The
revelation
that the "leading democrats" who were formed into a civilian front for the contras by the CIA have been receiving over $80,000, tax-free, annually from the CIA for years has never compromised their integrity as media sources.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
For a review of Times editorials on EI Salvador in the 1980s, exculpating the state terrorists throughout, see Noam Chomsky, "U.
S.
Polity and Society," in Thomas Walker, ed.
, Reagan versus the Sandinistas (Boulder, Colo.
: West- view, 1987), pp.
29S-96.
12. The press may also have been constrained by the fact that reporters who dig deeply and provide accounts unfavorable to the military regimes in Latin America may be barred from the country, or even murdered. Western reporters are very rarely physically threatened-let alone murdered-in Poland, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Nicaragua. They are often threatened and sometimes murdered in EI Salvador, Guatemala, and other U. S. clients in Latin America. This irony is not commented upon in the free press, nor are the effects of this potential and actual violence against dissident reporters on the possibilities of honest reporting. This point is discussed further in chapter 3, pp. 97-98.
13. Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 73? 14. James R. Brockman, The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero (Mary- knoll, N. Y. : Orbis, 1982), p. II.
IS. We discuss this link later in this section.
16. Carter sent former New York mayor Robert Wagner to persuade the pope to rein in Romero, which the pope then tried to do. See Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), p. 176. The provincial of the Jesuit order in Central America, Father Cesar Jerez, was called to Rome shortly after to explain the Romero letter. Father Jerez, who had fled from Guatemala after the military had threatened his life, was very close to Arch- bishop Romero. Subsequently he was forced to flee EI Salvador as well and is now a refugee in Nicaragua, where he is rector of the Universidad Cen-
troamericana, unable to return to the two "fledgling democracies" except for brief (and dangerous) visits.
17. Quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172.
18. On September 27, 1981, Alan Riding wrote in the New York Times that "under the Carter administration, United States officials said security forces were responsible for 90 percent of the atrocities," not "uncontrollable right- wing bands. " In short, not only was Bushnell lying, but the media knew it, and failed to use that information. Riding had an article on March 23, 1980, entitled "EI Salvador's Junta Unable to Halt the Killing. " On media coverage of EI Salvador during 1980, including gross falsification and cover-up of even con- gressional reports, see Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War, pp. 3Sff. , reprinted in James Peck, ed. , The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon,
1987).
19. Church estimates were that the government was responsible for some nine hundred civilian deaths in the first three months of 1980, exceeding the total for all of 1979; a report of Amnesty International dated March 21, 1980, contains seven pages of incidents in which security forces, army units, or paramilitary groups under general military control or guidance killed unarmed civilians, usually peasants (quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172). 20. This is a point that was conceded by Duarte himself, who admitted in an interview with Raymond Bonner that the army ruled EI Salvador, but that he hoped to do so in the future (see New York Times, Mar. I, 1982).
21. Weakness and Deceit, p. 146.
22. See chapter 3, pp. 101-102.
23. One proof of the fact that the paramilitary forces kill under official protec- tion is that, year after year, paramilitary murders never resulted in arrests (see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. IIS-19). As for the regular forces, through 1986, "there were no known instances of Inilitary officers or soldiers who were criminally punished for human rights abuses against Salvadoran civilians" (The Reagan Administration's Record on Human Rights in 1986 [New York: The Watch Committees and Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, February 1987], p. 46).
24. Laurie Becklund, "Death Squads: Deadly 'Other War,''' Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1983.
2S. Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 1(London: Zed, 1985), p. 221.
26. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 162.
27. "United States Network News Coverage of EI Salvador: The Law and Order Frame" (manuscript, 1986), pp. 17-18. Andersen provides many illustra- tions of how the networks continued to label the junta "moderate" throughout 1980, as atrocities mounted to what Archbishop Romero's successor, Bishop Rivera y Damas, described in October 1980 as the armed forces' "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" (Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 207).
28. "23 Die in EI Salvador As Clashes Continue; 3 Officials Step Down," New
York Times, March 29, 1980.
29. Quoted in Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982), p. 146.
350 NOTES TO P AGES 52-57
NOTES TO P AGES 57-65 351
30. From White's cable to the State Department, quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 184.
31. This statement is quoted in Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, p. 152. Others present claim that troops were on the scene, contradicting Duarte, junta, and Treaster assertions to the contrary. Phillip Berryman, who was at the funeral, told the authors that he saw quite clearly two truckloads of troops in the vicinity. Treaster is cagey, though-he speaks only of troops in the plaza, not near the plaza, or in the national palace and other buildings.
32. The view expressed in Ambassador White's cables was that the leftists acted to provoke a response by the security forces, a self-destructive tactic not supported by any evidence.
33. Quoted in Brockman, The Word Remains, p. 212.
34. See note 18. Time magazine did the same kind of misrepresenting as Treaster, but with a little more finesse: "From his pulpit, he regularly con- demned the tyranny and terrorism that have torn tiny, impoverished El Salva- dor apart and brought it to the verge of civil war" (Apr. 7, 1980).
35. "Church in Salvador Now Follows the Middle Path," New York Times, March 22, 1981.
36. For a more detailed discussion of Schumacher's manipulation of the arch- bishop's cautious remarks for an apologetic purpose, see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. 178-79.
37. It is possible that this failure was based on an honest lack of knowledge of the event. Lack of knowledge, however, reflects in part a lack of concern, and a distorting perspective that removes certain questions from the focus of investigation.
38. Actually, this may be true. The killer may have been a contra assassin hired by the Salvadoran security forces.
39. For the numerous acknowledged attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and the CIA-organized murder of Patrice Lumumba, see Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations, 94th Cong. , 1st sess. , November 20, 1975, S. Rep. 94-465, pp. 13-180.
40. Graham Hovey, "Salvador Prelate's Death Heightens Fear of War," New York Times, March 26, 1980.
41. See Craig Pyes, "Who Killed Archbishop Romero? " The Nation, October 13, 1984.
42. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 178.
43. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," New York Times, March 3, 1984.
44. Craig Pyes, "Dirty War in the Name of Freedom," Albuquerque Journa~ December 18, 1983. In November 1987, Duarte announced new (and rather flimsy) evidence implicating D'Aubuisson, but no one associated with the reigning security forces, in the assassination. The announcement was a trans-
. parent effort to maintain his image as a "moderate," holding the middle ground between extremists of right and left. It was carefully timed to coincide with a daring visit to El Salvador by two actual "moderates," FDR leaders Ruben Zamora and Guillermo Ungo, who have lived in exile under threat of assassi- nation in this terror state.
45. Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), p. 103. 46. Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, pp. 160-61.
47. In an article of February II, 1982, datelined San Salvador, the Mexican paper El Dia quoted D'Aubuisson telling two European reporters, one a German, that "You Germans are very intelligent; you realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them. " While the U. S. press played up the fabricated claims of Sandinista anti- Semitism, this statement of approval of the Holocaust was not picked up by the elite media.
48. "Peace Is Still a Long Shot in EI Salvador," New York Times, September 27, 1987, Week in Review.
49. This statement was left out of the edition of the report finally released to the public.
50. Report, p. 8.
51. Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p.
271.
52. Foreign Assistance Legislation for Fiscal Year I982, part I, Hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , March 1981, p. 163. Letter from David E. Simcox, State Department, to William P. Ford, dated April 16, 1981. At the time Haig made his statement, the evidence was quite clear that the women had been raped, and killed by close-range shots from behind. Haig himself never apologized for this insulting lie, nor did he suffer any serious attack for this in the mass media, with the honorable excep- tion of Anthony Lewis. This episode also appears to have had no noticeable effect on Haig's reputation.
53. "We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are [sic]. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente and somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed these women" (interview in Tampa Tribune, Dec. 16, 1980, quoted in Carrigan, Salvador Witness, p. 279. ) Former ambassador Robert White pointed out that remarks like these by Kirkpatrick, in the context of El Salvador, were "an incitement to murder" (T. D. Allman, Unmanifest Destiny [New York: Doubleday, 1984], p. 17)?
Jean Donovan asked Ambassador Robert White, "What do you do when even to help the poor, to take care of the orphans, is considered an act of subversion by the government? " (quoted in Allman, p. 3). Helping orphans in the Salvadoran countryside was also regarded as an act of subversion by officials of the Reagan administration.
54. The New York Times's version, shown on table 2-2, gives a succinct and inaccurate version of the use of the underwear.
55. "Statement by Revolutionary Governing Junta," December 8, 1980. The statement also notes that "the Revolutionary Government repudiates and condemns violence and the irrational crimes it generates"!
56. Juan de Onis, December 24. The question does not arise for the Times of why the security forces would want to conceal the bodies if they were unin- volved in the murders.
57. We discussed this myth in "Archbishop Oscar Romero" (p. 48).
58. Juan de Onis, "Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina," New York Times, August 29,1976.
352 NOTES TO P AGES 65-71
NOTES TO P AGES 71-73 353
59. See below, note 67.
60. John Dinges, "Evidence Indicates Military Planned Missionaries' Deaths," National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1981.
61. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," March 3, 1984. Note the "soft" headline. An option forgone by the Times was a headline like: "Duarte and Defense Minister Casanova Accused of Cover-up of Murder of Four American Women. " Santivanez was paid $50,000 to give his evidence, a sum he requested on the ground of the risk he was taking and the probability that he would be income-short in the future as a result of his confession. This payment was given unusual publicity as sug- gesting a compromising quality to his testimony, and the New York Times squelched a second installment of his evidence on this principled ground- which they never apply to Soviet defectors, who are less in need of protection.
The revelation that the "leading democrats" who were formed into a civilian front for the contras by the CIA have been receiving over $80,000, tax-free, annually from the CIA for years has never compromised their integrity as media sources. Nicaraguan defector Miranda got $800,000 for his services without being discredited.
62. Excellent accounts were produced by Michael Posner and the Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights in a series of investigatory reports, dated September 1981, July 20, 1982, and February I, 1983, which contain detailed and crushing evidence of a completely broken-down judicial process and an official cover-up. Once again, as with the Dinges report, these docu- ments were essentially ignored in the U. S. mass media and their facts and leads suppressed. News coverage of the lawyers' committee documents was negligi- ble. Michael Posner and Scott Greathead did succeed in placing an Op-Ed article in the Times on December 6, 1983, entitled "3 Years after Killings, No Justice in Salvador. "
63. Both Time and Newsweek had articles featuring stonewalling in February 1981-Time's article was entitled "Stonewalling" (Feb. 23)-but although the stonewalling continued for years, this was the end of the news magazines' interest in the matter.
64. Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights, Update:Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study, February I, 1983, p. 17.
65. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 80.
66. Larry Rohter, "Salvador Defense Lawyer Charges Cover-Up in Slaying of
U. S. Nuns," New York Times, May 6, 1985.
67. In the same month that Hinton was asserting with assurance that the low-level guardsmen were acting on their own, internal State Department memos were stating that "Reading the documents provoked several questions which we think should have occurred to an investigator whose real aim was to determine who committed the crime" (quoted in Update, p. 31).
68. Quoted in Update, pp. 30-31.
69. On the Tyler investigation, see Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, pp. 78-80. 70. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," New York Times, March 3, 1984?
71. Carrigan, Salvador Witness, p. 265.
72. See Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Biller Fruit (New York: Doubleday, 1982), pp. 32-47, 54-63.
73. Virtually all independent observers were of the view that land reform was also highly desirable for both equity and efficiency. See, especially, Jose M. Aybar de Soto, Dependency and Intervention: The Case of Guatemala in I954 (Boulder: Westview, 1978), chapter 6.
74. Ibid. See also Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).
75. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Dou- bleday, 1981), p. 222.
76. Piero Gleijeses, "Guatemala: Crisis and Response," in Richard B. Fagen and Olga Pellicer, The Future of Central America: Policy Choices for the U. S. and Mexico (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 188.
77. Ibid. , pp. 191-92.
78. Ibid. , p. 192.
79. U. S. officials have often pressed for purely formal democratic reforms and reductions in rates of murder, but they have consistently supported and helped organize theframework that eroded the democratic reforms and increased rates of murder. In Guatemala (and elsewhere), the reasons for the regular backing of antidemocratic institutions have been the fear of the left and the chronic hostility of U. S. officials and businessmen to popular organizations (unions, peasant organizations, mass political parties), for both economic and political reasons. Thus the periodic support for liberalforms has been rendered nuga- tory by the systematic bolstering up of institutions that regularly undermine the substance of liberalism. As Lars Schoultz points out, the function of "mili- tary authoritarianism," beginning with the U. S. -backed Brazilian coup of1964 and widely prevalent in Latin America and elsewhere within the U. S. sphere of influence, has been "to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the participation of the numerical majority, . . . " (Human Rights and United States Policy toward
Latin America [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], p. 7). We may let them "participate," however, with elections held after extended periods of military pacification and the dismantling of popular organizations. See chap- ter 3.
80. See "Counterrevolution and the 'Shakedown States,' " in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 61-66.
81. From 1977, Guatemala turned for aid to Israel, which has provided similar services regularly for the U. S. government. For details, see Bishara Bahbah, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (New York: St. Martin's, 1986); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection (New York: Pantheon, 1987); and Jane Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1987). On the continued flow of arms from the United States to Guatemala during the Carter years, see Lars Schoultz, "Guatemala," in Martin Diskin, ed. , Trouble in our Backyard (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 187ff.
82. Piero Gleijeses estimates that "the Guatemalan army has killed close to 100,000" since 1979 ("The Reagan Doctrine and Latin America," Current History [December 1986]).
83. See, for example, Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Pro- gram of Political Murder (London: AI, 1981); Parliamentary Human Rights Group, "Bitter and Cruel . . . ," Report of a Mission to Guatemala by the
354 NOTES TO PAGES 73-80
NOTES TO PAGES 81-89 355
British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984; Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986).
84. Amnesty International, Guatemala: Massive Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas under the Government of General Efrain R? os Monu, October II, 1982.
8S. According to State Department testimony ofJuly 20, 1981, "We need to try a new, constructive policy approach to Guatemala . . . " (quoted in Americas Watch, Guatemala Revisited: How the Reagan Administration Finds "Improve- ments" in Human Rights in Guatemala [New York: AW, 1985], p. 4).
86. Quoted in Americas Watch, Guatemala Revisited, p. S.
87. See Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, p. 8.
88. Americas Watch, Guatemala Revisited, p. 6.
89. State Department 1984 Human Rights Country Report, quoted in Ameri- cas Watch, Guatemala Revisited, p. IS.
90. Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, p. S.
91. While this is true almost without exception for news articles, there were perhaps a dozen Op-Ed columns in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and some letters, in the period 1980-86, that criticized Guatemalan state terrorism; some of these were harshly critical of U. S. policy.
92. A few of the opinion pieces cited in the previous note did discuss the U. S. role.
93. "Requiem for a Missionary," August 10, 1981.
94. The documents include the following four put out by Amnesty Interna- tional: Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, February 1981; "Disappearances": A Workbook, 1981; Guatemala: Massive Extrajudicial Execu- tions in Rural Areas under the Government of General Efrain Rios Manu, Oc- tober 1982; "Disappearances" in Guatemala under the Government of General Oscar Humberto Mej? a V? ctores, March 1985. We also included six studies by Americas Watch: Human Rights in Guatemala: No Neutrals Allowed, Novem- ber 1982; Guatemala Revisited: How the Reagan Administration Finds "Im- provements" in Human Rights in Guatemala, September 1985; Liule Hope: Human Rights in Guatemala, January I984-January I98S, February 1985; Guatemala: The Group for Mutual Support, 1985; Civil Patrols in Guatemala, August 1986; Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, 1987.
9S. This letter is reproduced in Americas Watch, Human Rights in Guatem. ala: No Neutrals Allowed, November 1982.
96. For a full discussion of the last of these murders, that of Marianela Garcia Villas, on March IS, 1983, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demon- stration Elections: U. S. -Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. x-xi.
97. Quoted in Americas Watch, Guatemala: The Group for Mutual Support,. I984-I98S, p. 2 (hereafter, AW, Mutual Support).
98. Council on Hemispheric Affairs, News and Analysis, April 26, 1986, p. 222. 99. McClintock, American Connection, vol. 2, p. 83.
100. AW, Mutual Support, p. 3.
101. "Bitter and Cruel," British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984.
102. AW, Mutual Support, p. 8.
103. Ibid. , p. 7.
104. An open letter of November 15, 1984, quoted in AW, Mutual Support,
P? 24?
lOS. AW, Mutual Support, pp. 24-2S.
106. Ibid. , p. 36. This was, of course, a complete fabrication. What Mejia
Victores is referring to is an investigative body that he established, manned
and that, predictably, gave the government a clean bill of health.
107. Ibid. , p. 38.
108. Ibid. , p. 41.
109? Two very terse exceptions should be noted: On April 13, an article on the case mentions that Gomez was tortured; and one on April 19 notes that his tongue was cut out. No details whatsoever were provided about the murders of Godoy de Cuevas and her brother and son.
I10. Aswewillseeinthenextchapter,thenewciviliangovernmentdidnothing to stem the army assault on the civilian population; but as we might also expect, the optimism of the press on the promise of the new civilian adminis- tration was not followed up with reports on what actually happened.
III.
12. The press may also have been constrained by the fact that reporters who dig deeply and provide accounts unfavorable to the military regimes in Latin America may be barred from the country, or even murdered. Western reporters are very rarely physically threatened-let alone murdered-in Poland, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Nicaragua. They are often threatened and sometimes murdered in EI Salvador, Guatemala, and other U. S. clients in Latin America. This irony is not commented upon in the free press, nor are the effects of this potential and actual violence against dissident reporters on the possibilities of honest reporting. This point is discussed further in chapter 3, pp. 97-98.
13. Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 73? 14. James R. Brockman, The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero (Mary- knoll, N. Y. : Orbis, 1982), p. II.
IS. We discuss this link later in this section.
16. Carter sent former New York mayor Robert Wagner to persuade the pope to rein in Romero, which the pope then tried to do. See Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), p. 176. The provincial of the Jesuit order in Central America, Father Cesar Jerez, was called to Rome shortly after to explain the Romero letter. Father Jerez, who had fled from Guatemala after the military had threatened his life, was very close to Arch- bishop Romero. Subsequently he was forced to flee EI Salvador as well and is now a refugee in Nicaragua, where he is rector of the Universidad Cen-
troamericana, unable to return to the two "fledgling democracies" except for brief (and dangerous) visits.
17. Quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172.
18. On September 27, 1981, Alan Riding wrote in the New York Times that "under the Carter administration, United States officials said security forces were responsible for 90 percent of the atrocities," not "uncontrollable right- wing bands. " In short, not only was Bushnell lying, but the media knew it, and failed to use that information. Riding had an article on March 23, 1980, entitled "EI Salvador's Junta Unable to Halt the Killing. " On media coverage of EI Salvador during 1980, including gross falsification and cover-up of even con- gressional reports, see Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War, pp. 3Sff. , reprinted in James Peck, ed. , The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon,
1987).
19. Church estimates were that the government was responsible for some nine hundred civilian deaths in the first three months of 1980, exceeding the total for all of 1979; a report of Amnesty International dated March 21, 1980, contains seven pages of incidents in which security forces, army units, or paramilitary groups under general military control or guidance killed unarmed civilians, usually peasants (quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172). 20. This is a point that was conceded by Duarte himself, who admitted in an interview with Raymond Bonner that the army ruled EI Salvador, but that he hoped to do so in the future (see New York Times, Mar. I, 1982).
21. Weakness and Deceit, p. 146.
22. See chapter 3, pp. 101-102.
23. One proof of the fact that the paramilitary forces kill under official protec- tion is that, year after year, paramilitary murders never resulted in arrests (see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. IIS-19). As for the regular forces, through 1986, "there were no known instances of Inilitary officers or soldiers who were criminally punished for human rights abuses against Salvadoran civilians" (The Reagan Administration's Record on Human Rights in 1986 [New York: The Watch Committees and Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, February 1987], p. 46).
24. Laurie Becklund, "Death Squads: Deadly 'Other War,''' Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1983.
2S. Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 1(London: Zed, 1985), p. 221.
26. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 162.
27. "United States Network News Coverage of EI Salvador: The Law and Order Frame" (manuscript, 1986), pp. 17-18. Andersen provides many illustra- tions of how the networks continued to label the junta "moderate" throughout 1980, as atrocities mounted to what Archbishop Romero's successor, Bishop Rivera y Damas, described in October 1980 as the armed forces' "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" (Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 207).
28. "23 Die in EI Salvador As Clashes Continue; 3 Officials Step Down," New
York Times, March 29, 1980.
29. Quoted in Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982), p. 146.
350 NOTES TO P AGES 52-57
NOTES TO P AGES 57-65 351
30. From White's cable to the State Department, quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 184.
31. This statement is quoted in Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, p. 152. Others present claim that troops were on the scene, contradicting Duarte, junta, and Treaster assertions to the contrary. Phillip Berryman, who was at the funeral, told the authors that he saw quite clearly two truckloads of troops in the vicinity. Treaster is cagey, though-he speaks only of troops in the plaza, not near the plaza, or in the national palace and other buildings.
32. The view expressed in Ambassador White's cables was that the leftists acted to provoke a response by the security forces, a self-destructive tactic not supported by any evidence.
33. Quoted in Brockman, The Word Remains, p. 212.
34. See note 18. Time magazine did the same kind of misrepresenting as Treaster, but with a little more finesse: "From his pulpit, he regularly con- demned the tyranny and terrorism that have torn tiny, impoverished El Salva- dor apart and brought it to the verge of civil war" (Apr. 7, 1980).
35. "Church in Salvador Now Follows the Middle Path," New York Times, March 22, 1981.
36. For a more detailed discussion of Schumacher's manipulation of the arch- bishop's cautious remarks for an apologetic purpose, see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. 178-79.
37. It is possible that this failure was based on an honest lack of knowledge of the event. Lack of knowledge, however, reflects in part a lack of concern, and a distorting perspective that removes certain questions from the focus of investigation.
38. Actually, this may be true. The killer may have been a contra assassin hired by the Salvadoran security forces.
39. For the numerous acknowledged attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and the CIA-organized murder of Patrice Lumumba, see Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations, 94th Cong. , 1st sess. , November 20, 1975, S. Rep. 94-465, pp. 13-180.
40. Graham Hovey, "Salvador Prelate's Death Heightens Fear of War," New York Times, March 26, 1980.
41. See Craig Pyes, "Who Killed Archbishop Romero? " The Nation, October 13, 1984.
42. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 178.
43. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," New York Times, March 3, 1984.
44. Craig Pyes, "Dirty War in the Name of Freedom," Albuquerque Journa~ December 18, 1983. In November 1987, Duarte announced new (and rather flimsy) evidence implicating D'Aubuisson, but no one associated with the reigning security forces, in the assassination. The announcement was a trans-
. parent effort to maintain his image as a "moderate," holding the middle ground between extremists of right and left. It was carefully timed to coincide with a daring visit to El Salvador by two actual "moderates," FDR leaders Ruben Zamora and Guillermo Ungo, who have lived in exile under threat of assassi- nation in this terror state.
45. Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), p. 103. 46. Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, pp. 160-61.
47. In an article of February II, 1982, datelined San Salvador, the Mexican paper El Dia quoted D'Aubuisson telling two European reporters, one a German, that "You Germans are very intelligent; you realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them. " While the U. S. press played up the fabricated claims of Sandinista anti- Semitism, this statement of approval of the Holocaust was not picked up by the elite media.
48. "Peace Is Still a Long Shot in EI Salvador," New York Times, September 27, 1987, Week in Review.
49. This statement was left out of the edition of the report finally released to the public.
50. Report, p. 8.
51. Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p.
271.
52. Foreign Assistance Legislation for Fiscal Year I982, part I, Hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , March 1981, p. 163. Letter from David E. Simcox, State Department, to William P. Ford, dated April 16, 1981. At the time Haig made his statement, the evidence was quite clear that the women had been raped, and killed by close-range shots from behind. Haig himself never apologized for this insulting lie, nor did he suffer any serious attack for this in the mass media, with the honorable excep- tion of Anthony Lewis. This episode also appears to have had no noticeable effect on Haig's reputation.
53. "We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are [sic]. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente and somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed these women" (interview in Tampa Tribune, Dec. 16, 1980, quoted in Carrigan, Salvador Witness, p. 279. ) Former ambassador Robert White pointed out that remarks like these by Kirkpatrick, in the context of El Salvador, were "an incitement to murder" (T. D. Allman, Unmanifest Destiny [New York: Doubleday, 1984], p. 17)?
Jean Donovan asked Ambassador Robert White, "What do you do when even to help the poor, to take care of the orphans, is considered an act of subversion by the government? " (quoted in Allman, p. 3). Helping orphans in the Salvadoran countryside was also regarded as an act of subversion by officials of the Reagan administration.
54. The New York Times's version, shown on table 2-2, gives a succinct and inaccurate version of the use of the underwear.
55. "Statement by Revolutionary Governing Junta," December 8, 1980. The statement also notes that "the Revolutionary Government repudiates and condemns violence and the irrational crimes it generates"!
56. Juan de Onis, December 24. The question does not arise for the Times of why the security forces would want to conceal the bodies if they were unin- volved in the murders.
57. We discussed this myth in "Archbishop Oscar Romero" (p. 48).
58. Juan de Onis, "Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina," New York Times, August 29,1976.
352 NOTES TO P AGES 65-71
NOTES TO P AGES 71-73 353
59. See below, note 67.
60. John Dinges, "Evidence Indicates Military Planned Missionaries' Deaths," National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1981.
61. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," March 3, 1984. Note the "soft" headline. An option forgone by the Times was a headline like: "Duarte and Defense Minister Casanova Accused of Cover-up of Murder of Four American Women. " Santivanez was paid $50,000 to give his evidence, a sum he requested on the ground of the risk he was taking and the probability that he would be income-short in the future as a result of his confession. This payment was given unusual publicity as sug- gesting a compromising quality to his testimony, and the New York Times squelched a second installment of his evidence on this principled ground- which they never apply to Soviet defectors, who are less in need of protection.
The revelation that the "leading democrats" who were formed into a civilian front for the contras by the CIA have been receiving over $80,000, tax-free, annually from the CIA for years has never compromised their integrity as media sources. Nicaraguan defector Miranda got $800,000 for his services without being discredited.
62. Excellent accounts were produced by Michael Posner and the Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights in a series of investigatory reports, dated September 1981, July 20, 1982, and February I, 1983, which contain detailed and crushing evidence of a completely broken-down judicial process and an official cover-up. Once again, as with the Dinges report, these docu- ments were essentially ignored in the U. S. mass media and their facts and leads suppressed. News coverage of the lawyers' committee documents was negligi- ble. Michael Posner and Scott Greathead did succeed in placing an Op-Ed article in the Times on December 6, 1983, entitled "3 Years after Killings, No Justice in Salvador. "
63. Both Time and Newsweek had articles featuring stonewalling in February 1981-Time's article was entitled "Stonewalling" (Feb. 23)-but although the stonewalling continued for years, this was the end of the news magazines' interest in the matter.
64. Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights, Update:Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study, February I, 1983, p. 17.
65. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 80.
66. Larry Rohter, "Salvador Defense Lawyer Charges Cover-Up in Slaying of
U. S. Nuns," New York Times, May 6, 1985.
67. In the same month that Hinton was asserting with assurance that the low-level guardsmen were acting on their own, internal State Department memos were stating that "Reading the documents provoked several questions which we think should have occurred to an investigator whose real aim was to determine who committed the crime" (quoted in Update, p. 31).
68. Quoted in Update, pp. 30-31.
69. On the Tyler investigation, see Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, pp. 78-80. 70. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads," New York Times, March 3, 1984?
71. Carrigan, Salvador Witness, p. 265.
72. See Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Biller Fruit (New York: Doubleday, 1982), pp. 32-47, 54-63.
73. Virtually all independent observers were of the view that land reform was also highly desirable for both equity and efficiency. See, especially, Jose M. Aybar de Soto, Dependency and Intervention: The Case of Guatemala in I954 (Boulder: Westview, 1978), chapter 6.
74. Ibid. See also Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).
75. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Dou- bleday, 1981), p. 222.
76. Piero Gleijeses, "Guatemala: Crisis and Response," in Richard B. Fagen and Olga Pellicer, The Future of Central America: Policy Choices for the U. S. and Mexico (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 188.
77. Ibid. , pp. 191-92.
78. Ibid. , p. 192.
79. U. S. officials have often pressed for purely formal democratic reforms and reductions in rates of murder, but they have consistently supported and helped organize theframework that eroded the democratic reforms and increased rates of murder. In Guatemala (and elsewhere), the reasons for the regular backing of antidemocratic institutions have been the fear of the left and the chronic hostility of U. S. officials and businessmen to popular organizations (unions, peasant organizations, mass political parties), for both economic and political reasons. Thus the periodic support for liberalforms has been rendered nuga- tory by the systematic bolstering up of institutions that regularly undermine the substance of liberalism. As Lars Schoultz points out, the function of "mili- tary authoritarianism," beginning with the U. S. -backed Brazilian coup of1964 and widely prevalent in Latin America and elsewhere within the U. S. sphere of influence, has been "to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the participation of the numerical majority, . . . " (Human Rights and United States Policy toward
Latin America [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], p. 7). We may let them "participate," however, with elections held after extended periods of military pacification and the dismantling of popular organizations. See chap- ter 3.
80. See "Counterrevolution and the 'Shakedown States,' " in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 61-66.
81. From 1977, Guatemala turned for aid to Israel, which has provided similar services regularly for the U. S. government. For details, see Bishara Bahbah, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (New York: St. Martin's, 1986); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection (New York: Pantheon, 1987); and Jane Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1987). On the continued flow of arms from the United States to Guatemala during the Carter years, see Lars Schoultz, "Guatemala," in Martin Diskin, ed. , Trouble in our Backyard (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 187ff.
82. Piero Gleijeses estimates that "the Guatemalan army has killed close to 100,000" since 1979 ("The Reagan Doctrine and Latin America," Current History [December 1986]).
83. See, for example, Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Pro- gram of Political Murder (London: AI, 1981); Parliamentary Human Rights Group, "Bitter and Cruel . . . ," Report of a Mission to Guatemala by the
354 NOTES TO PAGES 73-80
NOTES TO PAGES 81-89 355
British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984; Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986).
84. Amnesty International, Guatemala: Massive Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas under the Government of General Efrain R? os Monu, October II, 1982.
8S. According to State Department testimony ofJuly 20, 1981, "We need to try a new, constructive policy approach to Guatemala . . . " (quoted in Americas Watch, Guatemala Revisited: How the Reagan Administration Finds "Improve- ments" in Human Rights in Guatemala [New York: AW, 1985], p. 4).
86. Quoted in Americas Watch, Guatemala Revisited, p. S.
87. See Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, p. 8.
88. Americas Watch, Guatemala Revisited, p. 6.
89. State Department 1984 Human Rights Country Report, quoted in Ameri- cas Watch, Guatemala Revisited, p. IS.
90. Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, p. S.
91. While this is true almost without exception for news articles, there were perhaps a dozen Op-Ed columns in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and some letters, in the period 1980-86, that criticized Guatemalan state terrorism; some of these were harshly critical of U. S. policy.
92. A few of the opinion pieces cited in the previous note did discuss the U. S. role.
93. "Requiem for a Missionary," August 10, 1981.
94. The documents include the following four put out by Amnesty Interna- tional: Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, February 1981; "Disappearances": A Workbook, 1981; Guatemala: Massive Extrajudicial Execu- tions in Rural Areas under the Government of General Efrain Rios Manu, Oc- tober 1982; "Disappearances" in Guatemala under the Government of General Oscar Humberto Mej? a V? ctores, March 1985. We also included six studies by Americas Watch: Human Rights in Guatemala: No Neutrals Allowed, Novem- ber 1982; Guatemala Revisited: How the Reagan Administration Finds "Im- provements" in Human Rights in Guatemala, September 1985; Liule Hope: Human Rights in Guatemala, January I984-January I98S, February 1985; Guatemala: The Group for Mutual Support, 1985; Civil Patrols in Guatemala, August 1986; Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, 1987.
9S. This letter is reproduced in Americas Watch, Human Rights in Guatem. ala: No Neutrals Allowed, November 1982.
96. For a full discussion of the last of these murders, that of Marianela Garcia Villas, on March IS, 1983, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demon- stration Elections: U. S. -Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. x-xi.
97. Quoted in Americas Watch, Guatemala: The Group for Mutual Support,. I984-I98S, p. 2 (hereafter, AW, Mutual Support).
98. Council on Hemispheric Affairs, News and Analysis, April 26, 1986, p. 222. 99. McClintock, American Connection, vol. 2, p. 83.
100. AW, Mutual Support, p. 3.
101. "Bitter and Cruel," British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984.
102. AW, Mutual Support, p. 8.
103. Ibid. , p. 7.
104. An open letter of November 15, 1984, quoted in AW, Mutual Support,
P? 24?
lOS. AW, Mutual Support, pp. 24-2S.
106. Ibid. , p. 36. This was, of course, a complete fabrication. What Mejia
Victores is referring to is an investigative body that he established, manned
and that, predictably, gave the government a clean bill of health.
107. Ibid. , p. 38.
108. Ibid. , p. 41.
109? Two very terse exceptions should be noted: On April 13, an article on the case mentions that Gomez was tortured; and one on April 19 notes that his tongue was cut out. No details whatsoever were provided about the murders of Godoy de Cuevas and her brother and son.
I10. Aswewillseeinthenextchapter,thenewciviliangovernmentdidnothing to stem the army assault on the civilian population; but as we might also expect, the optimism of the press on the promise of the new civilian adminis- tration was not followed up with reports on what actually happened.
III.
