I was the last person Gonzalo Lira called before he got arrested and died at the hands of the Ukrainian war regime.
He sent me a direct message and we went into a zoom call. He was in a small room, extremely nervous, smoking one cigarette after the other. I had never seen so directly the mental effect that physical torture and extortion can do to a man.
In the previous months, he had been tortured by his Ukrainian guards, and amounts in the 6 figures were illegally taken from him as they forced him to reveal his passwords through physical torture unto his nails and eyes. One of these amounts was the 6-figure amount that had been dormant in his Patreon account, which his fans had donated to him across the years. Gonzalo was rich enough that he never needed to withdraw it, but I know it was the pride of his life; the idea that a bunch of regular people thought his commentary was worth enough to pay for when they didn't have to.
Two years before that call, a very intelligent and enlightened version of Gonzalo had called me. He was in the UK, then. He had then told me: "JF I'm about to do something radical. A radical change. I won't tell you what it is, but things are about to change in my life. I'll be covering something different."
It's only later that I got to know he had decided to go live in Ukraine with a family he had already established there, and he would then make a stand as a free thinking commentator as the war raged on, staying at the frontline with a clear message: The West is not the side of freedom it claims to be. Little did we know then that things would escalate to the point that his own death would prove that point conclusively.
Before he got brought to prison and died, the Gonzalo Lira I was seeing on screen in that zoom call was not the enlightened man I used to know. It's very hard to explain what torture does to a man, but if I was to summarize it for you, it strips a man of his humanity and turns him into a scared rat-like creature. Shifty, squirrely, looking out the window in nervousness at all times. The man who was capable of delivering such intelligent analysis on this war, the first to call out the impossibility of what Western countries were demanding of Ukraine (everyone knows today he was right), that man was reduced to a state of constant fear.
I did not tell Gonzalo how different he was. I thought the best I could do was to stand there emotionless, a reassuring pillar of autism on which he could hang unto in order to stay afloat mentally.
"I... I'm not calling you for any reason JF. I just wanted to have someone. I need someone."
"So how's everything?," he asked, as he was lighting up another cigarette.
I knew there was not much I could do for him. I didn't tell him how he could flee the regime or how he should behave. I didn't tell him that everything was going to be okay. I didn't tell him he could survive this.
I told him that the sacrifice he had done was the most honorable thing in the history of independent journalism. That his action in standing at the front line of a war while calling the lie that it was based on would remain engraved in history. And that no matter what would happen from there, he had committed to a highly moral path that one day his children would read about.
Then as we ended the call I said: "Greatest respect to you, Coach."
Hopefully the new US administration, with Trump and @elonmusk, ends up understanding his message: that any money sent Ukraine's way is not only a waste, it's an active investment into corruption and death. That the corruption does not lie only on the Ukrainian side, that it lies in the Blinkens and Nulands of our side. And, finally, that beyond the people that had to die in the war itself, so many were also just executed politically with the intent of socially engineering this war. For that last point, the words of Gonzalo Lira:
