'Russian Spy' Actually a Progressive New York Journalist

Rather interesting to note one of the alleged Russian spies rounded up yesterday happens to include a journalist for New York's Spanish language paper El Diario.

Pelaez is a Peruvian-born reporter and editor and worked for several years for El Diario/La Prensa, one of the country’s best-known Spanish-language newspapers. She is best known for her opinion columns, which often criticize the U.S. government.

In January 2000, Pelaez was videotaped meeting with a Russian government official at a public park in the South American nation, where she received a bag from the official, according to one complaint.

Pelaez was born in Cusco, southeast of Lima, and worked as a journalist for the defunct daily La Prensa de Lima and later for a television station, where she gained notoriety among local journalists. On Dec 8, 1984, Pelaez, who worked for Frecuencia Latina, was kidnapped for a day and interviewed a leader of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The interview wasn’t broadcast on television, but the following year it appeared in Marka, a newspaper with leftist leanings.

Lazaro and Pelaez discussed plans to pass covert messages with invisible ink to Russian officials during another trip Pelaez took to South America, a complaint said.
The complaint alleges authorities overheard an unguarded Lazaro once saying in his home, “We moved to Siberia ... as soon as the war started.”

Here's an article by the "progressive" journalist railing about the U.S. prison system, calling it a new form of slavery.

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

I wonder if Pelaez was a JournoList member?

A further look at the source of that piece tells you more than enough. Also worth noting about Pelaez is this.

Until now, the 10 under arrest have not been accused of espionage, but of having “conspired to act as foreign agents without being registered under the FARA law.” Among those detained is a journalist in New York, of Peruvian origin. Vicky Peláez wrote for El Diario/La Prensa, the most widely read Spanish language newspaper in the Big Apple. She was one of the few Hispanic journalists to criticize Washington’s policies toward Latin America, and who sought balance in her reports on Venezuela and other countries of the region that are normally extremely criticized in the U.S. press.

Until today, no international organization that defends journalists and freedom of expression, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA – English/SIP – Spanish), or Reporters Without Borders (RSF – French/Spanish) has made a statement about her arrest.

Their silence is telling.

Finding out more about Lazaro is interesting as well.

That name is mentioned here.

Juan Lazaro is a journalist and anthropologist, trained at the New School for Social Research, who has done extensive fieldwork in Peru.

Here it says Lazaro told people he was a professor of finance.

Meanwhile, here's a look at the couple picked up in Montclair, NJ. Love this comment.

These folks were almost certainly communists, which, of course, made it effortless for them to pass themselves off as typical residents of Montclair.

One of the spies picked up in New York looks like a real social butterfly, and looks pretty damn good.

More on her here.