What Happened to Gonzalo Lira?
American in Ukraine missing for a week and feared dead.
Full Disclosure: Gonzalo Lira is/was my cousin. Coming from large families with lots of cousins, we’d met maybe once or twice but hadn’t seen each other in twenty-five years or more. I reached out to him last week by email and politely asked if he’d answer some questions on Russia/NATO/Putin for a Substack piece. I didn’t expect to hear back right away since we weren’t close but never thought it could be forever and for the worst possible reasons.
I hesitated to write about this last weekend when I first noticed it had been 24 and then 48 hours since Gonzalo had posted anything to any social media, though the early rumors were already circulating. He had been pretty consistent with his Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube activity since the start of the war, earning hundreds of thousands of followers for his honest and accurate reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Gonzalo Lira was a writer, filmmaker, life coach, and more recently war reporter who had lived in Ukraine for years. He was the father of two children. He graduated with honors from Dartmouth and got a million-dollar advance for his first novel Counterparts at a young age.
He first began reporting on the Russian invasion from a luxury hotel in Kiev in late February before his videos went viral and made it onto Russian state TV. The next day hotel management, probably on orders from the government, kicked him out of the hotel and he took a train back to his residence city of Kharkov.
Why he didn’t take that as a sign to leave Ukraine entirely was curious, but he stayed and streamed his opposition opinions daily from his home in Kharkov. He knew he was taking a risk but perhaps didn’t take it seriously enough. One cannot beam from a digital device on this planet and not have NSA, CIA, and then SBU or Kraken Nazis track down that device to a specific location.
Gonzalo had to know this, right? His motivations still seem baffling, still seem very naive. He was doing well, gaining followers and making good money, but the danger just doesn’t go away.
My first instinct was to assume the worst given Gonzalo’s own videos and tweets where he admitted his life was potentially in danger.
Three weeks ago the Daily Beast did a hit piece on him. The Daily Beast is a wholly controlled digital printer of CIA-Psyop-USA. The propaganda rag smeared him throughout using the usual panty melt editorializing of unserious Brooklynite soyisms and identitarian jargon like “manosphere” and “toxic masculinity”.
The entire piece was a slanderous work of fiction, mostly laughable if one knew who Gonzalo was, but it quickly turned dangerous when the propaganda rag contacted the Ukrainian government and alerted them to Gonzalo’s location, perhaps with the help of their betters at the CIA? Why would a “news organization” do this if not to maliciously endanger that person?
Gonzalo was making the rounds the past two months on dozens of popular YouTube channels that were dedicated to objectively discussing the war and not just lathering themselves up with Zelensky hero-worship porn and Ghost of Kyiv propaganda.
I first got a glimpse of his astute observations when he was in that hotel room in Kiev and said some obvious but insightful things about Russia’s strategy to move cautiously and avoid civilian casualties compared to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which commenced six weeks of indiscriminate bombing and civilian deaths.
I sent that video to some family with the words: “Check out what this guy is saying from his hotel room in Kiev. He’s spot on about Russia’s strategy.”
Less than ten minutes later they replied: “You know that’s your cousin Gonzalo, right?”
It had been a long time and I didn’t recognize him.
Here we are eight weeks later and all those musings in live streams about kidnappings and hit squads coming for him, and the Daily Beast intentionally putting his life in danger, and well, he’s been missing for almost a week and it’s hard not to fear the worst has happened.
Some of his YouTube videos that he streamed still show his location at the time of streaming as Kharkov, so it was not a mystery where he was but it’s the second-largest city in Ukraine. Tracking him down to a specific residence would have required very advanced digital tracing capabilities that the SBU and Ukrainian government probably do not have. It doesn’t appear that he used TOR or a VPN or any kind of technology to hide his exact location. I do not recall him talking about it, though he may have.
The Chilean state department is aware and has confirmed his disappearance but the government hasn’t said much of anything. No word from his birth country, the United States. Presumably, their response will be feigned ignorance and silence. Maybe they’ll pin a medal on that Nazi who claims to know where Gonzalo is.
An American citizen with the wrong views of Zelensky and the U.S. empire goes missing and they couldn’t care less. What’s the point of citizenship, of paying taxes if your government will collude with Nazis to kill you if you dissent against their illegal coups and wars? The bare minimum contract of citizenship and holding a US passport around the world was once protection. Apparently, this only applies if you have the correct views now. Or maybe that all ended years ago when Obama drone bombed American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen while he was eating at an outdoor restaurant, all for the crimes of his father.
We can’t expect much from the U.S. government. Their response to Gonzalo’s disappearance will simply be another half a billion taxpayer dollars for more war, more dead Ukrainians, more dangerous weapons that will be bombed by Russia, or end up on the black market when Ukraine is an ash heap and failed state split in two.
They’re celebrating on the Ukrainian Borg twitter holes. The fake propaganda journalists embedded with Nazis are celebrating too because that’s what real intrepid journalism is all about - getting those critical of the regime whose boots you can’t stop licking abducted and killed.
There is no shortage of speculators on YouTube, Telegram, and impersonators on Twitter trying to build up their clout on his name. Some of the takes reveal people who hadn’t been paying any attention to Gonzalo until he went missing and are using his disappearance to build their channels. Stop posting or resharing their trash. Stop feeding the morons.
What to do?
It always feels like something needs to be done. Perhaps setting up a crowdfund (Not those sites!) to potentially higher International human rights attorneys to push for an investigation, or even force comment from the Ukrainian and U.S. governments on what they know regarding his disappearance. This is after all about the potential kidnapping, torture, and murder of an American citizen in Ukraine by Ukrainian Nazis who have openly bragged about getting Gonzalo on social media.
Any crowdfund would have to be through an attorney or platform that’s not tied to western countries where they’ll shut it down or seize the funds as they did with the Canadian truckers, twice.
If his family decides on something related to fundraising and taking some kind of legal/diplomatic action, or raising money for his two young children I’ll be sure to post it here.
In the meantime all we can do is ignore the gossip, hope he went to seek political asylum in Russia instead of the west, and that the worst fears and speculations aren’t true.
And maybe that too is naive.
Maybe he flew too close to the sun. If so, he did it with bravery, fearlessness, and the fundamental belief that in a world drowning in propaganda and psychological manipulation, above all things, the truth still matters.
And we know Gonzalo told the truth about the vile Ukrainian regime.
His disappearance is merely the latest evidence.
Source: The Good Citizen
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