(Agencia Prensa Armenia) – In an article published in Istor. Revista de Historia Internacional  this week, Mexican Professor Carlos Antaramian, lays bare several details of the Azeri lobby in Mexico.

“Why has Mexico, a country that has not recognized any other genocide in parliamentary statements (except the Holocaust), recognized Khojaly?” asks Antaramian at the beginning of his text.

“In late 2011, the following year, they opened in Mexico City two squares redeveloped by the Azeri government. The first, called ‘Mexico-Azerbaijan Friendship Park’, had a huge statue of the leader Heydar Aliyev, father of the current president of Azerbaijan, before being removed on January 26, 2013. The second square, called ‘Tlaxcoaque-Khojaly Square’, displays a monument of a woman raising her arms and a base that reads ‘Khojaly Genocide’. Both parliamentary statements and squares correspond to effective lobbying by Azerbaijan Ambassador Ilgar Mukhtarov”, Antaramian explains.

The professor adds that Azerbaijan threatened to retire the investments when they decided to remove the statue of Aliyev. Mukhtarov stated that, “The Latin American countries were a free field for Armenians, since Azerbaijan was not represented in the region”.

The document notes that one of the examples of Ambassador Mukhtarov’s lobbying efforts “were the conferences organized at universities in Mexico to present the Azeri version of Khojaly”.

In the report, the professor carefully explains all the manipulations, distortions of history and lies presented by Azerbaijan: “It is well known that history is sometimes manipulated and rewritten to be used as a powerful tool of territorial struggle and even denial of the culture and identity of other groups”.  

Antaramian also recalls the visit of Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian to Mexico, where he said that, “The parliamentary statements issued by the Chambers of Mexico contain distortions of the facts of the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh”.

“These documents where written using only the position of the Azeri Embassy in Mexico, thanks to Ambassador Ilgar Mukhtarov. He, as ‘roving ambassador’ in Latin America, has also taken the same document to be ratified by other congresses in Latin America”, explained Antaramian, citing the case of Colombia, where the Senate made a statement “condemning the ‘Armenian occupation’ and saying that what happened in Khojaly was a genocide”.

Denouncing the various political actors that promoted the parliamentary statement on Khojaly and agreed to the construction of statues of Heydar Aliyev and “Khojaly genocide”, Antaramian presents a unique document in the world, showing every stages of the work of Azeri diplomacy to rewrite and lie about their own history.

(Dr. Carlos Antaramian has a degree in International Relations in the UNAM (1999), and Master and PhD in Social Anthropology in Michoacan College (2006). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UAM -X (2008-9). He is currently a professor and researcher in the Multimedia Production Area of Michoacan College, and is conducting a research on “La migración armenia en America Latina”)

The full article is available in PDF or in the Diario ARMENIA of Buenos Aires site.