Some additional ironies did not escape all the smiling commentaries your fact-check has provoked in our newsrooms and across the chat screens that span our América...

For example, COHA's Bolivia analysis leans very heavily on a news source that it recently called "slanderous" (that be us). Does that mean that COHA is dependent on unreliable sources? (Certainly, any writer or journalist out there that is not fluent in Spanish is absolutely dependent on Narco News reports to find the facts, and a considerable number of fine Spanish-language journalists and others freely admit that we drive so many of these stories for them, too)...

But here is COHA, having to lean quite heavily on a "noisy and intemperate" source like us. It must be killing them from the inside out. Either - as I posited during the Great Zapatista Debate - COHA's accusation of "slander" was insincere and a smokescreen, or COHA depends on a "slanderous" source.

That COHA tries to mask its addiction to Narco News as generator of the original raw material upon which it relies to make its analyses (and raise money for its operation) is both funny and, well, kind of pathetic.

I mean, not only does COHA cite Gómez reporting disingenuously mis-sourcing it (as if saying a book is published by Xerox just because someone made a photocopy of it), but in one of those cases it credits the New Zealand newspaper Scoop, which republished not your full article, but merely an alert about it. This is especially entertaining because Scoop also publishes COHA's press releases with regularity. Does this mean that anyone citing a COHA report should simply credit it, as COHA does, to Scoop instead? If we do as they do, and not as they say, it seems like a blanket permission to do so, no?

In addition to leaning heavily on two Gómez reports, the COHA press release on Bolivia cites the work of Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholar Teo Ballvé's June 10th analysis over at Americas.org... an analysis that ends with an author's note that says:

Teo Ballvé is an editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas. He thanks and acknowledges the brave work of Luis Gómez, Jean Friedsky, Alex Contreras and the rest of the kind people at the Narco News Bulletin for the reporting included in this article.

In fact, Teo's analysis there is based largely on Teo's own work on Narco News: His 2004 investigative piece on the dynamics in the province of Santa Cruz, A Tale of Two Bolivias. Anybody reading the new COHA press release that gives a reading to that article will see, also, a heavy but undisclosed reliance on that Narco News story too.

Really, it's all so fun and entertaining.

Plagiarism, after all, is the highest form of flattery.

We'll be happy to ghostwrite more COHA press releases in the future. It looks like that spanking I gave them over the Zapatista libel has them sensitized indeed. They can't bring themselves to credit us when they rob us. They can't bring themselves to admit that they are dependent on us to do the heavy lifting that they then sanitize into lame "analysis." And yet they know it. Ouch. That must hurt. I feel their pain. Here's a band-aid and a kiss for your boo boo, Mr. Birns.

But at least we're having fun while pioneering a better way to find and tell the truth in our América. Pass the intemperate guitar! I feel a song coming on! I think I'll call it "El Copy Cat Corrido"! ¡Salud!