No More Learning

The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and crudely in placement, headlining, word usage, and other modes of mobilizing interest and outrage. In the opinion columns, we would anticipate sharp restraints on the range of opinion allowed expression. Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will gener- ate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.
Meanwhile, because of the power of establishment sources, the flak machines, and anti-Communist ideology, we would anticipate outcries that the worthy victims are being sorely neglected, that the unworthy are treated with excessive and uncritical generosity,132 that the media's liberal, adversarial (if not subversive) hostility to government explains our difficulties in mustering support for the latest national venture in counterrevolutionary intervention.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a system- atic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage. In the chapters that follow we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness oftreatment) differ in ways that serve political ends.
A PROPAGAKDA MODEL 35
2
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
APROPAGANDA SYSTEM WILL CONSISTENTLY PORTRAY PEOPLE abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation. We will show in this chapter that the U. S. mass media's practical definitions afworth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model. While this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone. This is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system.
2. 1. JERZY' POPIELUSZKO VERSUS A HUNDRED RELIGIOUS VICTIMS IN LATIN AMERICA
A useful comparison can be made between the mass media's treatment of Jerzy Popie! uszko, a Polish priest murdered by the Polish police in
? 38 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
October 1984, and the media's coverage of priests murdered within the U. S. sphere of influence. In our model, Popieluszko, murdered in an enemy state, will be a worthy victim, whereas priests murdered in our client states in Latin America will be unworthy. The former may be expected to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media; the latter will n. at genetate s. ustained cQvera1be.
2. 1. 1. Quantitative aspects of coverage.
Table 2-1 shows, on row t, the coverage of Popieluszko's murder and the trial of his murderers by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, and CBS News. Rows 2 through 5 summarize the coverage in the same media given to religious personnel murdered in Latin America by agents of U. S. client states:l Row 2 shows the coverage given seventy- two individuals in a list of Latin American religious "martyrs" named by Penny Lernoux in her book Cry ofthe People; row 3 describes media coverage of twenty-three priests, missionaries, and other religious workers murdered in Guatemala between January 1980 and February 1985. Row 4 summarizes the coverage of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, of ? 1 Salvador, shot by an assassin in March 1980. Row 5 shows the level of media coverage of four U. S. women religious workers, murdered in ? 1 Salvador in December 1980.
The coverage of the Popieluszko murder not only dwarfs that of the unworthy victims, it constitutes a major episode of news management and propaganda. Nothing comparable can be found for victims within the free world. 2 It can be seen that the New York Times featured the Popieluszko case on its front page on ten different occasions, and the intensity of coverage assured that its readers would know who Popie- luszko was, that he had been murdered, and that this sordid violence had occurred in a Communist state. By contrast, the public would not have seen mention of the names of Father Augusto Ramirez Monast- erio, father superior of the Franciscan order in Guatemala, murdered in November 1983, or Father Miguel Angel Montufar, a Guatemalan priest who disappeared in the same month that Popieluszko was killed in Poland, or literally dozens of other religious murder victims in the Latin American provinces, who were sometimes given substantial cov- erage in the local press of the countries in which the murders took place.
1n fact, none of the extremely prominent victims ofmurder in Latin
I
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 39
America, including Archbishop Romero and the four American church- women, received anywhere near the attention accorded Popieluszko. We will show below that the quality of treatment of the worthy and unworthy victims also differed sharply. While the coverage ofthe wor- thy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of vio- lence and the inherent tragedy ofhuman life. This qualitative difference is already apparent in placement and editorializing: ten front-page articles on Popieluszko is a statement about importance, as is the fact of three editorials denouncing the Poles, without a single editorial denunciation for the murderers of the unworthy victims.
By comparing rows 1 and 6 of table 2-1, we can see that for every media category the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, ex- ceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have ex- ceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred. From the table we can also calculate the relative wor- thiness of the world's victims, as measured by the weight given them by the U. S. mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U. S. client states;3 or,looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.
The claim is sometimes made that unworthy victims are so treated by the U. S. mass media because they are killed at a great distance, and are so unlike ourselves that they are easy to disregard. 4 Poland, how- ever, is farther away than Central America, and its cultural and business links with the United States are not as great as those of Latin American countries in general. Three of the religious victims among the twenty- three murdered in Guatemala (row 3) were American citizens, a consid- eration that failed to light a fire under the media. Even the four American churchwomen raped and murdered by members of the Sal- vadoran National Guard failed to elicit attention comparable with that accorded Popieluszko. Their relative valuation by the New York Times was less than a tenth that of the Polish priest, and we will show later that the coverage of these American victims displayed considerably less outrage and passion than that of Popieluszko. 5
The coverage of Popieluszko was somewhat inflated by the fact that his murderers were quickly tried, and in a trial that American reporters
TABLE 2-1
t
? > z o
Mass-Media Coverage of Worthy and Unworthy Victims (1): ? > o
A Murdered Polish Priest versus One Hundred Murdered o
"
Religious in Latin America
? z o
NEW YORK TIMES
TIME and NEWSWEEK
CBS NEWS
o o z
? z
No. of evening
" Articles' inches articles Editorialsl Articles! inches programs' programs
Front- Column pas'
No. of
news news
row I row I row I row I row I row 1 row I row I
78 (100) 1183. 0 (100) 10 (100) 3 (100) I 16 (100) 313. 0 (100) 46 (100) 23 (100)
Column
No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. % of No. % of
Yictinu
I. Jerzy Popieluszko,
murdered on
OCL 19, 1984 2. 72 religious
victims in Latin Ameri~ 1964-782
8 (10. 3) lIB
(9. 9) I (10)
16 (5. 1)
~
S. 23 religious, murdered in
Guatemala Jan.
19SQ-Feb. 19S5? 4. Oscar Romero,
murdered
Mar. IS, 19S0 5. 4 U. S. religious
women, murdered in EI Salvador, Dec. 2, 19S0
6. Total of lines 2-5
7 (? . 0) ". 5 (5. ') - - - -I 2 (12. 5) :14. 0 (10. ') 1 2 (4. 3) 2 (8. 7)
(20. 5) 219. 0 (IS. 5) ? (40) - -I 3 (lS. S) S6. 5 (27. 6) 1 13 (2S. 3) ? (17. 4) "
,
2. (33. 3) 201. 5 (17. 0) 3 (30) - -I (31. 2) 111. 0 (35. 5) 1 22 (47. S) 10 (43. 5)
57 (73. 1) 604. ' (51. 1) 8 (80) - -I 10 (62. 5) 247. 5 (79. 1) 1 37 (SO. 4) 16 (69. 6) o? - ?
?
<
1. The media coverage a for an l&-month period from the time of the tint repon of the victim's disappearance or murder.
>
z o
"
o ;&. Listed in Penny Lemoux, Cry olehe People (New York: Doubleday, 19S0), pp. 464-65. We hllve omitted the names of seven ? z
manyrs who had joined the guerrillas. Lemoux points out that ber list is far from complete, and is composed of only the o better-known victims. ?
3? The CBS News Index begins in 1975; our blank figure for this category does not cover earlier years.
- ? <
< 4. This is a panial listing only, laken from tabulations of "Religious Killed or 'Disappeared' in Guatemala," put out -
periodically by CONFREGUA: Conferend4J tk Religiosos de Gwatemakl.
o
? ?
"! :
42 MANUFACTURING CONSENT ?
could freely report. Almost every murder ofthe Latin American victims was carried out by official or paramilitary forces in crimes that were never investigated or prosecuted under law, and were on occasion even subject to active official cover-ups (as we describe below in connection with Romero and the four churchwomen). Only in the case of the four murdered American women, in El Salvador, was there sufficient pres- sure to force some kind of investigation and legal process. As we will see, this legal process was barely noted by the mass media (in contrast with their intense interest in the Popieluszko trial), and the press did not comment upon or explore the significance of the fact that there was a relatively serious trial in "totalitarian" Poland, while state murders were being carried out on a daily basis without any investigations or trials of the murderers in a number of countries within the U. S. sphere of influence called "fledgling democracies. "
2. 1. 2. Coverage of the Popieluszko case
Jerzy Popieluszko was an activist priest and a strong supporter of the Solidarity movement in Poland. In an effort to eliminate or intimidate him, members of the Polish secret police abducted him on October 19, 1984. He was beJ3ten, bound, and gagged, and eventually thrown into a reservoir. His body was found several days later. In the furor that ensued, the police directly involved in the killing were quickly identi- fied and were eventually tried and given stiff jail sentences. As we have seen, the level of attention given to the case in the United States was very great. The quality of coverage was also extremely well designed to score political points, and contrasts sharply with the quality of coverage of unworthy victims.
2. 1. 2(a). Fullness and reiteration ofthe details ofthe murder and the damage inflicted on the victim. The coverage of the Popieluszko murder was notable for the fullness of the details regarding his treat- ment by the police and the condition of the recovered body. What is more, these details were repeated at every opportunity. The condition of the body was described at its recovery, at the trial when the medical evidence was presented, and during the testimony of the perpetrators of the crime. 6 At the trial, the emotional strain and guilt manifested by the police officers were described time and again, interspersed with the description of how Popieluszko pleaded for his life, and evidence of the
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 43
brutality of the act. Numerous unflattering photos of the policemen on trial were presented, adding dramatic detail in support of the image of police viciousness. In the courtroom, the guilty police sit, one with "a nervous tic on the right side of his face [that] caused his dark mustache to twitch uncontrollably," with "tear-filled testimony [that] gave the trial some of its most dramatic moments" (Time~ Feb. I8, I985). The police weep openly or bow their heads in the face of the grisly evidence. Popieluszko himself was humanized, with descriptions of his physical characteristics and personality that made him into something more than a distant victim. 7 In sum, the act of violence and its effects on Popie- luszko were presented in such a way as to generate the maximum emotional impact on readers. The act was vicious and deserved the presentation it received. The acts against the unworthy victims were also vicious, but they were treated very differently.
2. 1. 2(b). Stress on indignation, shock, and demands for justice. In a large proportion of the articles on the Popieluszko murder there are quotations or assertions of outrage, indignation, profound shock, and mourning, and demands that justice be done. Steady and wholly sympa- thetic attention is given to demonstrators, mourners, weeping people, work stoppages, masses held in honor of the victim, and expressions of outrage, mainly by nonofficial sources. The population "continues to mourn," "public outrage mounted," the pope is deeply shaken, and even Jaruzelski condemns the action. The net effect ofthis day-in-day- out repetition of outrage and indignation was to call very forcible attention to a terrible injustice, to put the Polish government on the defensive, and, probably, to contribute to remedial action.
2. 1. 2(c). The search for responsibility at the top. In article after article, the U. S. media raised the question: how high up was the act known and approved?
By our count, eighteen articles in the New York Times stressed the question of higher responsibility, often with aggres- sive headlines addressed to that point. s A number of articles bring in a Soviet link ("Lawyer Seemingly [sic] Implies a Soviet Link in Slaying of Priest" Uan. 31, 1985]), and Michael Kaufman, of the Times, twice manages to drag in the plot to kill the pope, which the U. S. press, led by the New York Times, had been trying to tie in with the Soviets and Bulgarians. 9 These links to the Soviet Union and the Bulgarian Con- nection are established by finding someone who says what the reporter and his paper want to dredge up--in no case was there a trace of
supportive evidence.
Time, Newsweek and CBS News played the same game of aggres-
?
?
44 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
sively ralsmg questions about "Hints of a Contract from the Top" (Time) and "Keeping the Lid on Murder" (Newsweek), and Time raised questions about possible Soviet involvement as well as the Bulgarian Connection.
2. 1. 2(d). Conclusions and follow-up. The New York Times had three editorials on the Popieluszko case. In each it focused on the responsi- bility of the higher authorities and the fact that "A police state is especially responsible for the actions of its police" ("Murderous Po- land:' Oct. 30, 1984). It freely applied words like "thuggery," "shame- less," and "crude" to the Polish state. The fact that police officers were quickly identified, tried, and convicted it attributed to the agitation at home and abroad that put a limit on villainy. This is a good point, and one that we stress throughout this book: villainy may be constrained by intense publicity. But we also stress the corresponding importance of a refusal to publicize and the leeway this gives murderous clients under the protection of the United States and its media, where the impact of publicity would be far greater. 10 The Times also fails to note the con- trast between murderous Poland and murderous EI Salvador-in the latter country, no murders of Salvadorans by the security forces or the death squads connected to them have ever resulted in a trial. The absence of such a comparison, as well as the failure of the Times to produce an editorial entitled "Murderous El Salvador," illustrates how a serviceable terrorism is protected in a propaganda mode. II
2. 2. RUTILIO GRANDE AND THE UNWORTHY SEVENTY. TWO
As shown on table 2-1, the unworthy seventy-two on Penny Lernoux's list of martyrs were subject to a grand total of eight articles in the New York Times, one in Newsweek, and none in TimeJ and they were never mentioned on CBS News in the years of index coverage (1975-78). A total of seven names on the Lernoux list were mentioned in the eight Times articles, and two different ones were discussed in Newsweek, which means that sixty-three of the murders were blacked out entirely in these important media vehicles. None of the eight articles in the New York Times had any details or dramatic quality that might evoke sympa- thetic emotion. They described the murders as remote events in a distant world (see the Times's description of the murder of Michael
WORTHY AND U/<;WOR1HY ViCTIMS 45
Jerome Cypher, in table 2-2). But that is a matter of editorial choice. The drama is there for the asking-only the press concern is missing. 12
TABLE 2. 2
The Savageries Inflicted on W orthy and Unworthy Victims, as Depicted in the New York Times
WORTHY VICTIMS
Jerzy PopielWJzko, a Polish priest, murdered on October 19, 1984,
(I) Account al finding of body: "The sources who saw the priest's body on Tuesday, said it was badly bruised, indicating he had been beaten after he was kidnapped on a highway near the town of Torun. The autopsy also showed that Father Popiduszko had been gagged at Ihe mouth and apparently tied with a rope from neck to feel so that if he struggled he would strangle himself, they said. The sources said they could not confirm repons quoting members of the slain priest's family as saying he had suffered injuries to his jaw and skull" (Dec. 29, 1984).
(2) Account at trial of murderers: "The film showed clearly that the priest's bent legs were tied to a noose around his neck in such a way that ifhe straightened them he would be strangled. The rope binding his hands had evidently come loose in the water. Several gags had also worked free and lay covering his clerical collar and the front of his cassock. From his legs hung a sack of rocks that, according to earlier testimony, had been carried all over Poland for the week that [he three assailants were pursuing [he priest. When the cameras were trained on the priest's face, the narration by a police officer at the reservoir declared that 'there are clear signs of beating. ' This was con- firmed by medical evidence offered Thursday by Dr. Maria Byrdy, a pathologist, who said Father Popieluszko had been struck more than a dozen times with a club" Gan. 26, 1985).
UNWORTHY VICTIMS
MichaelJerome Cypher. an American priest murdered in Honduras.
"The bodies were found in a dynamited well on an eastern Honduran estate . . . " Guly 19, 1975). Note: There was no arrest or trial.
Jairru Alcina, a Spanish priest ofthe Catholic Action Workers movement, following his arrtst in Chile:
"Several days later a body with 10 bullet holes in the back was found in the Mapocho River. A Spanish consul identified the body as that of Father Alcina" (Oct. 1, 1973). NOle: There was no arrest or trial.
46 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Archbishop Oscar Amollo Romero, murdered in EI Salvador on March 24, 1980:
"Archbishop Romero was killed by a sniper who gOt out of a red car, apparently stood just inside the door of the Chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital, fired a single shot at the prelate and fled. The bullet struck the archbishop in the heart, according to a doctor at the hospital where the prelate was taken" (Mar. 25, 1980). Nou: There was no arrest or trial.
Maria Rosario Godoy de CUe1UUJ secretary of the Mutual Support Group, murdered in Guatem. ala on April 4, 1985:
"The body of the secretary of the Support Group for Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala was found Friday in a ravine nine miles south of Guatemala Ci[y, according to a spokesman for the group. The bodies of her brother and young son were also in the car" (Apr. 7, 1985, p. 5). * NOli! : There was no arrest or trial.
Jean Dono'04n, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and MauTa Clarke, four American women murdered in EI Salvador, December 4, 1980:
(1) Account at the finding of the bodies:
"Witnesses who found the grave said it was about five feet deep. One woman had been shot in the face, another in the breast. Two of the women were found with their blood-stained underpants around their ankles" (Dec. 5, 1980). *
(2) Account at the trial of the murderers:
No description was given, although medical testimony was presented to the court; see te:w. :t.
* For details that were not presented in this account, see the accompanying re:w. :t.
The murder of one of the seventy-two, Father Rutilio Grande, was an important landmark in the escalation of violence in El Salvador and in its effect on the newly appointed conservative archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. Rutilio Grande was a Jesuit, the pastor of Aguilares, and a progressive who helped organize peasants in self-help groups. He was strongly opposed by the local landlords, police, and military commanders, but he was a national figure in the Salvadoran church and was a friend of the archbishop. Rutilio Grande was shot to death, along with a teenager and a seventy-two-year-old peasant, while on his way to Mass on March 12, 1977. According to a church autopsy, the bullets that riddled the priest were of the same caliber as the
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 47
Manzer guns used by the police. "By 'coincidence,' all telephone com- munications in the area were cut offwithin an hour ofthe triple assassi- nation. Police patrols normally active in the region mysteriously disappeared. "13 Archbishop Romero wrote to the president of El Salva- dor, Arturo Armando Molina, urging a thorough investigation, which was promised. A week later, the church having established that it was probably police bullets that had killed the three victims, Romero wrote a harsher letter to Molina, noting the absence of a promised official report and pointing out that comments, "many of them unfavorable to your government," have been made. With continued inaction, Romero threatened to refuse church participation in any official government event unless the murders were investigated and the killers brought to justice. Romero's biographer writes:
Six weeks later, the lawyer chosen by Romero to follow the case reported "an embarrassing and clear indifference toward the in- vestigation on the part of statt:: organizations. " A suspect ordered arrested by a judge was living unconcernedly in El Paisnal, and no one had ordered the bodies exhumed and examined. The bul- lets are still in the graves. l4
Rutilio Grande's murder followed a series of forcible expulsions of foreign clergy by the Molina government and several earlier murders of church personnel. Romero and the clergy deliberated at great length on their course of action in response to this escalation of the violence against them. They tried to get out their messages of concern, but many were not heard because of newspaper censorship. They finally decided to take dramatic action: temporary school closings, and implementation of the previously mentioned threat to refuse to support the government and other power groups on official occasions.
This entire package of murder and church response was hardly lacking in drama and newsworthiness. Yet murder, the confrontation of the desperate church with a repressive state, and the dramatic acts carried out to try to mobilize support in its self-defense were subject to a virtual blackout in the U. S. mass media. The murder of Rutilio Grande was mentioned in Newsweek ("Priests in Peril," Aug. t, 1977), but it never once reached the audiences of the New York Times, Time, or CBS News. This was important in allowing the terror to go on unimpeded. To paraphrase the New York Times editorial on "murder- ous Poland": no publicity and agitation, no containment of terror.
~8 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
2. 3. ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO
The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the highest Catholic church official in El Salvador, was "big news," and its political implications were enormous. At the time of his murder, Romero had become the foremost and most outspoken critic of the policy of repression by murder being carried out by the U. S. -supported military government. In his last sermon, he appealed to members of the army and security forces to refuse to kill their Salvadoran brethren, a call that enraged the officer corps trying to build a lower-class military that was willing to kill freely. Romero had been placed on right-wing death lists and received threats from the right wing, which from the beginning had been closely linked to the army and intelligence services. IS Only a few weeks prior to his murder he had written a forceful letter to President Jimmy Carter opposing the imminent granting of U. S. aid to the junta as destructive of Salvadoran interests. The Carter administration had been so disturbed by Romero's opposition to its policies that it had secretly lobbied the pope to curb the archbishop. 16
Romero, in short, was not merely an "unworthy" victim, he was an important activist in opposition to the local alliance of army and oligar- chy and to U. S. policy in El Salvador. The U. S. media's news coverage of the archbishop's murder and its follow-up reflected well his threat- ening role, reaching new levels of dishonesty and propaganda service in their coverage of this and related events.
2. 3. 1. Details of the murder and public response
The details of the Romero murder provided by the U. S. mass media were concise (see table 2-2). While there were expressions of shock and distress, there were very few quotations and expressions of outrage by supporters of Romero. There were no statements or quotations suggest- ing that the murder was intolerable and that the guilty must be found and brought to justice. The New York Times had no editorial condemn- ing, or even mentioning, the murder. It was quickly placed in the larger framework of alleged killings by both the left and the right that were deeply regretted by Salvadoran and U. S. officials.
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 49
2. 3. 2. The propaganda line: a reformist junta trying to contain the violence of right and left
The Salvadoran and U. S. governments contended at the time of Romero's murder that the killing going on in El Salvador was being done by extremists of the right and the left, not by the Salvadoran armed forces and their agents; and that the government was trying its best to contain the killings and carry out reforms. John Bushnell, of the State Department, stated before a House appropriations comminee that "there is some misperception by those who follow the press that the government is itself repressive in EI Salvador," when in fact the violence is <<from the extreme right and the extreme left" and <<the smallest pan" of the killings come from the army and security forces. 17 This statement was a knowing lie,18 contradicted by all independent
evidence coming out ofEI Salvador and refuted by Archbishop Romero on an almost daily basis. 19 In his letter to Carter sent on February 17, 1980, the archbishop pointed out that aid to the junta had resulted in increasing repressive violence by the government, "amassing a total dead and wounded far higher than in the previous military regimes. " And Romero explained to Caner that the idea that the junta was reformist was a myth, that "neither the junta nor the Christian Demo- crats govern the country," but, rather, power is in the hands of the army, serving itself and the oligarchy. 20
What gave Bushnell's statement a certain credibility was the fact that there had been a "reformist coup" by young army officers in October 1979, and liberals and progressives entered the early junta. However, as Raymond Bonner points out,
The young, progressive officers who carefully plotted the coup lost control of it as swiftly as they had executed it. Their ideals and objectives were subverted by senior, more conservative of- ficers who had the backing of [U. S. Ambassador] Devine and the U. S. Embassy in EI Salvador and key Carter administration offi- cials in Washington. 21
The progressive elements on the junta found themselves entirely with-
out power, and gradually exited or were forced out, along with large
numbers from the cabinet and administration. Jose Napole6n Duarte
joined the junta in March to serve as a fig leaf and public-relations
agent of the army, but all those who were not satisfied to serve in that
role departed. 22 I
I ? J
50 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
?
Once the old-guard military had seized control from the progressive
officers in October 1979, it began a general war of extermination against all progressive individuals and organizations in El Salvador. By the end of May, church sources reported 1,844 civilian deaths already in 1980, a figure that reached 10,000 by the end of the year, almost all at the hands of the government. A guerrilla war was forced on the center and left by the policy of unconstrained violence of the Carter-supported government. The government was not centrist and reformist-it was a military regime of the right, closely linked to the terrorist force ORDEN and the death squads, and it used them regularly as proxies. The paramilitary groups were not uncontrollable-they were doing what the army wanted them to do. The paramilitary forces and death squads of EI Salvador had extensive interlocking relationships with the official military and security forces and their U. S. counterparts. There was a revolving door of personnel, close cooperation in sharing infor- mation, funding of the paramilitary groups by the official forces, and a division of labor between them. The paramilitary did jobs for which the official forces wished to disclaim responsibility. 23
Although the paramilitary group ORDEN was formally abolished at the time of the October 1979 coup, ir was secrerly maintained and had a close relationship with the regular military establishment. According to one detailed account,
The reformers had officially abolished ORDEN, rhe old informa- tion network. But . . . military officers suspicious of the young reformers secretly reestablished and expanded much of the old intelligence system into a grass-roots intelligence network that fed names of suspected subversives to military and paramilitary death squads. Four days after the coup, D'Aubuisson said in an inter- view, he was assigned by members of the high command to help reorganize ANSESAL [an intelligence communication network] inside a military compound under the chief of staff's office--out of the reach of civilians in ehe new jUDea. 24
This secret assignment ofD'Aubuisson was confirmed by junta member Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez, and then Deputy Defense Minister Colonel Nicholas Carranza. 25
The U. S. mass media, however, followed the Bushnell fonnula virtu- ally without deviation: there was a "civil war between extreme right and leftist groups" (New York Times, Feb. 25, 1980); the "seemingly well meaning but weak junta" was engaging in reforms but was unable to check the terror (Time, Apr. 7. 1980). The U. S. mass media had fea-
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 5I
tured heavily the reformist character of the revolutionary junta, but they uniformly suppressed evidence of the powerlessness, frustrations, and early resignation of the progressives, and their replacement by civilians willing to serve as "front men" for state terror. Roman Mayorga, an engineer and university professor who had been the unani- mous choice of the original coup ploners, resigned on January 3, I980, along with Guillermo Manuel Ungo "and at least 37 of the highest ranking government officials, including the heads of all government agencies. "26 But for the media, these events never happened, and the junta was still a "weak centrist government . . . beset by implacable extremes" (New York Times editorial, Apr. 28, I98o), not a right-wing government of massacre. Robin K. Andersen points out that
None of the networks reported . . . the final resignation of the junta members. Even CBS, which had reported at length on the appointment of Roman Mayorga, failed to report his resignation, or any of the others. For television news viewers, these political developments never happened. Television news coverage omitted every reference to this all-important political power struggle that could have accounted for the abuses that continued. . . . The civilian lack of control, and even their resignation, had no effect on the way in which the news characterized the junta; it continued
to be labeled moderate. 27
And the Salvadoran government has continued to be "moderate" and "centrist" up to today.
Other media suppressions aided in bolstering the myth of the neutral junta standing between the extreme right and the extreme left. On March 29, I980, the New York Times carried a Reuters dispatch noting the resignation of three high Salvadoran officials, who, according to the article, "resigned last night in protest against the junta's inability to halt violence by leftist and rightist forces. "28 The preceding day, an AP dispatch recorded the same resignations, but without any explanation of the reasons for this. One of the resigning officials, Undersecretary of Agriculture Jorge Alberto Villacorta, issued a public statement say- ing that
I resigned because I believed that it was useless to continue in a government not only incapable of puning an end to the violence, but a government which itself is generating the political violence through repression. .