I wrote this as a guest post on another blog. The other blog is about John McAfee and the saga of him being named as a "person of interest" in a murder in Belize and then hiding from the Belize authorities, eventually ending up back in America. I have never seen a diary here about it. This post is more about the media today than it is about John McAfee or the country of Belize.
Whatever your opinions of John McAfee or the story, please read this with an open mind. I have been following this story and doing lots of research on it. My opinions are shaped by all of that. I have come out of this very disenchanted with our "fourth estate" and how they would trade integrity for more clicks.
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Perception is Reality...
This phrase is attributed to Lee Atwater (google is your friend) though there are many variations of it that occurred before him. This phrase, as simple as it is, sums up the latest chapter in John McAfee's life and also, in parallel, Belize. Many perceptions of the past were perceived to be reality and have since been disproved with facts, "the world is flat".
Whenever I hear this phrase, it is usually in response to me saying something like, "that is not true". Whole volumes have been dedicated to perception, reality and truth. While I understand all the nuances and varying thoughts and theories, I like facts. Quantifiable, verifiable, not an opinion....facts. Once you have the available facts, you can then form your own opinion. Knowing the difference between the two seems to be something lacking in today's society. I grew up in a different time, a time when reporters reported facts and if they interjected opinion, because as humans we cannot help ourselves, they stated it as an opinion and not a fact. Perception is a functional reality, but it is not reality.
Which brings us to John McAfee. We pick up the story where our hero has been named as a "person of interest" by the Belize police in connection with the murder of his neighbor, Gregory Faull. This is, indeed a fact. A man was murdered by a single gunshot to the head. He was a neighbor of John McAfee's. Depending upon where you first heard the news from, I read it on Huffington Post, you either heard he was a person of interest or you heard he was wanted for murder. Jeff Wise of Gizmodo reported, interestingly before the official release, that John McAfee was wanted for the murder of his neighbor and he was on the lam from the police. They even got one of their graphic designers to mock up a wanted poster for the story. This was the one I read, and it was not true. Other news organizations, hungry for the scoop, cited this article in their stories. Later that day many of them had either posted new stories or replaced the original ones with revised ones which more accurately reported John McAfee as a person of interest, but the damage was done. For everyone who read the initial story and then moved on to the next one, John McAfee will forever be guilty of murder.
Is he guilty? In my opinion, absolutely not. The facts that are available support that. They also support reasonable doubt that he, or someone he knew, may be guilty. Our troll had said that means, motive and opportunity are the three tests. He had already come to his conclusion, so it was easy to bend the facts to match his "perception". On the other hand, a critical thinker would look at that and realize it was all based on perception and go out to dig up more facts. The means and opportunity were available to too many people for these to be significant. One of the things we do not know, and no one has ever asked as far as I know, is...did Greg Faull have a gun? See how that one piece of information could change everything? Another question is, what happened to his laptop and cell phone? The initial reports mention them but once the world was fixated on McAfee, these became trivial. Since it was reported that nothing else was missing, alledgedly, and the home had not been ransacked, I would say this is a significant fact.
Belize is the 6th worst country in the world for murders. This is a statistical fact. When calculating murders per capita, a small country like Belize can end up looking pretty bad. So you can look deeper to form your own opinions. Greg Faull had told his family that Belize was one of the safest Central American countries even though the US has had a travel warning for Belize due to the high crime rate. Perception, meet Reality. If you think a place is safe, you will not take precautions you may otherwise take. John McAfee was aware of the dangers, some say paranoid. Again, one man's precautions can be perceived of as paranoid behavior by others.
I have said many times that the other expats are on an extended vacation and Mr. McAfee was immersing himself in the culture. So there then existed two different Belize's, in parallel. This continues to this day. The Belize that it's citizens live in and the Belize that is created for the tourists. In tourist Belize the people are happy, the streets are clean, the water pure. There is no poverty and the streets are safe. By contrast, in the real Belize, crime is high. The police and other armed organizations, GSU, are abusing their authority and not doing the job they were entrusted to do. Being in police custody usually means that at the very least, you are safe. In Belize it can be a death sentence. Many of the "in custody" deaths are never reported. The abuses by the authorities, while sometimes reported on locally, never make it to world press. Until the John McAfee saga, Belize was just another tourist destination. A cruise ship port. The tourist Belize. Some people have said that if John McAfee was not Greg Faull's neighbor he would still be alive. I say that if John McAfee was not Greg Faull's neighbor, his murder would have been reported locally in Florida, maybe even a paragraph put out on the AP wire and used as filler but not the media firestorm that it was. It would be another unsolved murder, to go with the many other unsolved murders in Belize. The people in power would continue with their abuse and corruption and the world would have barely blinked.
John McAfee kept the conversation, and the media attention, alive for several months. Was it all just a mindf*** as he says or was it a masterful way of insuring that he and his friends stayed alive and at least for a moment the world shone a flashlight on Belize and the roaches scurried for cover? Perception, meet Reality....