No More Learning

The Salvadoran strategy was foot-dragging from beginning to end, as the idea of convicting soldiers for killing anybody was contrary to Salvadoran practice, and, moreover, there is little doubt that the responsibility for the crime went high. The U. S. official strategy, once it was clear that the National Guard was responsible for the killing, was to get the low-level killers tried and convicted-necessary to vindicate the system of justice in EI Salvador, at least to the extent of keeping the dollars flowing from Congress- while protecting the "reformers" at the top. On September 30, 1981, Ambassador Deane Hinton stated with assurance that the local national guardsmen "were acting on their own," although internal State Depart- ment documents of the time recognized that the Salvadoran investiga- tion had been a joke, and other evidence existed suggesting top-level involvement. 59 Nonetheless, the official position was clear. To go along . . with the official line, the mass media had to stop investigating high-level involvement and even to suppress evidence emerging from other sources. And so they proceeded to do this.
After a two-month investigation of the murders, the reporter John Dinges filed a story through Pacific News Service that showed the murders to have been preplanned in some detail. 60 First, there were intercepted radio communications indicating military discussions ofthe arrival of the women at the airport, and other evidence of close surveil-
lance of their flight plans, all suggesting a coordinated and extensive military operation. Second, a former deputy minister of planning de- scribed to Dinges a half-hour presentation by Salvadoran Defense Minister Guillermo Garcia in the national palace, denouncing the nuns
Land priests in the very area of the murders and stating that something must be done, only two weeks prior to the murders.
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 6S
66 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
In a remarkable feat of self-censorship, most of the mass media completely ignored the Dinges findings. Dinges's report appeared in the Washington Pos~ the Los Angeles Times, and some fifteen other papers, but not a word of it found its way into the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, or CBS News, and its leads were not pursued by any media. Instead, the media kept repeating the assurances of Duarte and U. S. officials that they were satisfied that the killings did not go beyond the local national guardsmen, and that the matter would be pursued dili- gently through proper legal channels.
In March 1984, Colonel Roberto Santivanez, a high official in Sal- vadoran intelligence, agreed to "talk" about the death-squad network in EI Salvador, and his claims found their way onto CBS News and the front page of the New York Times. 61 Santivanez gave highly credible details about the murder of the four women, indicating that the act had been committed on the specific order of Colonel Oscar Edgardo Casa- nova, who was in charge of the zone in which the killings took place. Colonel Casanova was transferred to another assignment two weeks after the murder as part of the official cover-up. His first cousin Eu- genio Vides Casanova, the minister of defense chosen by Duarte and head of the National Guard in December 1980, knew about the murder order by his cousin, as did Duarte. Although this crushing evidence implicated a high officer in the murder and the current minister of defense and Duarte in the cover-up, there was no follow-up to this story, no connection back to the Dinges story of high-level discussions of the need to do something about the religious workers-no editorials, no indignation, and no pressure for action.
In sum, the leads provided by Dinges, and the testimony of Santi- vanez, strongly suggest that the killing of the women was based on a high-level decision. The evidence is even clearer that middle-level officials of the government ordered the killing, and that the highest- level officials engaged in a continuing and systematic cover-up. In the Polish case, the evidence of top-level involvement was never forthcom- ing, bur the issue was pursued by the U. S. mass media relentlessly. In the case of the four churchwomen, where the evidence of top-level involvement was abundant, the U. S. mass media failed to press the matter, or even to engage in the pursuit of obvious investigative leads.
We cannot describe here the full details ofthe failure ofthe Salvado- ran process of justice, which never moved forward except under U. S. pressure and threats. 62 The mass media did at one point berate the Salvadoran government for "stonewalling" the investigation,63 but the media entirely failed to capture the depth and scope of the stonewalling process, or to remark on its significance in this "fledgling democracy,"
?
and they generally transmitted Salvadoran and U. S. government claims about the state of the process without sarcasm or expressions of out- rage. If they had given full details, the Salvadoran government would have been thoroughly discredited. Thus, the extensive evidence con- cerning official Salvadoran refusals to take action or to interrogate relevant witnesses, and concerning threats to witnesses, lawyers, and judges-which would have been aired with delight if applicable to a Polish investigation-were ignored.
A few illustrations of the Salvadoran proceedings will have to suffice here. Two years after the crime, for example?
. . .
' the prosecutors expressed ignorance of the testimony [in the
court record] of former guardsman Cesar Valle Espinoza, dated August 9, 1982, which quotes Subsergeant Colindres Aleman as stating on December 2, 1980, that there were "superior orders" to apprehend the women. They were also ignorant of the statement offormer National Guard Sergeant Dagoberto Martinez, taken by the FBI in Los Angeles, California, which establishes the exis- tence of a cover-up of the crime as early as December 1980. 64
A second illustration of the process: two of three judges assigned to the case resigned for fear of their lives. As we noted, Judge Ramirez, who was investigating the Romero murder, fled for the same reason. This line of evidence has cumulative weight, but it was never treated as a whole by the press (and was barely mentioned as individual items of back-page news). A third illustration: according to former ambassador Robert White, two national guardsmen who might have been able to link higher-ranking officers to the murders of the women were killed by military death squads, then listed as missing in action. 65 A final illustration: when the Salvadoran triggermen were finally assigned at-
- torneys, one of the three, Salvador Antonio Ibarra, was prepared to defend the men seriously. His colleagues pressed Ibarra to abide by the statement that "the possibility of a cover-up had been thoroughly investigated" and rejected. He refused to go along with this request, with the consequence that on October 3? ,1983, Ibarra was seized by the National Guard and tortured at its headquarters. 66 Released only under U. S. pressure, Ibarra fled the country,leaving the way clear for a lawyer team that would accept the notion that there had been a "thorough investigation" of top-level involvement. This last incident alone made it into the mass media in isolated and fleeting treatment; the others, and the package, were not featured in the free press.
,
I,
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 67
The U. S. government also engaged in a systematic cover-up--of
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 69
blatantly prejudged the case. The only plausible rationale for the U. S. cover-up is that the administration wanted to minimize adverse public- ity concerning the performance of its murderous client. Information on what was really going on, or its own internal analyses of the case or appraisals of the Salvadoran legal process, would make the client look bad. The administration hoped that the case would "go away," but until that happened, it wanted the publicity flow to be under its control.
Part of the reason the administration wanted control was to allow it to claim reasonable progress in the pursuit of the case whenever the military government was due for more money. As with other right-wing satellites, "improvement" is always found at money-crunch time. In its July 1982 certification report, the State Department found that "sub- stantial progress" had been made in the case and predicted a trial in the fall of 1982. In early 1983, the certification report noted "significant developments" in the case. This manipulation of evidence to protect the flow of arms and money to the regime would not be easy with full disclosure---or with a critical and honest press.
This cover-up of the SaJvadoran judicial process, even though four murdered American women were involved, did not arouse the press to indignation or satire, nor did it cause them to provide more than mini- mal coverage of the inquiry.
?
2. 4. 4. The trial-five national guardsmen for $19. 4 million
The trial of the five immediate killers of the four women should have been presented in a Kafkaesque framework, but the U. S. media played it very straight. The trial took place three-and-a-half years after the acts of murder, despite the fact that the triggermen were immediately identified and despite enormous U. S. pressure. Two of three judges assigned to the case had resigned out of fear for their lives, and the only independent defense attorney had fled the country after a session of torture at National Guard headquarters. The defense at the trial made no effort to defend the men on the grounds of "orders from above," although this is a standard defense in such cases, and significant evi- dence was available for use in this instance. The mass media failed to note the point, although it suggests fear, a deal, or both, and although, as we saw in the Popieluszko case, the media are sometimes immensely alert to cover-ups. In March 1984, former intelligence officer Santi-
68 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
both the Salvadoran cover-up and the facts of the case. The U. S. mass media, while briefly noting the Salvadoran stonewalling, failed to call attention to the equally important lies and suppressions of their own government. As we have pointed out, both the Carter and Reagan administrations put protection of its client above the quest for justice
for four U. S. citizens murdered by agents of that government. The U. S. government's stonewalling to protect its client took many forms. One was an active collaboration in the Salvadoran cover-up. Former Na- tional Guard sergeant Dagoberto Martinez was allowed to emigrate to the United States in December 1980, and although a subsequent inter- view by the FBI indicated that Martinez admitted knowledge of the perpetrators of the crime and a failure to report that information-in violation of Salvadoran law-no action was taken against him. U. S. officials also reiterated that there was no reason to believe that higher- level officials knew about the crime or participated in it, when they had clear knowledge of a cover-up and a refusal to investigate. 61 The State Department also regularly lied about the thoroughness ofthe investiga- tion. Ambassador Hinton stated in public that national guardsman Perez Nieto "was thoroughly interrogated and repeatedly denied that anyone superior to him had ordered him to watch the women. " A State Department cable, however, describes Nieto's testimony as "incom- plete, evasive, and uncooperative. "68
A second form of official U. S. participation in the cover-up was a refusal to make public information on the Salvadoran investigation and evidence uncovered by the United States itself. The Rogers report was released belatedly, in a version that edited out the original report's statement about the sad state of the Salvadoran system of justice. In response to a growing chorus of criticism of the delays, Judge Harold R. Tyler was appointed by the U. S. government to carry out a further investigation. His report was kept under wraps for a long time, again apparently because it had some serious criticism of the Salvadoran judicial process that would have interfered with Reagan administration plans to claim progress every time such certification was required. 69 The families of the victims and their attorneys regularly found the U. S. government unwilling to release information on the case. The argument given was that the information was sensitive, and that releasing it would interfere with the legal process in El Salvador. As the Salvadoran process was a sick joke, moving only in response to U. S. threats, the official rationale was transparently fraudulent. Furthermore, Duarte was regularly making statements that the arrested guardsmen were surely guilty, and that nobody higher than them was involved, which
70 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
vlinez stated that the guardsmen knew that "If they don't name Casa- nova, they will get out of jail as soon as it is feasible. "7o This testimony was not referred to in the trial context-the media played dumb.
Like the Salvadoran elections of 1982 and 1984, this trial was thoroughly American in staging and motivation. As Ana Carrigan put it:
Security in the courtroom was in the hands of a special Judicial Protection Unit, formed and trained in Glencoe, Alabama; the jurors were driven to the courtroom in the morning and returned to their homes after the verdict in bullet-proof American embassy vehicles; meals and camp beds were provided by the embassy so that if necessary the jurors and the staff of the court could sleep overnight within the protection of the guarded courthouse; and when the electricity failed, just as the prosecution began to make its presentation, light was restored by means of hurricane lamps
delivered by embassy staff. 71
The stakes were U. S. dollars. Congress had frozen $19. 4 million pend- ing the favorable outcome of the case. Within twenty-four hours of the decision, the State Department, announcing that justice had been done, released the money to the charge of Minister of Defense Vides Casa- nova, who had been head of the National Guard on December 4, 1980, when the murders took place, whose first cousin, according to Colonel Santivanez, had given the direct order to kill, and who had so effectively protected his cousin and stalled the prosecution of underlings for three- and-a-half years.
In conformity with the predictions of a propaganda model, the mass media failed entirely to capture the quality ofthis scene-the American omnipresence, the courtroom security, the failure of the defense to press the responsibility of the higher authorities, the role of Vides Casanova, the literal money transaction for justice in this single case, which dragged on for three-and-a-half years. Newsweek found the re- sult a "remarkable achievement," in an article entitled "A Defeat for a Death Squad" aune 4, 1984), despite the fact that it was the National Guard that killed the women. The article does stress the difficulties in bringing and winning the case, and the possibility of a cover-up of higher-level personnel, but it does not use this information to point up the nature of the system being supported by the United States. It also closes out the discussion with reference to the Tyler report discounting high-level involvement, without quoting the report's acknowledgment of "some evidence supporting the involvement of higher-ups" or men-
r
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 71
tianing the repon's admission ofthe limits ofits information. No refer- ence is made to Santivanez or the Dinges report: Newsweek sticks to an official source, and misreads it.
2. 5. TWENTY-THREE RELIGIOUS VICTIMS IN GUATEMALA, 1980-85
The modern history of Guatemala was decisively shaped by the U. S. - 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.