It has made the headlines in Hungary and beyond that Chilean American political YouTuber Gonzalo Lira has recently announced that he is seeking asylum in Hungary. Gonzalo was arrested in Kharkiv, Ukraine in late April of this year for allegedly producing pro-Russian propaganda. Lira is making political commentary videos on his YouTube channel with 85,000 subscribers. The oldest upload still available there is from October 2022, but the channel itself was created in 2013.
Generally, he tends to hold right-wing opinions, such as speaking out against anti-white sentiments and the LGBTQ agenda. However, what really got him into trouble was his views on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. He has posted videos in which he claimed that the Russian forces are close to victory, and the state of the Ukrainian army is worse than the media reports. He also stated that the Ukrainian territories captured by Putin’s forces ‘are now part of the Russian Federation, and the Russians will never gonna let them go’, and even went as far saying ‘the Ukrainian nation has been killed already’.
These were the statements that most likely prompted local authorities to step in and detain the man. Lira shared the English translation of his indictment on Twitter, according to which he is accused of the ‘production and distribution of materials containing the justification, recognition as legitimate, [or] denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine’.
What is interesting is that while Lira is an American-Chilean dual citizen, having been born in Burbank, California in 1968, the US State Department made no effort to help their fellow American imprisoned abroad for a non-violent and non-property crime initially. What’s more, no major news outlet in the US reported on his plight; and some of the little coverage he got was seemingly celebrating the demise of a ‘Putin shill’.
After his arrest in April, the controversial political YouTuber was able to share publicly on social media again on 1 August. According to those posts, he was prohibited from contacting lawyers and loved ones upon his arrest, and was denied bail. While detained, still according to Lira’s social media posts, he was ‘tortured’ by his fellow inmates for which they faced no repercussions. At last, he was released on an $11,000 bail on 6 July. He also claims that he is not expecting to see his $11,000 ever again, and that about $100,000 worth of cash and other assets have been ‘extorted’ from him by the Ukrainian government since his arrest.
Also on 1 August, Gira posted an update video to his YouTube channel, in which he is claiming to be crossing the border to Hungary. In it, he goes on to state that both the Chilean and American governments put pressure on Kyiv to allow him to post bail, which led to him being let out of custody.
Referring to that, he sarcastically claimed ‘if only I’d been a black lesbian drugee, or a transgender grifter, then maybe they would have done something. Well, if I had been one of those two things I would have been out instantly’. This is a reference to female basketball player Brittney Griner being traded for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in a prisoner exchange between the US and Russia in December 2022.
In his Youtube video, Lira went on to state about his arrest that
‘The judge was very clear…I couldn’t leave the city, I couldn’t leave the country, and I had to surrender my passports—I have two, American and Chilean. And of course they confiscated all these documents for my transportation. And yet when I was released on bail, they gave me all this stuff back. They didn’t put the electronic monitor [on me], and they allowed me to keep my passports.’
About his most recent status update, he had this to say:
‘I will definitely be sent to a prison labour camp where I will most certainly die. And so, I decided that the smart thing was [to] take my chances in terms of getting across the border.
Right now, I’m maybe five kilometres away from the border with Hungary…My intention is to cross the border, get to Hungary, and in Hungary, I will ask for political asylum.’
Lira believes that he has the best chance in Hungary to avoid extradition back to Ukraine, as the country ‘has shown some independence’, as he put it, in not going along with full-blown support to Ukraine in conflict. As of the time of writing this article, Lira’s whereabouts are unkwnon.
It is not uncommon to have wartime governments crack down on individual freedoms. Historically, even US President Abraham Lincoln did so during the American Civil War, arresting Confederate-sympathiser journalists in Maryland, among other things, and he is universally hailed as one of the best Presidents in American history. However, such actions by the current Ukrainian government are rarely reported in the international press, and, curiously, the NGO Freedom House has even upgraded their ‘democracy index’ since the war started.
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