El Pais of Spain conned by counter propaganda from Cuba

UPDATED

At least this is what I suspect.

Newspaper of reference, El Pais of Madrid, which is to Spanish what Le Monde is to French or the NYT to English has been scammed. Tweets today announced that they were going to publish a picture of sick Chavez (why? to begin with). That picture was of Chavez supposedly intubated.
Unfortunately within minutes someone showed a video from a Mexican surgery training or something to that effect where the picture came from.

At this typing El Pais has not made a retraction yet but the link to the article has ceased to function though the Latin America news page still carries the header.

I suppose lots of explanations are going to follow.  However one thing is certain, international newspapers should show the restraint of Venezuelan bloggers like yours truly, not to obsess with Chavez whereabouts because  well, those whereabouts are used for political manipulation by Cuba and his local allies inside the Chavez regime.  Even Bocaranda has shown no picture...

Now, in a few days, when and if Chavez dies, or when and if another coup happens in Venezuela, any comment from El Pais will be ridiculed by the regime, thus silencing it at least in the eyes of the chavista suckers.

I will, of course  keep reading El Pais in spite of that apparent blunder, but I expect a real explanation real, real soon... PS: by the way, El Pais has done some serious budget cuts that resulted in part in stopping the international commentary I participated in.  Looks like El Pais lost more than just that forum with those cuts....

Below the page as it appeared a few minutes ago.


UPDATE

El Pais has just announced that it was withdrawing the picture of "Chavez" from its web site and recalling the distribution of its newspaper. It apologizes because it needs to do a new edition, that not all will have the paper in a timely way tomorrow.  The explanation is not too good as El Pais claims that they accepted that picture from a news agency that they still do not name...  I suppose that for legal reasons they may want to withhold the name for the time being but they need to expose whomever conned them if they want to leave this major mess behind fast.  I trust they will.

The tweet that poked my page a few minutes ago



EL PAÍS retira de su web una falsa foto de Hugo Chávez vía