Considering what she wrote about the United States, it’s no surprise she’d switch sides.
Vicky Pelaez, the Peruvian-born reporter and editor for El Diario/La Prensa best known for her aggressive columns, has been rooting against the United States in world politics for years. She is now accused of spying on her adopted homeland for Russia.
Stories attributed to her on Web sites — some in Spanish and some translated into English — compare the United States to Nazi Germany in its treatment of prisoners and call President Obama “a habitual liar.”
An El Diario story from this past December, translated on the blog Machetera, accused the United States of meddling in Honduran elections.
Pelaez, 55, seethed that the US government was “ignoring every democratic precept that it has supposedly preached for the last 200 years.”
Another of her stories claims that US officials use prison labor as a form of slavery. It quotes a Progressive Labor Party study saying prison labor imitates “Nazi Germany” and “concentration camps.”
Pelaez’s stories appear to have been pulled from the El Diario Web site, where there was no trace of them yesterday. A call to the paper was not returned.
Colleagues called Pelaez a “radical.” But her writings targeted both Republican and Democratic administrations.
In one article, she accused Obama of “making fun of Haiti and the world” for sending President George W. Bush to the island after the earthquake.
But her lawyer, John Rodriguez, insisted to The Post that her writings show she loves her country.
“If you see something wrong with a child, you correct the child. You don’t stop loving the child,” Rodriguez said.
Pelaez and her husband, CUNY finance professor Juan Lazaro, 66, are accused of collecting money from Russian officials they had met in South America to work as spies for Russia. They met with the Russian undercovers on two separate occasions, the feds allege.
They have a 17-year-old son. Pelaez also has a son, 38, from a previous relationship.
Both Pelaez and Lazaro have denied the spying charges.
At the time of Pelaez’s arrest, the former editor-in-chief of El Diario, Gerson Borrero, said of the suspect:
“Fifty percent of the people that know Vicky Pelaez, that know her trajectory, will say, ‘I knew all along she was a no-good communist.’ The other 50 percent will say this is a frame-up by the US government because she has been critical of US policy and imperialism in Latin America.”