Legrand accused the legislator of posting false information on social networks, after he attributed a phrase to her that she later denied having declared. “Lula should summon Chavista troops (from Venezuela) to repress the Bolsonaristas,” said the phrase that was on a photo of the journalist, to which Bianchi opined: “These assertions are very serious”.
Faced with this complaint, the nationalist senator expressed: “PTo shut me up, they’re going to have to kill me.”.
Graciela Bianchi was criminally denounced for disclosing false information on her social networks https://t.co/VlxkrI4etu via @ladiaria. Now it is clear that they are trying to limit everyone’s freedom of expression and generate self-censorship.
— Graciela Bianchi (@gbianchi404) January 24, 2023
In the letter, which was presented to the Prosecutor’s Office, Legrand argues that Bianchi’s “messages of systematic intolerance” “become a constant harassment against journalists and people with public exposure”. In the plaintiff’s understanding, the motivation behind the original post “seems to be none other than the intimidation and humiliation of the journalist”, in addition to the fact that it is a behavior that the senator constantly maintains, with a hostile and inquisitive speech against journalists and media workers”, according to La Diaria.
Other examples
It’s not the first time that the senator, third in the government’s line of succession behind President Luis Lacalle Pou and Vice President Beatriz Argimón, Post false information on Twitter. In June 2022, he released a photomontage of the then recently elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petroin which he is seen together with the historic drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. “The terrible constant in Latin America in recent decades: guerrilla, drug trafficking and reaching the government using democratic forms that were not respected”criticized the legislator on the social network.
According to AFP Factual, the photograph is false. It has been shared since May 2021, and its visibility increased prior to the elections in Colombia in 2022. The section of the French agency reported that the original photograph It is seen in various international media such as a 2018 Infobae news.
Despite this, Bianchi also discredited the veracity of this AFP investigationbecause it gives “no assurance of certainty”, and refused to apologize or acknowledge his mistake: I affirm that “reality is not a montage” and that the new Colombian president “He belonged to the FARC for more than 40 years and they were financed by drug trafficking”.
That last comment is also wrong: Petro He was a member of the socialist urban guerrilla M19, not from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); When this error was marked on the networks, Bianchi maintained that “is the same”.
In turn, in 2021 the legislator starred in yet another case, when she shared an image of two doctors with masks and blue tunics on a cartwhich he used to defend the strategy of vaccination against covid-19 From Uruguay. “This is a photo that represents Uruguay like few others today. So that many think before talking about the government’s strategy to face the pandemic and to carry out the vaccination. We are dating,” the senator tweeted in July of that year.
However, the Argentine outlet Todo Noticias reported that the photo He was not from Uruguay, but from Alhuampafrom the Argentine province Santiago del Esteroand it was May.
