In the 1960’s Senator McCarthy ruined lives of innocent people. The criticisms of McCarthyism, and of Senator McCarthy in particular, are threefold. First, he ruined the reputations and lives of many innocent people by accusing them without credible evidence.
Second, he used accusations of Communist sympathies to counterattack anyone who criticized his methods. Third, he argued against freedom of speech because much of his rhetoric assumed that any discussion of the ideas underlying communism was dangerous and un-American.
Fast forward today, jailed Spanish Police Commissioner Jose Manuel Villarejo got his first taste of policing activity when he was recruited as a police officer during the dirty war between the Spanish state and the terrorist group ETA.
He became an undercover intelligence agent, unfortunately also acquiring extortion and blackmailing skills which would finally land him in prison in 2017.
In a surprise move on a get-rich-quick scheme, he set his target on Equatorial Guinea and got a 5.3 million Euro contract to dig up dirt, create fake stories, fake crimes, and smear Gabriel Mbaga Obiang Lima and anyone perceived to be associated with him.
As previously written by Dave Uwakwe, in 1995 Villarejo was among a group of agents commissioned to produce a report aimed at discrediting Judge Baltasar Garzón, who was investigating allegations that the government had carried out extrajudicial killings in the Basque country in the 1980’s.
In the resulting Veritas report, which was leaked to the press, Garzón was accused of attending orgies where he consumed cocaine, caviar and champagne while having sex with two or three women at a time. In an interview in 2017, Villarejo admitted that he was part of the team selected to check the information in the dossier.
According to Joaquín Vidal, the director of moncloa.com “He (Jose Villarejo) recorded absolutely everything – all his phone calls and meetings – so we know that it’s a huge archive.”
Mr Vidal runs an online publication that has released several of Mr. Villarejo’s recordings without explaining exactly how it got them. This has gotten collaborators of Jose Villarejo like Delfin Mocache Masoko and OCCRP really worried. They participated in the smear campaign.
What has been amazing to many is that this corrupt cop Mr. Villarejo secretly recorded his numerous dealings. While in detention, snippets of his work and conversations have surfaced in many Spanish news media. This includes but is not limited to his 5.3-million-euro contract with the now famous report called “Project King” in Equatorial Guinea. Recent publications by Delfin Mocache Masoko and OCCRP mirror many of the falsehoods fabricated by Jose Villarejo’s “Project King” that have landed Villarejo in a Spanish jail.
According to the Spanish prosecutors, the appalling criminal actions in this matter revealed their lack of integrity and greed. Quite simply, he betrayed his brothers and sisters in law enforcement.
Africans must express their deepest gratitude to the judiciary in Spain but must also urge them not to stop there, and to take all legal steps to root out injustice and corruption by any of its police officers and associates found to be corrupt.
The actions of Delfin Mocache Masoko in taking money and working with Jose Villajero must be condemned. This was not a simple mistake. This was manufacturing of evidence. This was about faking documents. He has a history of doing this including plagiarizing stories.
We disagree with anyone who believes that the collaboration of Delfin Mocache Masoko, Jose Villarejo and OCCRP against Gabriel Mbaga Obiang Lima was just a mere coincidence. Their work and practice of using fraudulent documents to create a smear campaign is not a coincidence. It was premedicated and well executed. They are now embarrassed and sorry because they got caught and justice is coming quick to them. They got busted.
In an emotional speech to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Dr. Charlotte Knobloch, former President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany told the German lower house of parliament (Bundestag) that extremists and conspiracy theorists had again taken aim at liberal European values. “We must not forget for a single day how fragile the precious achievements of the last 76 years are since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on January 27, 1945.”
As the world remembers victims of the Nazi Holocaust, “We Can Never Again Be Silent” when we stay silent on lies, conspiracy theories and misrepresentations, hate, anti-Semitism and racism returns. “For months, conspiracy theories with anti-Semitic tendencies have been deliberately stirred up in the coronavirus debate,” Council President Josef Schuster told German daily newspaper Bild. “If, for example, the Rothschilds are blamed for the pandemic, then this is a synonym for Jews,” said Shuster.
The work of Delfin Mocache Masoko, Jose Villarejo and OCCRP and their conspiracies are exactly what must be condemned. If they are allowed to run rogue with the truth when it comes to Africa and Africans, it will set the stage for many more hundred years of racism, exploitation and subjugation.
This generation of Africans must fight back. Truth can be stranger than fiction, citizens expect and deserve those in public to serve them honestly and in accordance with the law. Failure to do so erodes the public’s faith in government and civil society.
