

En una época en que Hitler, Mao y Stalin no quedan tan lejos, no tiene mucho sentido atribuirle a Estados Unidos una propensión exclusiva a la violencia. El empleo de la violencia cruza toda frontera étnica, nacional, racial y religiosa. Hobbes, Dostoievski y Freud siguen siendo nuestros contemporáneos.

En el agitado debate provocado por la masacre de Tucson, tanto quienes se han aprovechado políticamente del odio al presidente como sus aliados han insistido en que no tienen responsabilidad alguna por lo que ha hecho el asesino y lo describen como un caso de psicopatología individual. Para muchos, es más difícil que nunca en el páramo dejado por la incesante crisis de empleo, no ya conseguir, sino simplemente mantener un mínimo de integración social.…  Seguir leyendo »