In academic, journalistic and political terms, the Pegasus case confirms three irrefutable facts: first, that news criteria are not universal. Second, that self-censorship is perhaps one of the worst practices of journalists and media companies.
And the third irrefutable fact is that the state, under the administration of former Colombian president Iván Duque Márquez, used the malicious Pegasus software to spy on the campaign of current president Gutavo Petro and those from social and political sectors who legitimised the mobilisations and protests in the context of the social unrest.
Regarding the first fact, it must be said that the claim that news criteria are universal and that, therefore, all media and journalists are obliged to make newsworthy events into headline news is false.
This choice is driven by corporate interests and ideological decisions. It is clear that the media companies that today oppose the Petro government of Colombia were not interested in turning the already confirmed purchase of the computer tool by the Duque government into news and, much less, into a news and political phenomenon.
The references made by magazines such as La FM and Blu Radio to the thorny issue can be explained by a natural reason: it was President Petro who put the issue on the news agenda, a circumstance that forced them to allude to it for two purposes. The first was to deny the transaction and thereby ridicule the head of state. They did so as long as President Petro did not produce a document confirming it.
Once the private company NSO Group confirmed the purchase and sale of the software and Raya magazine published details of the flights that dropped off the software and collected in cash the millionaire sum of money it cost, the same media took on the task of denying the uses Petro claimed the software had been put to in the Duque government.
These uses speak of spying on his campaign and the young leaders of the Primera Linea (Front Line). In addition to the sardonic treatment, the journalists of La FM and Blu radio, owned by Néstor Morales, find it of little or no interest that the legal purchase of Pegasus was paid for in cash, money that was delivered by chartered Israeli aircraft. Regarding the second fact, self-censorship was established from the very first moment in which the head of state warned the country and the world what the Duque government had done with the opposition: chuzarlos, spy on them.
The journalistic treatment that La FM and Blu Radio, among other media, gave to the event is emblematic because it confirms that self-censorship is as real as the purchase of Pegasus. At first, the “journalist” Darcy Quinn, from La FM, in her malicious gossip section, said that Pegasus did not exist.
Once Petro proved otherwise, the director of La FM, the ultra-Uribista Juan Lozano, came out to acknowledge that the purchase of the malicious software was indeed real, without questioning that it was used to spy on Petro’s campaign and much less to affect the leaders of the Front Line.
The brilliant journalist Cecilia Orozco is right when she says that “there is an infallible rule in investigative journalism: the tactics of deception are always defeated by the facts. And these, I add for my part, lead to the truth no matter what size of diversionary operation is activated. The obscure acquisition of the Pegasus spy software (which steals anyone’s intimate data without anyone noticing), and the failure of the attempt to conceal its existence and use in Colombia, are proof that, despite widespread scepticism, reality eventually wins out over lies”.
Of course, if it were discovered that the Petro government was really spying on its opponents, the media that today minimise the importance and seriousness of what happened with Pegasus would have turned it into a colossal scandal bigger than Proceso 8,000. But since they are agents of the right, media companies such as La FM and Blu Radio, the latter run by Néstor Morales, Iván Duque’s brother-in-law, are obliged editorially, economically and politically to tone down the news they wanted to hide.
With regard to the third and last factual event, it is expected that what has been disclosed so far by the presidency of the Republic will reach a criminal and political dimension that these same Uribised media will try to lower the news profile. Perhaps they will do the opposite, when it is the Attorney General’s Office itself that will issue a criminal notice against those officials, whether or not they have a legal status, who participated in the purchase of the malicious software.
The Pegasus case takes us back to the times of the chuzadas (phone tappings) perpetrated by the now extinct Administrative Department of Security (DAS), during the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez. If the criminal use of Pegasus is confirmed, and once the prosecutor’s office opens investigations and summons former ministers and former police directors of the Duque government, we will be able to make a comparison between the monitoring and the processes of stigmatisation, persecution and deaths that occurred during the criminal operation of the former DAS and the actions carried out with the malicious software. It will also serve to ratify that Duque Márquez was the puppet of Uribe Vélez, the father of the feared democratic security policy.
*German Ayala Osorio: Colombian writer, journalist, with a Ph D in Sustainable Regions, political scientist and professor, author of the blog La Otra Tribuna.
(Translated by Rene Phelvin: Email: renephelvin @gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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