No More Learning

- organized invasion and overthrow aCthe democratically elected regime of Jacobo Arbenz in June 1954. Since that time, while Guatemala has remained securely within the U. S. sphere of influence, badly needed economic and social refonDs were put off the agenda indefinitely, politi- cal democracy was stifled, and state terror was institutionalized and reached catastrophic levels in the late 19705 and early 19808. Given the client status of Guatemala and the fact that the antidemocratic counter- revolution served important elite interests, a propaganda model sug- gests that its victims will be "unworthy," which should be reflected in both the quantity and quality ofmedia attention. Furthermore, whereas victimization in Soviet client states like Poland and Czechoslovakia is regularly traced back to the Soviet occupations, a propaganda model would predict that the U. S. media will not explain the contemporary Guatemalan environment ofstate terror as a natural product ofthe U. S. intervention in 1954 (and thereafter). On the contrary, we would expect the United States to be portrayed as a benevolent and concerned by- stander, trying its very best to curb abuses of right and left extremists.
Before looking at the media's handling of Guatemala, however, let us step back for a brief review of the crucial period 1945-54 and its sequel to set the stage for an examination of the media's role in the ? 980s. Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan Arevalo, Jed the first demo- cratic system in Guatemalan history. During the decade of their rule, newspapers, social groups, unions, peasants, and political parties could organize without fear of repression or murder. 72 But this fragile democ- racy rested on a base of concentrated land ownership and foreign control of land and strategic facilities that was a constant threat to its independence and political freedom, as well as a human disaster. The struggle for unionization and land reform during the democratic decade was motivated in part by a desire to build a mass constituency that would provide an institutional base for democracy. B Each progressive
72 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
move by both Arevalo and Arbenz was greeted with fierce hostility by the local oligarchy, the multinational corporate community, and the U. S. governmentJ4 "Communism" was found to be in control, or a threat, from the time trade unions were allowed to organize in 1947, and Arbenz's modest and effective land reform was the last strawJ5 With U. S. initiative, organization, funding, and direct psychological warfare and terror operations, a tiny mercenary army ousted Arbenz and in- stalled an "anti-Communist" regime.
From 1954 to the present day, neither reform nor democracy, let ~ alone radical change, has been possible in Guatemala. The main reason
for this is that the forces into whose hands the United States delivered
that country in 1954 "bitterly opposed any change that might affect, however slightly, their entrenched pos. tion,"76 and they had learned
from the 1945-54 lesson that democracy moves inexorably toward re- form and threats to privilege in a system of extreme inequality. The very brief interludes of tentative openness after 1954 witnessed the quick emergence of protective organizations of urban workers and the peasantry, strikes, and reformist and radical parties and organizations. As Piero Gleijeses puts it, "in the last months of the Arana period (I97o-74], the repression had acquired a more selective character, and on repeated occasions Laugerud [Arana's successor, 1974-78] refrained from 'settling' strikes by force. "77 But the feebleness of the reforms and the awakened hopes and pressures forced a further choice; and "given the nacure of the regime," the wave of terror thar followed "was the only logical choice" for the Guatemalan ruling class. 78
Another reason for the failures of both reform and democracy has been ongoing U. S. influence. The U. S. establishment found the plural- ism and democracy of the years 1945-54 intolerable, and it eventually ended that experiment. 79 In the succeeding thirty-two years of U. S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U. S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and coun- terrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large- scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency eCI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 73
training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionaliza- tion of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U. S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state. "
The special role of the army in the counterinsurgency state gradually elevated its status and power, and eventually gave it the institutional capacity to rule Guatemala. As in many U. S. client states, the military used its power to carve OUt economic opportunities and to steal, directly o r i n d i r e c t l y . 80 T h e t e r r o r i s m , t h i e v e r y , a n d a u t o n o m y o f t h e G u a t e m a - lan military reached a temporary peak-later surpassed by Rios Montt-during the reign of Lucas Garcia (1978-82). This overlapped the brief interlude of the Carter human-rights policy, during which there was open criticism of the Guatemalan government and a brief and partial cutoff of arms supply from the United States under congressio- nal pressure. B1 Even during the Carter years, however, relations with Guatemala were not hostile-it was as if a child in the family were naughty and briefly put in the corner. Part ofthe reason for the willing- ness of the Carter government to provide no new arms supplies was that the bad boy was in no danger. In El Salvador in 1980, by contrast, where the Carter administration saw the possibility of a left-wing victory, support was quickly forthcoming to a right-wing terror regime.
During the Reagan years, the number of civilians murdered in Guatemala ran into the tens of thousands, and disappearances and mutilated bodies were a daily occurrence. B2 Studies by Amnesty Inter- national (AI), Americas Watch (AW), and other human-rights monitors have documented a military machine run amok, with the indiscriminate killing of peasants (including vast numbers of women and children), the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of farmers and villagers into virtual concentration camps, and the enlistment of many hundreds of thousands in compulsory civil patrols. B3 Reagan, however, visiting Guatemala in December 1982, commented that head of state Rios Monn was "totally committed to democracy" and was receiving a "bum rap" on human-rights abuses. Two months earlier, AI released its re- port describing sixty different Indian villages in which massacres of civilians took place in a three-month period, with the total killed ex- ceeding . 2,500. 84
The Reagan policy toward Guatemala was, as with South Africa, "constructive engagement. "8S From the beginning, the administration strove to embrace and provide arms to the military governments. Ongo- ing mass murder was merely an inconvenience. One method by which the administration sought to rehabilitate our relations with the
74 MANUfACTURING CONSENT
Guatemala regimes was by continual lying about their human-rights record (with Reagan himself setting the standard). Stephen Bosworth, of the State Department, assured a House committee in July 1981 that the Lucas Garcia government was successfully attacking the guerrillas "while taking care to protect innocent bystanders. "86 The State Depart- ment's Country Report on Human Rights for 1981 also found it impossi- ble to determine who was doing all the killing in Guatemala, and disappearances were attributed to the "right" and the "left," but not to the government. Amnesty International, by contrast, in February
1981, gave detailed evidence that the thousands of murders were almost entirely governmental in origin, including those of the death squads, whose victims were targeted in an annex of Guatemala's national palace under the direct supervision of President Lucas Garcia. S7
With the overthrow of Lucas Garcia, suddenly, as if by magic, the Reagan administration line altered, and Stephen Bosworth "could not emphasize strongly enough the favorable contrast between the current human rights situation in Guatemala and the situation last December. _. . " Melvyn Levitsky, deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights, told another congressional committee that "the United States cannot easily sustain a relationship with a government which engages in violence against its own people," as with the Lucas Garcia regime. ss
When Lucas Garcia was in power, Bosworth found it a caring regime that protected the innocent, and the State Department couldn't deter- mine that the government was doing any killing. With Lucas Garcia ousted, the State Department discovered that he was an indiscriminate murderer and assumed a high moral tone about his behavior. That is, the State Department implicitly conceded that it was lying earlier and counted on the press not to point this out. Of course, the reason for the switch was to help make a favorable case for Lucas Garcia's successor, Rios Montt. Under Rios Montt there was "a dramatic decline" in human-rights abuses, according to State Department spokesman John Hughes in January 1983. Rios Montt is the one whom Reagan found to be getting a bum rap. But as we noted, Amnesty International found R10S Montt to be another top-rank murderer, who appears to have exceeded his predecessor in civilian massacres.
When R10s Montt was ousted in his turn, once again the State Department line shifted. It was admitted that things had been terrible under Rios Montt . in 1982, but now there was a dramatic improvement, and the government was showing "increased sensitivity to human rights questions. "89 It is evident that we have here a consistent pattern that may be formulated into a quasi-law: in the case of a terrorist state with which the administration wants "constructive engagement," things are
t
always OK and improving; but when that regime is ousted, its record deteriorates ex post facto and looks most unfavorable compared with the humanistic and sensitive one now in power! This droll pattern of identical apologetics for each successor terrorist, and ex post denigra- tion of the one ousted, is an Orwellian process that the Western press associates with totalitarian states, but it happens here. And it can only occur if the mass media are cooperative. They must be willing to downplay or ignore the large-scale murders going on in Guatemala in the first place. In that context, the serial apologetics, the lies defending each murderer, and the mind-boggling hypocrisy will hardly be news- worthy.
Given the U. S. role in originating and sustaining the Guatemalan counterinsurgency state, and the fact that that state is dedicated to blocking the growth of popular organizations (i. e. , "anti-Communist" in Orwellian rhetoric) and has a strong U. S. business presence, a propa- ganda model would anticipate a lack of media interest in its "unworthy"
'victims and an evasion of the U. S. role in its evolution and practices. We would expect reports on Guatemala put out by Amnesty Interna- tional and other human-rights groups to be downplayed or ignored, despite their spectacular data and horrifying stories. This is a strong test of the model, as the number of civilians murdered between 1978 and 1985 may have approached 100,000, with a style of killing reminiscent of Pol Pot. As AI pointed out in 1981:
The bodies of the victims have been found piled up in ravines, dumped at roadsides or buried in mass graves. Thousands bore the scars of torture, and death had come to most by strangling with a garrotte, by being suffocated in rubber hoods or by being shot in the head. 90
The expectations of a propaganda model are fully realized in this case. Referring to our table 2-1 comparison of media treatment of twenty- three religious victims in Guatemala with the coverage accorded Popie- luszko, only four of the twenty-three were ever mentioned by name in our media sample, and the twenty-three taken together had approxi- mately one-twentieth of the space in the New York Times that the newspaper of record gave to Popieluszko. In the cas{' ")f the murder in Guatemala of the American priest Rev. Stanley Rother, the New York Times reported on August 5, 1981, in a tiny back-page article, that three men had been arrested for questioning in the shooting. What was the ourcome of the arrests? Were the arrested persons tried? Readers of the Times will never know, and the Guatemalan government did not have
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 75
76 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
to suffer the embarrassment and pressure of the press raising questions in this or any of the remaining twenty-two Guatemalan cases.
Along with the minuscule attention to the murder of Guatemalan priests) the details of the killings were brief) and no sense of outrage was generated or sustained. 91 The few lengthier articles never discuss the role of the 1954 coup and the long training and supply relationship of the United States to the Guatemalan police and army;92 rather, they almost invariably put the killings in the format of a civil war with unexplained atrocities of extremists of the right and left (see "Arch- bishop Oscar Romero," p. 48). An AP dispatch in the New York Times of May 16, 1981, is entitled "Four Guatemalans Slain in Leftist-Rightist Rivalry. " The article, which reports on the murder of one of our twenty-three priests, the Reverend Carlos Galvez Galindo, says: "The attacks appeared to be related to the long struggle for power between leftists and rightists. " A UPI dispatch in the Times of July 29, 1981, reporting on the murder of Rev. Stanley Rother, also relates the attack to "right-wing extremists"-not the Guatemalan government.
Time has Rother and his Guatemalan villagers "caught in the middle of an undeclared civil war. . . . "93 Time never explains the roots of the civil war, nor the crucial role of the United States in refusing to allow peaceful social change and installing the institutions of permanent counterrevolution. Time does, in most unusual fashion, point out that the government was responsible for the "overwhelming majority" of the killings, and even more exceptionally, it cites Amnesty International's evidence that the paramilitary death squads are an ann of the govern- ment. But the article fails to give illustrations of the scope and quality of the murders, and retreats, as noted, to the civil-war rationale. Even more compromising is its framing of the U. S. policy debate. According to Time, "Yet Guatemala confronts the Reagan administration with one of its toughest foreign policy challenges: on one hand, the country is viewed as a victim of Cuban-sponsored insurgency, needing U. S. sup- port; on the other) the government obviously violates human rights. " The dichotomy offered by Time is a bit uneven: the Cuban sponsorship is a Cold War ploy for which no evidence has ever been given, but it provides a convenient propaganda framework that is regularly deployed by the State Department to divert attention from its support of mass murderers. Time thus elevates it to equality with a real and extremely serious charge-and without an honest citation even to a political hack. The "on the other hand" is, despite the "obviously)" a gross understate- ment. The Reagan administration chose to support and provide regular apologetics for a genocidal government that was using a policy of massacre to destroy a purely indigenous revolt. The "challenge" for the
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTiMS 77
Reagan administration--quite different from that portrayed by Time- was how to sell the support of mass murder. Time did its little bit by unqualified transmission of the claim of a Cuban-based insurgency, which posed a serious dilemma for policy-making.
The holocaust years 1978-85 yielded a steady stream of documents by human-rights groups that provided dramatic evidence of a state terrorism in Guatemala approaching genocidal levels. Many of these documents had a huge potential for educating and arousing the public, but as a propaganda model would anticipate, they were treated in our media sample in a manner that minimized their informational value and capacity to create and mobilize public indignation. Using a selection of ten important reports on Guatemala by Amnesty International and Americas Watch issued in the years 1981-87, we could only find mention of four of them in our media sample. 94 None of these four made it to the first page, and none provided the basis for an editorial or the building up of a press campaign of sustained coverage and indignation.
The spectacular AI report of 1981 on "Disappearances": A Workbook, describing a frightening development of state terrorism in the Nazi mold, was entirely ignored in our media sample, as was AI's March 1985 report on "Disappearances" . . . under the Government of General Oscar Humbert{) Mejia Vicf{)res, which if publidzed would have interfered with the media's portrayal of the Guatemalan elections of 1984-85 as exercises in legitimation (as described in the next chapter). AW's 1985 report on the Mutual Support Group was ignored, as was the 1987 study of human rights in Guatemala during Cerezo's first year. We return to the Mutual Support Group in the next section. We will see in the next chapter, too, that the media reported Cerezo's election in a framework of hopefulness and optimism, despite prior electoral experience in Guatemala and Cerezo's own expressed doubts about his ability to rule; the ignoring of AW's retrospective describing the actual results of Cerezo's presidency reflects the media's general failure to follow up on the effects of client state elections (as we show in chapter 3 with regard to E1 Salvador).
We described earlier the important Americas Watch study
Guatemala Revised: H<J1Q tke Reagan Administration Finds "Improve- ments" in Human Rights in Guatemala, whose most striking and impor- tant theme was the ex post facto admission by the State Department that its apologetics for the previous general had been false. This il- luminating document was ignored in our media sample, except for the Neu' York Times, which gave it a three-inch article on page 7 under the benign title "Rights Group Faults U. S. on Guatemala Situation" (Sept. 24,1985). The article describes the report as saying that the administra-
78 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
tion has refused to acknowledge major human-rights abuses in Guatemala, but it fails to mention the stress on the ex post facto tacit admission of lying. Mentioning this would, of course, suggest that the Times's primary source for its "news" is thoroughly untrustworthy. The last paragraph of the article, which absorbs a quarter of the three inches devoted to this document, gives a State Department response to the AW report, which is that AW is "less a human rights organization than it is a political one. " The brazen hypocrisy of this retort would have been clear and dramatic if the article had given the gist of AW's evidence that the administration was not merely an apologist for state terrorism in Guatemala, but was also demonstrably dishonest.
In its concern to protect the Guatemalan generals in their terroristic assault on the population, the Reagan administration took umbrage at organizations like Amnesty International and Americas Watch and mounted a systematic campaign in I98I and I982 to discredit them as left-wing and politically biased. In a letter dated September IS, I982, directed to AI and the Washington Office on Latin America, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders assailed the reporting of these or- ganizations as one-sided and apologetic for the "ferocious" and "ter- rorist attacks"-of the guerrillas. Enders writes that
No one would deny the possibility [ric] of units of the military, in contravention of stated policy, having been involved in viola- tions of human rights. What is important is that since March 23 the Government of Guatemala has committed itself to a new course and has made significant progress. '~5
This amazing piece of apologetics for an army that was in the midst of slaughtering thousands ofcivilians was distributed within Guatemala as an official U. S. document, and its full text appeared in the Guatemalan press. AW states:
We find this use of the letter unconscionable in light of the risks run by human rights investigators in a political climate like Guatemala's. It also appears to us to be further evidence that the State Department, like the Guatemalan government, admits no neutrals in the Guatemalan conflict; the bringer of bad news becomes, through this reasoning, part of the enemy, to be publicly discredited if possible.
Americas Watch also indicated that the State Department's substantive criticisms of AW and AI were not merely incompetent but, more impor-
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 79
tant, were based largely on the assumed truthfulness of Guatemalan army claims (a form of gullibility displayed clearly in the statement by Enders quoted above).
As we discussed in chapter I, the government is a primary flak producer as well as information source. This Guatemala episode is an important illustration of the government's efforts to silence competing sources of information. It is interesting that the New York Times never mentioned or crit. icized this sinister campaign, even though it was carried out in the context of a policy protecting mass murderers. We will see in the next chapter that Time magazine cooperated with the campaign, citing Americas Watch only once on Guatemala, but with the qualifying explanation that it is "a controversial group that is often accused of being too sympathetic to the left" (the State Department, on which Time relies very heavily, is never subject to any adjective suggesting any bias). The Washington Post (Dec. 4, 1982) had one back-page article by Terri Shaw, on the Enders letter, which features the State Department charges in the title-"Embassy Sees 'Disinfor- mation' on Guatemala: U. S. Report Says Rights Groups are Used"- and in the text. The author allows the embassy claim. that "the report never was meant to be made public" to stand unchallenged, and never refers to the threat posed to human-rights monitors by the release of such State Department charges. The human-rights groups are allowed to suggest a State Department intent to discredit, but the word "disin-
formation" is never applied to State Department allegations, and no serious examination of the content of those charges is provided. This superficial piece exhausts the sample media's coverage of this State Department campaign. The AW report Human Rights in Guatemala: No Neutrals Allowed, which discusses this campaign and the Enders letterJ was never mentioned.
2. 6. THE MUTUAL SUPPORT GROUP MURDERS IN GUATEMALA
Human-rights monitoring and protective agencies have had a very difficult time organizing and surviving in the "death-squad democ- racies" of EI Salvador and Guatemala. Between October 1980 and March 1983, five officials of the Human Rights Commission ofEI Salva- dor were seized and murdered by the security forces. In accord with
80 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
a propaganda model, these murders should have been of little interest
to the U. S. mass media, and this expectation is borne out by evidence.
As an illustrative comparison, the New York Times had a grand total of
four back-page articles on these five murders,96 whereas, during the
same period, the Times had thirty-five articles on the Soviet human- rights activist Natan Sharansky, not all of them on the back pages. The proportionality of attention fits well our general propaganda-model analysis of the media's treatment of worthy and unworthy victims. ,~
Guatemala has been even more inhospitable to human-rights organi- zations than El Salvador. Guatemalan Archbishop Monsignor Prospero Penados del Barrio asserted in 1984 that "It is impossible for a human rights office to exist in Guatemala at the present time. "97 "Disappear- ances" as an institutional form began in Guatemala in the mid-1960s and eventually reached levels unique in the Western Hemisphere, with the total estimated to be some 40,000. 98 Protest groups that have formed to seek information and legal redress have been consistently driven out of business by state-organized murder. The Association of University Students (AEU) sought information on the disappeared through the courts in the course of a brief opening in 1966, but after one sensational expose ofthe police murder of twenty-eight leftists, the
system closed down again. As McClintock points out, "In the next few years many AEU leaders and member law students were hunted down and killed. "99 In the 1970s, a Committee of the Relatives of the Disap- peared was organized by the AEU, with headquarters in San Carlos National University. As Americas Watch points out, "It disbanded after plainsclothesmen walked into the University's legal aid center on March 10, 1974, and shot and killed b principal organizer, lawyer Edmundo Guerra Theilheimer, the center's director. "loo Another human-rights group, the National Commission for Human Rights, was created in the late 1970S by psychologist and journalist Irma Plaquer. Her son was murdered, and she herself "disappeared" on October 16, 1980.
According to the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, in 1984 alone there were an average of one hundred political murders and over forty disappearances per month in Guatemala. 101 These figures are almost surely an underestimate, as only the disappearances that took place in and around Guatemala City received any publicity. The greater number of murders and disappearances occur among rural and Indian families who do not have the resources to complain and are more exposed to retaliation.
In this context of murder, fear, and the prior failure of all human- rights organizations, the Mutual Support Group, or GAM, was formed
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 81
in June 1984. It was a product of the desperation felt by people seeking information on the whereabouts of disappeared relatives and willing to take serious risks to that end. Many of them had suffered enormous pain in frustrating searches and inquiries that never bore fruit. There is no legal redress in Guatemala, and nothing useful can be obtained by appeals to the police or courts of law. Mr. Hicho, looking for his disappeared daughter, saw some one hundred bodies in the months he spent at the morgue, and "seventy to seventy-five percent of them had been tortured. "I02 Others took different painful routes in their search. In early 1985, one woman was told by an army officer that her husband was still alive, and that he would see to his return if she slept with him. She did so, and her husband turned up dead shortly thereafter. 103
The intention of the organizers of GAM was to seek strength by collective action, and to use it to gather data and seek redress by petition and publicity. Their hope for survival and success rested, in part, on the fact that the chief of state, Mejia Victores, was being built up by the Reagan administration as another "reformer," and the Rea- gan-Mejia Victores team was trying to establish the appropriate "image" to induce Congress to loosen the purse strings. GAM also had support within Guatemala from Archbishop Penados del Barrio and other church groups and lay persons, although few felt able to speak up in the system of unconstrained state terror. Internationally, GAM received significant political support from progressive and humanitar- ian political parties and human-rights groups.
Thirty members of the newly organized GAM held a press confer- ence in Guatemala City in June 1984, denouncing the disappearances and calling on the government "to intervene immediately in order to find our loved ones. " In the latter part of June, and again in early August, masses were held in the Metropolitan Cathedral to express concern over the fate of the disappeared, with the initial services held by the university rector, Meyer Maldonado, and Archbishop Penados. A thousand people attended the August mass. On August I, the group first met with General Mejia Victores, at which time he promised to investigate the disappearances. In ads placed in the major newspapers on August 8 and 9, GAM put his promises on the public record. Subse- quently the group began to call attention to the government's failure to follow through on the August 1 promises, and they moved gradually to other actions. In October 1984 they sponsored a march and mass for the disappeared at the cathedral-the first mass demonstration in Guatemala since May I, 1980 (at which time protestors were seized on the streets and an estimated one hundred were assassinated, or disap-
peared).
82 M A S U F A C T U R IN G C O N S E N T
The organization continued to grow, from the initial handful to 225 families in November 1984 and then to 1,3? 0 in the spring of 1986. Most
of the members were women, a large majority peasant women from the countryside. They were persistent. After initial petitions, requests, meetings, and marches, they began to make explicit accusations and "publicly charge elements of the national security forces as directly i responsible for the capture and subsequent disappearance of our family . , members. "I04 They asked for an investigation, an accounting, and jus-
tice. They appealed to the constituent assembly and began regular 1? protests in downtown Guatemala City, banging pots and pans and, on . occasion, peacefully occupying buildings.
Nothing, of course, was done in response to the GAM demands. The assembly had no powers anyway, but was too fearful even to pass a resolution of support. The military rulers toyed with GAM. In public, with the press on hand, Mejia Victores would say, "I don't want to shirk responsibilities and something has to be done. " But when the press was not there, he said, "It seems as though you are accusing me-and we don't have them [the disappeared]. " "You have them," we said. "We don't have them," he replied. lOS The military rulers were getting an- noyed, and phone threats, letters of warning, and open surveillance intensified. Two days after the exchange between Mejia Victores and GAM, the tortured bodies of two disappeared associated with GAM members showed up, one placed in front of his house with his eyes
gouged out and his face barely recognizable.
In a television interview on March 14, 1985, Mejia Victores said that
GAM was "being used by subversion, because if they have problems, solutions are being found, and they have been given every advantage to [solve these problems]. "106 A spate of newspaper headlines followed, stressing government warnings and allegations that GAM was being manipulated by subversives. In mid-March, General Mejia Victores was asked on television what action the government would take against GAM. He replied, "You'll know it when you see it,"107
On March 30, 1985, GAM leader Hector G6mez Calito was seized, tortured, and murdered. (The six policemen who had come for him were themselves assassinated shortly after his death. )108 He had been burned with a blowtorch, on the stomach and elsewhere, and beaten on the face so severely that his lips were swollen and his teeth were broken; his tongue had been cut out. Then, on April 4, another leader of GAM, Maria Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, her twenty-one-year-old brother, and her two-year-old son were picked up, tortured, and murdered. Her breasts had bite marks and her underclothing was bloody; her two-year-
old son had had his fingernails pulled out.
On grounds of newsworthiness, the murders of the two GAM lead- ers, along with the brother and the child of one of them, would seem to deserve high-order attention. Their bravery was exceptional; the villainy they were opposing was extraordinary; the justice of their cause was unassailable; and the crimes they suffered were more savage than those undergone by Popieluszko. Most important of all, these were crimes for which we bear considerable responsibility, since they were perpetrated by clients who depend on our support, so that exposure and pressure could have a significant effect in safeguarding human rights. On the other hand, the Reagan administration was busily trying to enter into warmer and more supportive relations with the Guatemalan mili-
I tary regime and, as we described earlier, was going to great pains to put the regime in a favorabJe light. A propaganda model wouJd anticipate that even these dramatic and horrifying murders would be treated in a low-key manner and quickly dropped by the mass media-that, unlike Popieluszko, there would be no sustained interest, no indignation capa- ble of rousing the public (and disturbing the administration's plans).
These expectations are fully vindicated by the record.
Table 2-3 compares media coverage ofthe Popieluszko case with that of the murders of the GAM leaders. It is immediately obvious that the treatment is radically different in the two cases. The GAM murders couldn't even make "the news" at Time, Newsweek, or CBS News, The New York Times never found these murders worthy of the front page or editorial comment, and we can see that the intensity of its coverage was slight. The first report of the quadruple murder was on April 7, 1985, in a tiny item on page 5 of the paper in which it is mentioned that the body of Maria Rosario Godoy de Cuevas was found in her car in a ravine, along with the bodies of her brother and her young son. In neither this item nor any succeeding article does the Times provide details on the condition of the bodies, or mention that the two-year-old
child had his fingernails tom OUt. I09
In other respects, too, the Times articles, all written by Stephen
Kinzer, generally employ an apologetic framework. That is, they don't focus on the murders-who the victims were, the details of the vio- lence, who did it, why, and the institutional structures and roots of organized murder of which these are an obvious part. With Popie- luszko, these were the issues. Kinzer has little or nothing on the details of the GAM murders and very little on the victims and the experiences that brought them to GAM, and the question of who did it and what was being done (or not done) to bring the murderers to justice he hardly considers. Kinzer takes it for granted that the murders were committed by agents of the state, but he doesn't say this explicitly, or discuss the
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 83
TABLE 2-3 ~
?
Mass-Media Coverage of Worthy and Unworthy Victims (2):
A Murdered Polish Priest versus Two Murdered Officials ?
>
"
c
> n
of the Guatemalan Mutual Support Group
"
c
NEW YORK TIMES
TIME and NEWSWEEK
CBS NEWS
? o
"
n
No. of No. of o Articlest Column page Editorials Artides CoI~ news evening Z
Front- Inches articles
'?
inches No. % of
row I
programSI news
" "
z
No.
% of row I
No. '" of No. row I
% of No. row 1
% of row 1
No. % of row I
No. % of No. row I
% of row I
V ictinu
l. lerzy Popicluszko,
murdered on
Oct. 19, 1984 2. H~ctor Orlando
G6mez and Maria Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, murdered between Mar. 30 and Apr. 6, 1985 (along with a child, who was tortured)
78 (l00) 1183. 0 (100) 10 (100) 3 (100) 16 (tOO) 313. 0 (100) 46 (100) 23 (100)
5 (6. 4) 80. 0
(6. 8)
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WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 85
background, or provide a framework for evaluating the case. He looks "objectively" at the scene, quoting some of the GAM survivors in brief and rhetorical statements that are offset by quotes from the generals: they approved the formation of GAM (an ambiguous half-truth); they appointed an investigating committee that "found no evidence of secret detention centers in Guatemala" (no mention of the composition of the committee, no counter-evidence, and no mention of issues they may have overlooked-like disappeared who are murdered); and they deny any responsibility for the murder of Godoy, her brother, and her son, who they claim to have been victims of an auto accident. If Kinzer had given the details of the victims' injuries, this lie would have been exposed as such, and further questions would have suggested them- selves.
In article after article, Kinzer repeats that the Mejia Victores gov- ernment has pledged to return to civilian rule shortly, which helps deflect attention from the ongoing killing and its causes, and from the GAM murders under discussion; he also does not tell us just what "civilian rule" would mean in a terrorist state in which, as he knows, the effective rulers would be the same military forces. Ho In the Popie- luszko case, once it was established that the police had committed the murder, the media spent a great deal of space discussing the police apparatus and police methods, as well as attending to the responsibility of the people at higher levels for the murder. Kinzer doesn't discuss these questions at all. The structure of the Guatemalan murder ma- chine and how it works would make a good Story, and numerous details of its operations were available, but this did not fit the government agenda and the Times format. Similarly, the role of Mejia Victores in the murder of the GAM leaders-recall his warnings just prior to the murders, and consider his virtually unlimited discretionary power to murder or protect the citizenry-is ignored. But once again, the links to the top in the case of unworthy victims do not fit the propaganda format. Kinzer does a nice job of making the GAM murders seem to be part of the natural background-regrettable but inevitable, part of the complex inheritance of a troubled country, and possibly, it is hoped, to be rectified when the new civilian government takes power.
In an attempt to gain support abroad, two of the remaining leaders of GAM, Nineth de Garcia and Herlindo Hideo de Aquino, traveled to Europe in March and April 1986, after the inauguration of the elected civilian president, Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo. One of their most important messages was that killings and disappearances had not abated at all during the first three months of Cerezo's presidency, and that the death squads had actually reappeared and were active in
86 MANti"FACTti"ltING CONSENT
Guatemala City. Because of ill health, Nineth de Garcia canceled her visits in Washington, D. C. , and flew directly from Europe to Chicago, where she was scheduled to receive the key to the city from Mayor Harold Washington. As she went through customs in Chicago, how- ever, the officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service searched, interrogated, and harassed her for two hours, one of the customs officials calling her a subversive and a Communist. They also seized literature she carried and threatened to deport her, despite her intended brief stopover and valid visa. This intimidation had its effect, and Nineth de Garcia flew directly to Guatemala. A friend attended the banquet in her place to accept the key presented by Mayor Washington.
This incident is revealing. It is unlikely that Sharansky or Walesa would be so treated by the INS, but if by some chance they were, the press outcry would be great. I I I When a press conference was held in Chicago by supporters of GAM to protest this outrage, the major media did not attend, and neither the press releases nor the follow-up lener from a congressional group signed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan could break the silence. The convergence between Reagan administra- tion policy toward Guatemala and media priorities was complete. (Ac- cording to two organizers of the Chicago press conference, full information on this event was given Steve Greenhouse, the New York Times's reporter in Chicago, but not a word about this incident ap- peared in the newspaper of record. )
A press release by the Guatemalan army on September 17, 1986, accused GAM of conducting
. . . a black campaign of falsehood . . . insults and insolence . , directed at the military institution that exceed [the boundaries] of 1 liberty and tolerance for free speech. The army cannot permit the insidiousness and truculence of GAM's maneuvers . . . that at-
tempt to compromise the democratic international image of Guatemala. 112
Although very similar threats preceded the murder of two leaders of GAM in March and April of1984, the U. S. mass media entirely ignored this new information-despite strenuous efforts by GAM, the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, and their allies to elicit pub- licity. As in the past, the unworthiness of these victims remains an essential ingredient in the Guatemalan army's continued freedom to kill.
Legitimizing versus
Meaningless Third World
Elections:
EI Salvador Guatemala Nicaragua
THlRD WORLD ELECTIONS PROVIDE AN EXCELLENT TESTING ground for a propaganda model. Some elections are held in friendly client states to legitimize their rulers and regimes, whereas others are held in disfavored or enemy countries to legitimize their political sys- tems. This natural dichotomization is strengthened by the fact that elections in the friendly client states are often held under U. S. sponsor- ship and with extensive U. S. management and public-relations support. Thus, in the Dominican Republic in I966, and periodically thereafter, the United States organized what have been called "demonstration elections" in its client states, defined as those whose primary function is to convince the home population that the intervention is well inten- tioned, that the populace of the invaded and occupied country wel- comes the intrusion, and that they are being given a democratic choice. l
The elections in EI Salvador in 1982 and 1984 were true demonstra- tion elections, and those held in Guatemala in 1984-85 were strongly supported by the United States for image-enhancing purposes. The
88 MANUFACTliRlNG CONSENT
election held in Nicaragua in 1984, by contrast, was intended to legiti- mize a government that the Reagan administration was striving to destabilize and overthrow. The U. S. government therefore went to great pains to cast the Nicaraguan election in an unfavorable light.
A propaganda model would anticipate mass-media support of the state perspective and agenda. That is, the favored elections will be found to legitimize, no matter what the facts; the disfavored election will be found deficient, farcical, and failing to legitimize-again, irre- spective of facts. What makes this another strong test of a propaganda model is that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections of 1982 and
1984-85 were held under conditions of severe, ongoing state terror against the civilian population, whereas in Nicaragua this was not the case. To find the former elections legitimizing and the Nicaraguan election a farce, the media would have had to use different standards of evaluation in the two sets of cases, and, more specifically) it would have been necessary for them to avoid discussing state terror and other basic electoral conditions in the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections. As we will see, the media fulfilled these requirements and met the needs of the state to a remarkable degree.
In order to demonstrate the applicability of a propaganda model in these cases, we will first describe the eJecrjon-propaganda framework that the U. S. government tried to foist on the media; we will then review the basic electoral conditions under which elections were held in the three countries; and finally, we will examine how the U. S. mass media treated each of the three elections.
3. 1. ELECTION-PROPAGANDA FRAMEWORKS
The U. S. government has employed a number of devices in its spon- sored elections to put them in a favorable light_ It has also had an identifiable agenda of issues that it wants stressed, as well as others it wants ignored or downplayed. Central to demonstration-election man? agement has been the manipulation of symbols and agenda to give the favored election a positive image. The sponsor government tries to associate the election with the happy word "democracy" and the mili- tary regime it backs with support of the elections (and hence democ- racy). It emphasizes what a wonderful thing it is to be able to hold any election at all under conditions of internal conflict, and it makes it
LEGITIMIZllI:G VERSUS MEA:. <ISGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS 89
appear a moral triumph that the army has agreed to support the election (albeit reluctantly) and abide by its results.
The refusal of the rebel opposition to participate in the election is portrayed as a rejection of democracy and proof of its antidemocratic tendencies, although the very plan of the election involves the rebels' exclusion from the ballot. 2 The sponsor government also seizes upon any rebel statements urging nonparticipation or threatening to disrupt the election. These are used to transform the election into a dramatic struggle between, on the one side, the "born-again" democratic army and people struggling to vote for "peace," and, on the other, the rebels opposing democracy, peace, and the right to vote. Thus the dramatic denouement of the election is voter turnout, which measures the ability of the forces of democracy and peace (the army) to overcome rebel threats.
Official observers are dispatched to the election scene to assure its public-relations success. Nominally, their role is to see that the election is "fair. " Their real function, however, is to provide the appearance of fairness by focusing on the government's agenda and by channeling press attention to a reliable source. 3 They testify to fairness on the basis of long lines, smiling faces, no beatings in their presence, and the assurances and enthusiasm of U. S. and client-state officials. 4 But these superficialities are entirely consistent with a staged fraud. Fairness depends on fundamental conditions established in advance, which are virtually impossible to ascertain under the brief, guided-tour conditions
of official observers. Furthermore, official observers in sponsored elec- tions rarely ask the relevant questions. 5 They are able to perform their public-relations function because the government chooses observers who are reliable supporters of its aims and publicizes their role, and the press gives them respectful anention.