In 2006, Fredo Arias-King pointed out to me that Castaneda's Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father, Mexico's UN ambassador, met her in New York City in the early 1950s, where she was a translator for Stalin's delegation. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister (2001-2003) was his older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental Gutman, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.
On Monday, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal has accused Castaneda of spying for Castro's intelligence service on his father, who was Mexico's foreign minister in the late 1970s and early 1980s: "Casta?±eda espi?? a M?©xico y a su padre."
Even though Castaneda is a frequent commentator in the American press, the American media, according to a Google News search, ignored the story — after all, it's only a story about America's next-door neighbor — except for the LA Times on Wednesday, which headlined Castaneda's denial of a story that nobody in America had been told about.
