RTÉ Special on Michael Dwyer, Bolivia, and the Truth

international | arts and media | news report Thursday November 26, 2009 23:38 by ERS

RTÉ Primetime Investigates next Thursday is a special on the death of Michael Dwyer.

Dwyer worked for Shell as a security guard in Mayo last year, and while there, made contact with extremists from right-wing militia groups. He joined with a number of these men and spent time in Bolivia, where after an investigation he was killed when police stormed his hotel room. It will be interesting to see what spin RTE will place on the events in Bolivia and Ireland.

Last April Bolivian police raided a hotel in Santa Cruz. They shot dead Michael Dwyer, Eduardo Rozsa Flores, a well known Croatian-Bolivian fascist, and Arpad Magyarosi, a Romanian with Hungarian citizenship. Two others were arrested. In the following days the Bolivian authorities said that the gang around Flores were working to spark a civil war leading to the secession of the natural gas rich Santa Cruz region.

Testimony was given that they had carried out one bombing and were planning assassinations. Weapons been found in the hotel room and so were pictures of the men posing with a high powered sniper's rifle.

At a later postmortem examination in Ireland, the state pathologist said she had found one bullet wound to the heart area of Dwyer, which was apparently fired from above.

It will be interesting to see what spin RTE put on all of this. When a member of the IRA was killed by British police in London in 1996 in remarkably similar circumstance (except he had no gun and was shot ten times) there was no Primetime special.

Some might feel that RTE may need reminding of some of the facts of the case in the run up to the programme, so some people may even email them the details of the activities of the Shell and IRMS. Their email address if of course, primetime@rte.ie.

A good source of information on all this is the excellent indymedia report: www.indymedia.ie/article/92865, and the legendary long running thread on this subject on troubled discussion site politics.ie: http://www.politics.ie/foreign-affairs/61194-irish-invo....html