Adriaan Alsema is an anarchist from the Netherlands, and the head editor and founder of Colombia Reports. After seeing a fake news story he produced on U.S. soldiers raping Colombian children being repeatedly shared during the Paro Nacional protests in Colombia, I decided to investigate this “news” site some more.
I started by reading Adriaan Alsema’s coverage of the protests and – having read multiple other stories on the matter – realized that his writing was complete disinformation and every chance taken to slip in an editorial addition implying that the Colombian government was categorically evil and ought to be overthrown.
I contacted him via Facebook with links to multiple sources showing that he was writing was fake news – but he ignored them and continued to publish bald-faced lies.
Paro Nacional: A Communist Party Production
The slogan “Another World is Possible” was adopted by the Sao Paulo Forum, a Communist front organization.
The information that I shared with him is that – in contrast to what he claimed – the upcoming protests was clearly part of an operation in coordination with the Venezuela government and the Clandestine Colombian Communist Party.
How this is evident is as follows:
1. The Paro Nacional is clearly based on the same model that Venezuela recently used in coordination with domestic indigenous and leftist groups in Ecuador and in Chile. Step one is to create a sizable mass of people, and then have “professional protestors” intermixed within the larger population work towards achieving strategic goals – such as occupation of key government buildings or engaging in such violence that it’s leads to a response from the police.
2. The slogans used in the propaganda, like the one in the top left of the above image, are directly from those linked to the Sao Paulo Forum – the conferences wherein all of the Communist parties in Latin America meet to plot, plan, and strategize.
3. – As I’ve been monitoring their accounts online and saw evidence of this – which I shared with Adriaan Alsema.
Flustered by Adriaan Alsema’s publishing of misinformation about the Paro Nacional protests – I decided to post a comment on the Colombia Reports Facebook page in hopes that public criticism might be more effective than my attempts at private correspondence.
Sure enough he responded.
Adriaan Alsema admitted that he was an anarchist and claimed that a body of 30,000 mostly indigenous people travelling from outside Bogota – a city of 7.1 million people – to occupy the area around the government district was equivalent with “the majority of the people”.
After asking if he would be willing to answer questions for me about his relationship to any international anarchist or socialist organizational bodies, i.e. the Fourth Internationale, and I was blocked from being able to like or comment upon the Colombia Reports Facebook pages.
Adriaan Alsema: Purveyor of Propaganda
The media that was widely circulating in different Facebook groups was linked to an urban myth that Adrian Alsema had published as truth, and later recanted.
WNYC produced this interview with Adrian asking him questions related to the claim, not true, that a group of American military contractors raped a bunch of Colombian minors and videotaped it as well as how Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, RussiaToday and TeleSUR all picked up the story.
The above screen shot shows that Adriaan Alsema’s anti-American propaganda is being used by the very groups seeking to get people to attend Paro Nacional events!
No wonder he did not want to answer my questions – his propaganda from years ago was being used as a pretext to help build outrage and thus contribute to violent protests!
Colombia Reports is Bolivarian Propaganda
Now more than four years after the story has been proven to be fake, it’s worth noting that multiple media outlets still have coverage of this fake news still on their website:
TeleSUR English still has the story published on their website.
The Center for Economic Policy and Research still has the story published on their website.
RussiaToday still has the story published on their website.
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting still has the story published on their website.
The Nation in an article written by Greg Grandin, still has the story published on their website.
TruthOut still has the story published on their website.
People’s World still has the story published on their website.
Project Censored still has the story published on their website.
ImpunityWatch still has the story published on their website.
Time still has the story published on their website.
The Daily Mail still has the story published on their website.
Most shockingly, even after the author of the fake news story Adrian has admitted that the story is fake – ColombiaReports still has the story published on their website.
Not that you can read my exchange with Adriaan Alsema because of his editing my relationship to the Colombia Reports Facebook page – but I am linking to it below irregardless.