(ERIC FEFERBERG AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
The official reaction of Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and several other Latin American countries to the Islamic radicals terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo was not only weak, but shameful: they condemned the bloodshed but not its intention to silence the press.
Hours after the Jan. 7 attack on the satirical magazine that left 12 dead, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro issued a statement saying that he “strongly condemns the terrorist attack.” Likewise, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Bolivian President Evo Morales, and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa issued statements condemning the killings, but without denouncing them as an attack on freedom of expression.
“It was a lukewarm response, ” former Argentine Foreign Minister Dante Caputo told me in a telephone interview, referring to Argentina’s reaction. He said that Fernández’s government issued a “standard prepared statement, like the ones they send out after any terrorist attack, as if this were an ordinary attack like others that we see happening all the time.”
“But this was no ordinary attack, ” Caputo added. “It was an assault on our culture, an effort to intimidate the Western World into silence.”
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Etiquetas: Andres Oppenheimer, Charlie Hebdo, Latin America
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