American
Watch, Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, February 1987.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
In the case of the Salvadoran elections of 1982 and 1984, the government relied on the media to play down not only this plan, but also the fact that the rebels were driven into rebellion by decades of refusal of the army to allow any democratic option, and that the rebels could not have participated in the election anyway because they would run heavy risks of being murdered-the five leaders of the political opposition in EI Salvador were tortured, murdered, and mutilated in San Salvador in November 1980.
3. As we pointed out in chapter I, the government and other power groups try to monopolize media attention not only by flooding the media with their own propaganda, but also by providing authentic and reliable "experts" to validate this propaganda.
4. For a model illustration of observer bias and foolishness, see appendix I on the findings of a U. S. official-observer team at the Guatemalan election ofJuly I, 1984.
S? "The observer delegation's mission was a simple one: to assess the fairness, honesty and propriety of the voting, the counting of ballots and the reporting
entirely by government personnel, including the deputy minister of defense . . '
356 NOTES TO P AGES 89-94
NOTES TO P AGES 94-101 357
of final results in the Salvadoran elections" (Senator Nancy Kassenbaum,
Report of the U. S. Official Observer Mission to the El Salvador Constituent Assembly Elections ofMarch 28, I982, Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 97th Cong. , 2d sess. , p. 2. This agenda does not include considera- tion of any of the basic framework conditions-like free speech and the absence of state terror-that determine in advance whether an election can be meaningful. See the text below.
6. The New York Times even allowed the right-wing Freedom House observers to dominate its reports on the election staged by Ian Smith in Rhodesia in 1979 (articles of April 22 and May II, 1979). Although a brutal civil war raged and the rebel black groups were off the ballot, Freedom House found the election fair. In a rerun held a year later under British government auspices, the black candidate sponsored by Ian Smith who had received 65 percent in the "fair" election got only 8 percent of the vote, whereas the previously excluded black rebels received a commanding majority. Freedom House found the second election doubtful! See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appen- dix I, "Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and EI Salvador. " 7. Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 71-72.
8. Philip Taubman, "Shultz Criticizes Nicaragua Delay," New York Times, February 6, 1984; Security and Development Assistance, Hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 98th Cong. , 2d sess. , February 22, 1984, p. 83?
9. George Orwell, I984 (New York: Signet, 1950), p. 163.
10. "The Electoral Process in Nicaragua: Domestic and International Influ- ences," Report of the LASA Delegation to Observe the Nicaraguan General Election of November 4, 1984, Latin American Studies Association (Nov. 19, 1984), p. 32 (hereafter, LASA, Report).
II. The U. S. media quite properly condemned in advance the January 1947 elections held in Poland, under Soviet control and with security forces omni- present in the country, although not killing on anywhere near the scale seen in EI Salvador and Guatemala, 1979-87. See Herman and Brodhead, Demon- stration Elections, pp. 173-80.
12. LASA, Report, p. 5.
13. Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? (Oxford: Oxfam, 1986), p. 14. Oxfam's U. S. affiliate also has warm words for the Sandinista effort, stating that
Among the four countries in the region where Oxfam works [Guatemala, EI Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua], only in Nicaragua has a sub- stantial effort been made to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational, and agricultural services to poor peasant families. (Oxfam America Special Report: Central America, Fall 1985).
14. See below, under "Free speech and assembly" (p. 93) and "Freedom of the press" (p. 97).
15. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 119-20.
16. See Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder (London: AI, 1981); Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 2 (London: Zed, 1985).
17. UN General Assembly, Report ofthe Economic and Social Council: Situation
of Human Rights in Guatemala, November 13, 1985, p. 15. On Viscount Col- ville's apologetics, see Americas Watch, Colville for the Defense: A Critique of the Reports of the U. N. Special Rapporteur for Guatemala (February 1986). 18. Guatemala Human Rights Commission, "Report for the 39th General As- sembly of the United Nations on the Human Rights Situation in Guatemala" (New York, 1984), p. 18 (Hereafter, HRC, Report).
19. Ibid. , p. 23.
20. "Bitter and Cruel . . . ," Report of a Mission to Guatemala by the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984, p. 21.
21. Bishop Maurice Taylor and Bishop James O'Brien, "Brief Report on Visit to Guatemala," October 27-November 3, 1984, quoted in Americas Watch, Little Hope: Human Rights in Guatemala, January I984-I985 (New York: AW, 1985), p. 25?
22. InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, Civil and Legal Rights in Guatemala (1985), p. 156. Development Poles are organizational units estab- lished by the army, nominally to foster "development," actually mere conve- nient units for control and surveillance.
23. International Human Rights Law Group, The I985 Guatemalan Elections: Will the Military Relinquish Power? (Washington: December 1985), p. 56 (here- after, IHRLG, Report).
24. Ibid. , p. 61.
25. LASA, Report, p. 27.
26. Ibid. , p. 25.
27. See further, Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 120-21. 28. "Journalists Killed and Disappeared since 1976," Committee to Protect
Journalists (December 1986), pp. 6-8.
29. Council on Hemispheric Affairs and the Newspaper Guild, "A Survey of Press Freedom in Latin America, 1984-85" (Washington: 1985), p. 38.
30. See IHRLG, Report, pp. 59-60.
31. Howard H. Frederick, "Electronic Penetration," in Thomas S. Walker, ed. , Reagan versus the Sandinistas (Boulder: Westview, 1987), pp. 123ff.
32. For a full account of media conditions, see John Spicer Nichols, "The Media," in Thomas S. Walker, ed. , Nicaragua: The First Five Years (New York: Praeger, 1985), pp. 183-99.
33. Ibid. , pp. 191-92. For comparison of media conditions in Nicaragua with those of the United States in wartime and its leading client state, Israel, see Noam Chomsky, "U. S. Polity and Society: The Lessons of Nicaragua," in Walker, ed. , Reagan versus the Sandinistas.
34. For a discussion of this decimation process and a tabulation of murders by group, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 121-26.
35? "The Grass Roots Organizations," in Walker, ed. , Nicaragua, p. 79.
36. Ibid. , p. 88.
37? It has often been observed by serious students of American democracy that the relative weakness of intermediate organizations (unions, political clubs, media not under corporate control, etc. ) is a severe impediment to meaningful political democracy in the United States-one reason, no doubt, why voter participation is so low and cynicism about its significance so high.
38. Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), PP? 278-79?
39. Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 122-24.
40. Enrique A. Baloyra, who argues that there was a real choice, says that people voted "primarily because they wanted to make use of this massive action to urge an end to violence and civil war. " But Baloyra nowhere discusses Duarte's and D'Aubuisson's views on a negotiated settlement of the war, which allows him to convey the erroneous impression that one of them supported a nonmilitary route to ending the violence and civil war (El Salvador in Transi- tion [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982], p. 175).
41. See Dennis Hans, "Duarte: The Man and the Myth," Covert Action Infor- mation Bulletin 26 (Summer 1986), pp. 42-47; Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp. 109ff.
42. Weakness and Deceit, p. 205.
43. The top leadership of the Social Democratic party had been murdered in
1980, and its remaining officials fled the country. Only a portion of this exiled leadership returned for the 1985 election.
44. The guerrilla position was that with the army having set up a national control system, military domination had been institutionalized and elections would have no meaning. See "Guerrillas' View of Elections: Army Will Hold Power Despite Polls," Latin America Weekry Report, October 25, 1985, p. II. 45? HRC, Report, p. 7.
46. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986), p. 2. 47. "EI Senor Presidente? " An interview of Cerezo by George Black in Octo- ber 1985, NACLA Report on the Americas (November-December 1985), p. 24. 48. "In a meeting several months ago with the ultra-rightist organization Amigos del Pais, which allegedly has strong death squad connections, PDCG deputies to the Constituent Assembly pledged that if the party came to power, they would ref~ain from agrarian and banking reforms, investigation into human rights abuses by the armed forces, and any interference in the coun- terinsurgency program" ("Guatemala Votes," Washington Report on the Hemi- sphere, Nov. 27, 1985). Stephen Kinzer also reports on a private meeting between Cerezo and right-wing landowners, in which "he said we all needed each other at this moment . . . " ("When a Landslide Is Not a Mandate," New York Times, Dec. 15, 1985).
49. Allen Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, in their "The Bureaucracy of Death," New Republic, aune 30, 1986), describe the "tactical alliance" between Cerezo and the army, which protected them against any accountability for past ac- tions, in exchange for which the army would allow Cerezo to occupy office. 50. See "Cerezo Adapts to Counterinsurgency," Guatemala, Guatemala News and Information Bureau (May-June 1986).
51.
American Watch, Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, February 1987. Cerezo argued for not prosecuting the military for old crimes on the ground that everyone wanted to start afresh. But Americas Watch points out that if terrible crimes of the past are exempt from the rule of law, it suggests that Cerezo doesn't have the power to stop further military crimes. "It is a sign that the rule of law has not been established in Guatemala, and that it cannot be established" (p. 4). This point is supported by Cerezo's inaction in the face of a hundred violent deaths a month-many of them political murders by the army-after he assumed office.
52. See Michael Parenti, "Is Nicaragua More Democratic Than the United
States? " Covert Action Information Bulletin 26 (Summer 1986), pp. 48-52. 53. Wayne S. Smith, "Lies About Nicaragua," Foreign Policy (Summer 1987), p. 93. Smith states that Cruz "now says that he regrets not taking part and that his failure to participate in the 1984 elections was one of his major political mistakes. "
54. See LASA, Report, pp. 24-25, 29-31. We discuss this point, and the likeli- hood that Cruz's withdrawal was part of a public-relations strategy, in our treatment below of the media's handling of the Nicaraguan election.
55. LASA, Report, p. 23?
56. Doherty's statement appears in U. S. Policy toward El Salvador, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , 1981, p. 290; Gomez's statement is in Presidential Certification ofEl Salvador, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 2d sess. , 1982, vol. I, p. 330.
57. AW, Little Hope, p. 1.
58. IHRLG, Report, p. 4?
59. They were being murdered on a regular basis by U. S. -sponsored terrorists entering Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica, however.
60. Rev. Daniel Long and seven other ecumenical group observers, "March 25, 1984, Elections in EI Salvador" (1984, mimeographed), p. 4?
61. Based on conversations with voters, the Long group states that "most people waited these long hours because of their desire to have their cedula stamped and their finger inked to avoid fines for not voting and/or possible reprisals from the government and military. . . . " They note that at many places voting officials stamped the cedulas of those unable to vote because of crowding just so they could leave (ibid. , p. 6).
62. In the July I, 1984, election for a constituent assembly, null and blank votes exceeded those of any party and were a staggering 26 percent of the total. 63. IHRLG, Report, p. 54.
64. This procedure was put into the rules at the request of several opposition parties (LASA, Report, p. 15).
65. The media generally suppressed the fact that the number of voting booths was sharply restricted in 1982, allegedly for security reasons but making for longer lines.
66. "Media Coverage ofEI Salvador's Election," Socialist Review (April 1983),
P? 29?
67. "Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations; Rebels Close Some," New York Times,
March 29, 1982.
68. See further, Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 164-67. 69. Warren Hoge did quote Garcia, but only to suggest an open election: "Without any lies, you can see here what it is that the people want . . . " ("Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations," New York Times, Mar. 29, 1982).
70. Eleven days before the 1982 election, four Dutch journalists were mur- dered by the Salvadoran security forces. The foreign press corps was trooped into the morgue to see the bodies, whose ripped genitals were exposed to media view. This episode-described in the 1984 documentary film In the Name of Democracy-was suppressed in the U. S. mass media, led to no large outcries and generalizations about the qualities of the Salvadoran government, and may have contributed to the remarkable silence of journalists in EI Salvador on the
300 NUTIiS TO PAGES 1011-IIS
NOTES TO PAGES IIS-II8 361
unfavorable media (as well as other) conditions in the incipient democracy. 71. "Salvador Vote: Uncertainty Remains," April 3, 1982.
72. The Times devoted an entire article to the Salvadoran chief of staff's promises that "his troops would provide adequate security for the election of March 25" (1984); Blandon is quoted as saying "I'm giving you the assurance that there will be secure elections for all of the country" (Lydia Chavez, "Salvadoran Promises Safe Election," New York Times, Mar. 14, 1984).
73. Time, July 16, 1984. "Moderation" is a favorite media word in descriptions of demonstration elections. Newsweek's article of May 7, 1984, on Duarte and the Salvadoran election of May 1984 is entitled "EI Salvador: A Miracle of Moderation. " For a discussion of some of the ways in which the media use the word "moderate," see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, (Boston: South End Press, 1988), chapter 2. 8.
74. The Guatemalan extreme right-wing leader, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, often described as the godfather of the death squads in Central America, was present at Reagan's first inauguration, met with his defense and foreign-policy advisers, and claimed that "verbal agreements" were entered into at that time to cut back on criticism of Guatemalan human-rights abuses and to renew military aid. See Marlise Simons, "Guatemala: The Coming Danger," Foreign Policy (Summer 1981), p. 101; Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 175; and Alan Nairn, "Controversial Reagan Campaign Links with Guatemalan Government and Private Sector Leaders," Research Memo for Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 30, 1980, p. II.
75. The Polish election of January 1947 was so designated by the U. S. mass media, although Polish state terrorism was much less severe than that of Guatemala in 1984-85. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, PP? 173-80.
76. Council on Hemispheric Affairs, News and Analysis, February 6, 1987. 77. We may be quite certain that Time will not assert that "Much of the killing in Afghanistan is linked to General Zakov's success against the insurgents. " 78. For evidence of the complete servility and dishonesty of Time in its cover- age of the elections in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam in the 1960s, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 45, 46, 51-52, 83-86. 79. A summary of this document was given in Enfoprensa News Agency, "Information on Guatemala," June 22, 1984. This excellent weekly bulletin of news on Guatemala reports a continuing flow of seemingly newsworthy items-regrettably, however, on unworthy victims, and therefore not of inter- est to the mass media.
80. This statement, dated October 1985, is reproduced in IHRLG, Report. 8! . The two stories that follow were discussed in Enfoprensa, "Information on Guatemala. "
82. "A New Chance in Guatemala," December 12, 1985. The Times never found that the Sandinistas had "honored" a promise in 1984, but then neither did the Reagan administration. Nor did the editorial consider the meaning of the fact that the ruling generals had declared an amnesty-for themselves- before allowing the electoral "project" to proceed.
83. The Times's editorial of December 12, 1985, congratulates Cerezo for
pledging to "take charge without vengeance against the military for its murder- ous rule. " Translated from the propaganda format, this means Cerezo is too weak to promise minimal justice for terrible crimes, which raises serious doubts about whether he has any real power. The newspaper of record makes this exoneration of mass murderers a virtue, and pretends that it is just an act of mercy on Cerezo's part! The Times also does not speculate on what would happen to President Cerezo if he chose to wreak "vengeance against the military," or how exactly he might proceed with this mission under conditions of effective military rule.
84. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Double- day, 1982).
85. Of course, there was an even deeper hypocrisy in failing to call attention to the administration's devotion to a free election in Nicaragua but not in Chile, Indonesia, Namibia, or South Korea, among many others, and its pre- tense that the elections in the terror states of EI Salvador and Guatemala are free and have anything to do with democracy.
86. The New York Times had an article on the numerous observers in Nicara- gua, but before the election ("Election Draws Many U. S. Observers," Nov. 4, 1984). The thrust of the article was to suggest observer bias favorable to the Sandinistas, a subject the Times never addresses in regard to official observers. In later discussion of the elections, the 450 observers, including even the professional society of Latin American scholars, were entirely ignored by the Times. An excellent study by Lucinda Broadbent, "Nicaragua's Elections: A Cruz Around the Issues; Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of the 1984 Elections," as yet unpublished, parallels our findings in detail, based on an analysis of a wide sample, including U. S. network TV and the British as well as U. S. press. Broadbent points out that in her sample, the opposition to the Nicaraguan government is given more than twice the space accorded the government, "an unusual priority for media usually so wedded to 'official sources' in whichever country they find themselves" (p. 77). Broadbent stresses, as we do, the domination of the Reaganite frame, even in Britain and in the liberal press, and the massive distortion of reality that resulted from this biased framing. She notes also that the media never addressed the programs of the contesting parties in Nicaragua, which allowed Reaganite cliches about Sandinista intentions and policies to prevail. The media portrayals were "roughly the opposite of what was witnessed by international observers of the election" (p. 99), which is why, in our view, these observers had to be ignored. 87. For further details, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, Institute for Media Analysis, Monograph I (New York: 1987), note 32, which also discusses the distortion of the Dutch observers' report by Robert Leiken in the New York Review ofBooks, December 5, 1985. Leiken dismisses the LASA report without comment as pro-Sandinista, i. e. , as coming to the wrong conclusions.
88. LASA, Report, p. 2.
89. This was partially true, as the Sandinistas were trying to alter their image. But the same was true in EI Salvador, with the added problem that the election was held in an environment of ongoing state terror. Time never used the word "theatre" to describe either of the two Salvadoran elections.
90. As in 1982, the FMLN carried out no military operations directed at the
362 NOTES TO PAGES 118-126
NOTES TO PAGES 126-139 363
election-day process, and made no threats against Salvadoran voters. But as in 1982, this has no impact on Time reporting. The real threats, broadcast to voters in Nicaragua by contra radio, and the several contra killings of poll watchers, were never reported by Time.
As we have noted, the stress on superficialities like long lines is part of the propaganda agenda for a demonstration election. So is blacking out the fact that the length of the lines might be a function of the restricted number of voting booths, as was the case in El Salvador. Time provides both the emphasis on long lines and the suppression of relevant evidence on why the lines were so long. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 126-27.
91. Cruz was mentioned by Kinzer in eleven, and quoted, usually at some length, in five, of the fourteen articles he wrote on the Nicaraguan election; disruption and harassment are mentioned or featured in seven of the articles. 92. See particularly his "Sandinista Is Favored but Runs Hard" (Oct. 30, 1984), "Going Through the Motions in Nicaragua" (Nov. 4), and "Sandinistas Hold Their First Elections" (Nov. 5).
93. We will see below that Time even tries to make out a coercive threat that produced the vote in Nicaragua.
94. See the quotation from Warren Hoge given above, on p. 108.
95. These points were discussed in the LASA report, as we note below, but for Kinzer and the rest of the mass media, they were off the agenda.
96. Note that the exact opposite is true in the United States, reflecting the recognition on the part of the general public in both societies of who stands to gain through the electoral process.
97. The rate was, in fact, far higher than in the 1984 U. S. presidential election, in which just over half the electorate participated.
98. "Sandinistas Hold Their First Election," New York Times, November 5, 1984.
99. Duarte is quoted to this effect by Edward Schumacher in the New York Times, February 21, 1981.
100. On April 23, 1985, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Cruz was on the CIA payroll.
3. As we pointed out in chapter I, the government and other power groups try to monopolize media attention not only by flooding the media with their own propaganda, but also by providing authentic and reliable "experts" to validate this propaganda.
4. For a model illustration of observer bias and foolishness, see appendix I on the findings of a U. S. official-observer team at the Guatemalan election ofJuly I, 1984.
S? "The observer delegation's mission was a simple one: to assess the fairness, honesty and propriety of the voting, the counting of ballots and the reporting
entirely by government personnel, including the deputy minister of defense . . '
356 NOTES TO P AGES 89-94
NOTES TO P AGES 94-101 357
of final results in the Salvadoran elections" (Senator Nancy Kassenbaum,
Report of the U. S. Official Observer Mission to the El Salvador Constituent Assembly Elections ofMarch 28, I982, Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 97th Cong. , 2d sess. , p. 2. This agenda does not include considera- tion of any of the basic framework conditions-like free speech and the absence of state terror-that determine in advance whether an election can be meaningful. See the text below.
6. The New York Times even allowed the right-wing Freedom House observers to dominate its reports on the election staged by Ian Smith in Rhodesia in 1979 (articles of April 22 and May II, 1979). Although a brutal civil war raged and the rebel black groups were off the ballot, Freedom House found the election fair. In a rerun held a year later under British government auspices, the black candidate sponsored by Ian Smith who had received 65 percent in the "fair" election got only 8 percent of the vote, whereas the previously excluded black rebels received a commanding majority. Freedom House found the second election doubtful! See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appen- dix I, "Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and EI Salvador. " 7. Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 71-72.
8. Philip Taubman, "Shultz Criticizes Nicaragua Delay," New York Times, February 6, 1984; Security and Development Assistance, Hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 98th Cong. , 2d sess. , February 22, 1984, p. 83?
9. George Orwell, I984 (New York: Signet, 1950), p. 163.
10. "The Electoral Process in Nicaragua: Domestic and International Influ- ences," Report of the LASA Delegation to Observe the Nicaraguan General Election of November 4, 1984, Latin American Studies Association (Nov. 19, 1984), p. 32 (hereafter, LASA, Report).
II. The U. S. media quite properly condemned in advance the January 1947 elections held in Poland, under Soviet control and with security forces omni- present in the country, although not killing on anywhere near the scale seen in EI Salvador and Guatemala, 1979-87. See Herman and Brodhead, Demon- stration Elections, pp. 173-80.
12. LASA, Report, p. 5.
13. Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? (Oxford: Oxfam, 1986), p. 14. Oxfam's U. S. affiliate also has warm words for the Sandinista effort, stating that
Among the four countries in the region where Oxfam works [Guatemala, EI Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua], only in Nicaragua has a sub- stantial effort been made to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational, and agricultural services to poor peasant families. (Oxfam America Special Report: Central America, Fall 1985).
14. See below, under "Free speech and assembly" (p. 93) and "Freedom of the press" (p. 97).
15. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 119-20.
16. See Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder (London: AI, 1981); Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 2 (London: Zed, 1985).
17. UN General Assembly, Report ofthe Economic and Social Council: Situation
of Human Rights in Guatemala, November 13, 1985, p. 15. On Viscount Col- ville's apologetics, see Americas Watch, Colville for the Defense: A Critique of the Reports of the U. N. Special Rapporteur for Guatemala (February 1986). 18. Guatemala Human Rights Commission, "Report for the 39th General As- sembly of the United Nations on the Human Rights Situation in Guatemala" (New York, 1984), p. 18 (Hereafter, HRC, Report).
19. Ibid. , p. 23.
20. "Bitter and Cruel . . . ," Report of a Mission to Guatemala by the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984, p. 21.
21. Bishop Maurice Taylor and Bishop James O'Brien, "Brief Report on Visit to Guatemala," October 27-November 3, 1984, quoted in Americas Watch, Little Hope: Human Rights in Guatemala, January I984-I985 (New York: AW, 1985), p. 25?
22. InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, Civil and Legal Rights in Guatemala (1985), p. 156. Development Poles are organizational units estab- lished by the army, nominally to foster "development," actually mere conve- nient units for control and surveillance.
23. International Human Rights Law Group, The I985 Guatemalan Elections: Will the Military Relinquish Power? (Washington: December 1985), p. 56 (here- after, IHRLG, Report).
24. Ibid. , p. 61.
25. LASA, Report, p. 27.
26. Ibid. , p. 25.
27. See further, Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 120-21. 28. "Journalists Killed and Disappeared since 1976," Committee to Protect
Journalists (December 1986), pp. 6-8.
29. Council on Hemispheric Affairs and the Newspaper Guild, "A Survey of Press Freedom in Latin America, 1984-85" (Washington: 1985), p. 38.
30. See IHRLG, Report, pp. 59-60.
31. Howard H. Frederick, "Electronic Penetration," in Thomas S. Walker, ed. , Reagan versus the Sandinistas (Boulder: Westview, 1987), pp. 123ff.
32. For a full account of media conditions, see John Spicer Nichols, "The Media," in Thomas S. Walker, ed. , Nicaragua: The First Five Years (New York: Praeger, 1985), pp. 183-99.
33. Ibid. , pp. 191-92. For comparison of media conditions in Nicaragua with those of the United States in wartime and its leading client state, Israel, see Noam Chomsky, "U. S. Polity and Society: The Lessons of Nicaragua," in Walker, ed. , Reagan versus the Sandinistas.
34. For a discussion of this decimation process and a tabulation of murders by group, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 121-26.
35? "The Grass Roots Organizations," in Walker, ed. , Nicaragua, p. 79.
36. Ibid. , p. 88.
37? It has often been observed by serious students of American democracy that the relative weakness of intermediate organizations (unions, political clubs, media not under corporate control, etc. ) is a severe impediment to meaningful political democracy in the United States-one reason, no doubt, why voter participation is so low and cynicism about its significance so high.
38. Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), PP? 278-79?
39. Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 122-24.
40. Enrique A. Baloyra, who argues that there was a real choice, says that people voted "primarily because they wanted to make use of this massive action to urge an end to violence and civil war. " But Baloyra nowhere discusses Duarte's and D'Aubuisson's views on a negotiated settlement of the war, which allows him to convey the erroneous impression that one of them supported a nonmilitary route to ending the violence and civil war (El Salvador in Transi- tion [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982], p. 175).
41. See Dennis Hans, "Duarte: The Man and the Myth," Covert Action Infor- mation Bulletin 26 (Summer 1986), pp. 42-47; Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp. 109ff.
42. Weakness and Deceit, p. 205.
43. The top leadership of the Social Democratic party had been murdered in
1980, and its remaining officials fled the country. Only a portion of this exiled leadership returned for the 1985 election.
44. The guerrilla position was that with the army having set up a national control system, military domination had been institutionalized and elections would have no meaning. See "Guerrillas' View of Elections: Army Will Hold Power Despite Polls," Latin America Weekry Report, October 25, 1985, p. II. 45? HRC, Report, p. 7.
46. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986), p. 2. 47. "EI Senor Presidente? " An interview of Cerezo by George Black in Octo- ber 1985, NACLA Report on the Americas (November-December 1985), p. 24. 48. "In a meeting several months ago with the ultra-rightist organization Amigos del Pais, which allegedly has strong death squad connections, PDCG deputies to the Constituent Assembly pledged that if the party came to power, they would ref~ain from agrarian and banking reforms, investigation into human rights abuses by the armed forces, and any interference in the coun- terinsurgency program" ("Guatemala Votes," Washington Report on the Hemi- sphere, Nov. 27, 1985). Stephen Kinzer also reports on a private meeting between Cerezo and right-wing landowners, in which "he said we all needed each other at this moment . . . " ("When a Landslide Is Not a Mandate," New York Times, Dec. 15, 1985).
49. Allen Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, in their "The Bureaucracy of Death," New Republic, aune 30, 1986), describe the "tactical alliance" between Cerezo and the army, which protected them against any accountability for past ac- tions, in exchange for which the army would allow Cerezo to occupy office. 50. See "Cerezo Adapts to Counterinsurgency," Guatemala, Guatemala News and Information Bureau (May-June 1986).
51.
American Watch, Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, February 1987. Cerezo argued for not prosecuting the military for old crimes on the ground that everyone wanted to start afresh. But Americas Watch points out that if terrible crimes of the past are exempt from the rule of law, it suggests that Cerezo doesn't have the power to stop further military crimes. "It is a sign that the rule of law has not been established in Guatemala, and that it cannot be established" (p. 4). This point is supported by Cerezo's inaction in the face of a hundred violent deaths a month-many of them political murders by the army-after he assumed office.
52. See Michael Parenti, "Is Nicaragua More Democratic Than the United
States? " Covert Action Information Bulletin 26 (Summer 1986), pp. 48-52. 53. Wayne S. Smith, "Lies About Nicaragua," Foreign Policy (Summer 1987), p. 93. Smith states that Cruz "now says that he regrets not taking part and that his failure to participate in the 1984 elections was one of his major political mistakes. "
54. See LASA, Report, pp. 24-25, 29-31. We discuss this point, and the likeli- hood that Cruz's withdrawal was part of a public-relations strategy, in our treatment below of the media's handling of the Nicaraguan election.
55. LASA, Report, p. 23?
56. Doherty's statement appears in U. S. Policy toward El Salvador, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , 1981, p. 290; Gomez's statement is in Presidential Certification ofEl Salvador, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 2d sess. , 1982, vol. I, p. 330.
57. AW, Little Hope, p. 1.
58. IHRLG, Report, p. 4?
59. They were being murdered on a regular basis by U. S. -sponsored terrorists entering Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica, however.
60. Rev. Daniel Long and seven other ecumenical group observers, "March 25, 1984, Elections in EI Salvador" (1984, mimeographed), p. 4?
61. Based on conversations with voters, the Long group states that "most people waited these long hours because of their desire to have their cedula stamped and their finger inked to avoid fines for not voting and/or possible reprisals from the government and military. . . . " They note that at many places voting officials stamped the cedulas of those unable to vote because of crowding just so they could leave (ibid. , p. 6).
62. In the July I, 1984, election for a constituent assembly, null and blank votes exceeded those of any party and were a staggering 26 percent of the total. 63. IHRLG, Report, p. 54.
64. This procedure was put into the rules at the request of several opposition parties (LASA, Report, p. 15).
65. The media generally suppressed the fact that the number of voting booths was sharply restricted in 1982, allegedly for security reasons but making for longer lines.
66. "Media Coverage ofEI Salvador's Election," Socialist Review (April 1983),
P? 29?
67. "Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations; Rebels Close Some," New York Times,
March 29, 1982.
68. See further, Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 164-67. 69. Warren Hoge did quote Garcia, but only to suggest an open election: "Without any lies, you can see here what it is that the people want . . . " ("Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations," New York Times, Mar. 29, 1982).
70. Eleven days before the 1982 election, four Dutch journalists were mur- dered by the Salvadoran security forces. The foreign press corps was trooped into the morgue to see the bodies, whose ripped genitals were exposed to media view. This episode-described in the 1984 documentary film In the Name of Democracy-was suppressed in the U. S. mass media, led to no large outcries and generalizations about the qualities of the Salvadoran government, and may have contributed to the remarkable silence of journalists in EI Salvador on the
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NOTES TO PAGES IIS-II8 361
unfavorable media (as well as other) conditions in the incipient democracy. 71. "Salvador Vote: Uncertainty Remains," April 3, 1982.
72. The Times devoted an entire article to the Salvadoran chief of staff's promises that "his troops would provide adequate security for the election of March 25" (1984); Blandon is quoted as saying "I'm giving you the assurance that there will be secure elections for all of the country" (Lydia Chavez, "Salvadoran Promises Safe Election," New York Times, Mar. 14, 1984).
73. Time, July 16, 1984. "Moderation" is a favorite media word in descriptions of demonstration elections. Newsweek's article of May 7, 1984, on Duarte and the Salvadoran election of May 1984 is entitled "EI Salvador: A Miracle of Moderation. " For a discussion of some of the ways in which the media use the word "moderate," see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, (Boston: South End Press, 1988), chapter 2. 8.
74. The Guatemalan extreme right-wing leader, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, often described as the godfather of the death squads in Central America, was present at Reagan's first inauguration, met with his defense and foreign-policy advisers, and claimed that "verbal agreements" were entered into at that time to cut back on criticism of Guatemalan human-rights abuses and to renew military aid. See Marlise Simons, "Guatemala: The Coming Danger," Foreign Policy (Summer 1981), p. 101; Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 175; and Alan Nairn, "Controversial Reagan Campaign Links with Guatemalan Government and Private Sector Leaders," Research Memo for Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 30, 1980, p. II.
75. The Polish election of January 1947 was so designated by the U. S. mass media, although Polish state terrorism was much less severe than that of Guatemala in 1984-85. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, PP? 173-80.
76. Council on Hemispheric Affairs, News and Analysis, February 6, 1987. 77. We may be quite certain that Time will not assert that "Much of the killing in Afghanistan is linked to General Zakov's success against the insurgents. " 78. For evidence of the complete servility and dishonesty of Time in its cover- age of the elections in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam in the 1960s, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 45, 46, 51-52, 83-86. 79. A summary of this document was given in Enfoprensa News Agency, "Information on Guatemala," June 22, 1984. This excellent weekly bulletin of news on Guatemala reports a continuing flow of seemingly newsworthy items-regrettably, however, on unworthy victims, and therefore not of inter- est to the mass media.
80. This statement, dated October 1985, is reproduced in IHRLG, Report. 8! . The two stories that follow were discussed in Enfoprensa, "Information on Guatemala. "
82. "A New Chance in Guatemala," December 12, 1985. The Times never found that the Sandinistas had "honored" a promise in 1984, but then neither did the Reagan administration. Nor did the editorial consider the meaning of the fact that the ruling generals had declared an amnesty-for themselves- before allowing the electoral "project" to proceed.
83. The Times's editorial of December 12, 1985, congratulates Cerezo for
pledging to "take charge without vengeance against the military for its murder- ous rule. " Translated from the propaganda format, this means Cerezo is too weak to promise minimal justice for terrible crimes, which raises serious doubts about whether he has any real power. The newspaper of record makes this exoneration of mass murderers a virtue, and pretends that it is just an act of mercy on Cerezo's part! The Times also does not speculate on what would happen to President Cerezo if he chose to wreak "vengeance against the military," or how exactly he might proceed with this mission under conditions of effective military rule.
84. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Double- day, 1982).
85. Of course, there was an even deeper hypocrisy in failing to call attention to the administration's devotion to a free election in Nicaragua but not in Chile, Indonesia, Namibia, or South Korea, among many others, and its pre- tense that the elections in the terror states of EI Salvador and Guatemala are free and have anything to do with democracy.
86. The New York Times had an article on the numerous observers in Nicara- gua, but before the election ("Election Draws Many U. S. Observers," Nov. 4, 1984). The thrust of the article was to suggest observer bias favorable to the Sandinistas, a subject the Times never addresses in regard to official observers. In later discussion of the elections, the 450 observers, including even the professional society of Latin American scholars, were entirely ignored by the Times. An excellent study by Lucinda Broadbent, "Nicaragua's Elections: A Cruz Around the Issues; Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of the 1984 Elections," as yet unpublished, parallels our findings in detail, based on an analysis of a wide sample, including U. S. network TV and the British as well as U. S. press. Broadbent points out that in her sample, the opposition to the Nicaraguan government is given more than twice the space accorded the government, "an unusual priority for media usually so wedded to 'official sources' in whichever country they find themselves" (p. 77). Broadbent stresses, as we do, the domination of the Reaganite frame, even in Britain and in the liberal press, and the massive distortion of reality that resulted from this biased framing. She notes also that the media never addressed the programs of the contesting parties in Nicaragua, which allowed Reaganite cliches about Sandinista intentions and policies to prevail. The media portrayals were "roughly the opposite of what was witnessed by international observers of the election" (p. 99), which is why, in our view, these observers had to be ignored. 87. For further details, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, Institute for Media Analysis, Monograph I (New York: 1987), note 32, which also discusses the distortion of the Dutch observers' report by Robert Leiken in the New York Review ofBooks, December 5, 1985. Leiken dismisses the LASA report without comment as pro-Sandinista, i. e. , as coming to the wrong conclusions.
88. LASA, Report, p. 2.
89. This was partially true, as the Sandinistas were trying to alter their image. But the same was true in EI Salvador, with the added problem that the election was held in an environment of ongoing state terror. Time never used the word "theatre" to describe either of the two Salvadoran elections.
90. As in 1982, the FMLN carried out no military operations directed at the
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NOTES TO PAGES 126-139 363
election-day process, and made no threats against Salvadoran voters. But as in 1982, this has no impact on Time reporting. The real threats, broadcast to voters in Nicaragua by contra radio, and the several contra killings of poll watchers, were never reported by Time.
As we have noted, the stress on superficialities like long lines is part of the propaganda agenda for a demonstration election. So is blacking out the fact that the length of the lines might be a function of the restricted number of voting booths, as was the case in El Salvador. Time provides both the emphasis on long lines and the suppression of relevant evidence on why the lines were so long. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 126-27.
91. Cruz was mentioned by Kinzer in eleven, and quoted, usually at some length, in five, of the fourteen articles he wrote on the Nicaraguan election; disruption and harassment are mentioned or featured in seven of the articles. 92. See particularly his "Sandinista Is Favored but Runs Hard" (Oct. 30, 1984), "Going Through the Motions in Nicaragua" (Nov. 4), and "Sandinistas Hold Their First Elections" (Nov. 5).
93. We will see below that Time even tries to make out a coercive threat that produced the vote in Nicaragua.
94. See the quotation from Warren Hoge given above, on p. 108.
95. These points were discussed in the LASA report, as we note below, but for Kinzer and the rest of the mass media, they were off the agenda.
96. Note that the exact opposite is true in the United States, reflecting the recognition on the part of the general public in both societies of who stands to gain through the electoral process.
97. The rate was, in fact, far higher than in the 1984 U. S. presidential election, in which just over half the electorate participated.
98. "Sandinistas Hold Their First Election," New York Times, November 5, 1984.
99. Duarte is quoted to this effect by Edward Schumacher in the New York Times, February 21, 1981.
100. On April 23, 1985, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Cruz was on the CIA payroll.
