Reader Burritnomics provided the sad news about Gonzalo Lira’s death in comments. It looks to have been first reported by Tucker Carlson:
Gonzalo Lira, Sr. says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison, where he was being held for the crime of criticizing the Zelensky and Biden governments. Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen, but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture. Several… https://t.co/F0nOG9qGvv
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 12, 2024
I am saddened and outraged at this news. It is a disgrace, particularly after Gonzalo reported having been tortured and extorted while in prison, that the State Department did nothing to assist him, when they clearly could have gotten him deported. But that was certain not to happen given his show on Victoria Nuland.
Gonzalo wrote some posts for Naked Capitalism not long after the financial crisis that were very colorful and informative. We parted ways over his submitting a post that took strong views on budget orthodoxy. Update: our code maven Dave just informed me that Gonzalo also created our Wikipedia page. By e-mail:
00:29, 4 April 2010 GonzaloLira talk contribs 319 bytes +319 ←Created page with ”’Naked Capitalism” is a popular blog run by Yves Smith. It deals mainly with finance-related and economic news and analysis. It has been consistently ra…’
I don’t know how I found his commentary on the war in Ukraine, but I watched it regularly. Lira had produced documentaries and analyzed some videos presented as battlefront scenes that he demonstrated were staged. In particular, he called out James Vasquez as a fraud who produced bogus videos to extract money from people who wanted to support Ukraine:
The New York Times reported that Vasquez was a con artist months later, without crediting Gonzalo. Business Insider re-reported the New York Times story and added new detail in The making of a fake war hero: An American who reinvented himself as a social-media soldier in Ukraine is accused of ‘stolen valor‘.
This was from our August 1 post. Gonzalo had been detained once by the Ukraine authorities for about ten days, has all of his social media accounts taken from him, and was released with (after much pleading) one very old laptop but also his identity papers. He was told not to leave the country but allegedly did not get the message that being given his documents meant he was being given the opportunity to fly the coop.
Instead he stayed and resumed broadcasting. I participated in a few of his Roundtables during this period, which I very much enjoyed. We last spoke for what was supposed to be 15 minutes and turned out to over 2 hours, in IIRC spring 2023, when I was bummmed and stressed out the state of the warld and getting my mother’s house emptied, sold, and moving overseas and he was depressed about being under something close to house arrest and not knowing what would happen when the war got to him in Kharkiv.
But Gonzalo and was unable to restrain himself from giving pointed commentary about Urkraine, resulting in a second arrest and much harsher treatment. From an August 1 post, after his second arrest:
Gonzalo Lira is alive, as the videos embedded below and a fresh 25-entry tweetstorm attest. However, he has a very ugly story to report. He was detained and repeatedly tortured by prisoners at the behest of guards, so as to create official deniability.
He was allowed to go free by virtue of paying $70,000 in bribes (after having $9,000 of “emergency cash” stolen) plus $11,000 in bail to be set loose before an August 2 trial date, where he was told his conviction was a certainty, despite the prosecution effectively admitting in its own filings that Gonzalo’s only crime was running afoul of Ukraine’s extreme restrictions on free speech. The anticipated sentence was 5 to 8 years in a labor camp. Gonzalo was not given access to an attorney despite claims otherwise.
And predictably, the State Department was no help, due not just to Gonzalo’s critical reporting on the US role in the conflict and outing some Western propaganda, but no doubt more specifically to his video on Russia-hater-in-chief Victoria Nuland, who was just promoted to number two at State. Representatives of the US Embassy did visit him three times, but offered, as Gonzalo put it, only bromides. But apparently there was enough noise made, particularly by the Chilean government, about Gonzalo not being allowed to post bail, so State apparently did eventually clear its throat about that.
Gonzalo tried to make a run for the Hungarian border and posted a video before his attempted crossing, which failed. I am at a loss as to why he did that ahead of time, putting the officials on notice, as opposed to arranging for it to appear at a time certain, when he would either have been arrested or be in Hungary. Perhaps he had reason to think that setting up a delayed release could still be detected by the SBU, so he might as well go public. And he wanted to leave a record in case this was his only chance to give a message to his family. This is the last in a series of three videos he released then. It’s is a bit verbose but you can understand why:.
I feel I should say more but am at a loss as to how best commemorate Gonzalo. He was irreverent, funny, often acidly insightful, a little too fond of wild speculation for the hell of being provocative. He could also be undisciplined, such as his unnecessarily vitriolic attack on Scott Ritter (his critique would have been more effective with less venom) and being insistent on his retrograde views of male-female relations. That defiance of norms was part of his charm but also a sign of perhaps too much appetite for risk.
Gonzalo said more than once the measure of a life was the distance between the highs and the lows. Tragically, he was killed on a low. It seems pretty obvious this is not a bona fide death from natural causes, as Ukraine is alleging. He had pneumonia, which is highly treatable if dealt with early, and the Ukrainians did not. So they can pretend they had nothing to do with his early death when the reverse is true. As Lambert put it, “He died in prison, as was the intent.”