TeleSur or TeleTerrorism?

El Tiempo |Test Transmissions of Telesur include imagenes of Tirofijo

The channel, that is to debut on July 24, has signed agreements so that some of their droadcasts are transmitted by Capital Channel and Telepacífico. On the television sets of some Venezuelans, Argentineans, Cubans, and Uruguayan they have already begun to receive a clear test signal of Telesur, a channel that looks to spread the Latin American values under the optics of its four partners: the governments of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay, that already have injected into it more than 10 million dollars, about 25 billion Colombian pesos.

"It is without a doubt a political and strategic project", admitted by its director, the Uruguayan Aram Aharonian, in several interviews, and adds: "we are trying to recover our voice that has been kidnapped for more than three decades by dictators, corrupt and genuflects politicians before capital". Thus it is not a mystery that the channel will have a clear leftist content, still more if it considers that Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, inspired the idea: "We have to make something similar to CNN", he said some time ago. However, the test signals of the new channel - that already has nine correspondents in all the continent - have members of Colombian intelligence community worried. They have assured El Tiempo that the channel includes elements related to national and international terrorism and that it paints Colombia in a negative image.

The president of Capital Channel, Héctor Pinilla, clarified that he will choose himself what is transmitted and what will not be shown on Telesur. However, he added that he thinks that, sometimes, the Government suffers from too much paranoia.
On the other hand, the manager of Telepacífico, Jaime Fernandez, emphasized: "We know clearly what is what we can transmit, what is suitable to our public and audience. The citizen is our audience, and what is in their best interest ".
In any case, to sustain their affirmations, the investigators exhibit several fragments of the test transmission of Telesur and stress three specific episodes.

ETA Shower?

The first transmission shows a young woman in a shower, singing a song whose choris is "eta, eta, eta".
The image then shows an amazonian landscape and after that one on the Tunjuelito river (in the south of Bogota ') and its contamination. The investigators think that the song of the woman is a clear reference to the Basque terrorist group that, coincidently, exploded several bombs yesterday, while the governments of Colombia and Spain where at a joint press conference on binational agreements.

The second image that they make reference shows the head of the guerrilla of the FARC, Pedro Antonio Marín, "Tirofijó", like part of the promotion of a denominated program "Memories de fuegó" that, according to the channel (Telesur), will be documentary against the forgetfulness. The face of ' Titofijó alternates with marches of protests in different countries, among them the one that provoked the murder of the Colombian leader of Unión Patriótica (UP), Jose Antequera, which happened on March 3, 1989.

Finally, they call the attention on the prolonged images of a demonstration on on May day (May 1) - world-wide day- at Plaza Bolivar in Bogota. In the clip, the demonstrators shout insults against the Government and show placards in which they blame the Armed Forces as authors of recent massacres and reject governmental policies. "Colombia Plan: war and death against the town ", say one of the placards that are seen in the test images. These, also appear in the test transmissions.
El Tiempo tried to communicate with the directors of the Telesur channel, whose main seat is in Caracas (Venezuela), to formulate these questions to them. But to the closing of this edition an answer had not been obtained.



I find it rather interesting that Telesur is broadcasting all anti-Colombian broadcast (except the ETA one). Chavez and Castro seem to be so intent on overthrowing the Uribe government, and installing a radical left wing one, that now they are attacking it using media broadcast along with the tacit support towards the FARC.

Click the title link above to see the test video transmissions being broadcast by Telesur.