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3.6.4. THE REVIVED SENSITIVITY TO COERCION

As we described earlier, the “coercion package” was off the agenda for the U.S. government and mass media in addressing the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections. So was the element of fear engendered by mass murder and the absence of any rule of law in these U.S. client states. Coercion and fear were back on the agenda, however, for Nicaragua. This revival was illustrated with amazing dishonesty and hypocrisy in Time, which had never mentioned fear and pressures from the government as factors possibly explaining turnout in the U.S.-sponsored elections, even after the murder of 50,000 civilians. In Nicaragua, however, the “pugnacious” Sandinistas had “an awesome monopoly of force,” and getting them to “relax their grip,” which was “essential for free electoral competition,” was extremely dubious. Time’s Central American correspondent George Russell even located a “Latin American diplomat” who says, “You can’t have democracy where there is no personal liberty at all” (Oct. 8 and May 14, 1984). Russell and Time had never found the Salvadoran government “pugnacious,” with any “awesome monopoly of force,” or as having a “grip” that needed relaxing for electoral competition, and personal liberty was never mentioned as lacking or even pertinent to Salvadoran elections. For the Nicaraguan election, however, Time found that “The pressure to participate was high: many citizens feared they would lose precious rationing cards.” Further, “the government had made it clear that it considered failure to vote a counterrevolutionary stance.” Later, quoting Daniel Ortega, “All Nicaraguans who are Nicaraguans are going to vote. The only ones who are not going to vote are sellouts” (Nov. 19, 1984).

As we pointed out earlier, both the Guatemalan and Salvadoran army warned the public that voting was required by law and that nonvoting was treasonous. These statements were more precisely warnings, whereas Ortega’s was an insult but not a clear threat. Ortega’s was the only such statement of its kind reported, and Time’s statement that the government “made it clear” that nonvoting was “counterrevolutionary” is doubly dishonest—the statement was not clearly a warning, and “counterrevolutionary” is an invidious word concocted by Time. The official government position as expressed in the law was that Nicaraguans did not have to vote. Time suppresses this fact. It suppresses the secrecy of the ballot and absence of a checkable ID card, so that there would have been no way to implement a threat even if one had been made. It suppresses the fact that the Nicaraguan army did not regularly murder even “counterrevolutionaries,” whereas the Salvadoran and Guatemalan armies murdered numerous people who weren’t “revolutionaries” but were somehow in the way. In short, propaganda could hardly be more brazen.

Time’s alleged “fact,” that “many” people feared the removal of the rationing card, is contested by LASA, which states that “in our interviews in many neighborhoods in several cities, we found no evidence that ration cards were being held back or withdrawn . . . for any reason.” They note that there were five reports filed with the supreme electoral council alleging intimidation by threat of withdrawal of ration cards, “but none of these allegations were sustained upon investigation” (p. 27). Time does not indicate the source of its evidence and fails to provide a single illustration of the “many” cases.

We noted earlier that Stephen Kinzer cited more claims of coercion in the Nicaraguan than the Guatemalan elections, a remarkable journalistic achievement, given the unchallenged facts about the actual scale and character of repression in the two states. His playing down of state terror in Guatemala as a basic factor affecting the quality of the election in all its dimensions—the ability of candidates to run, freedom of speech and press, the existence of intermediate groups, endemic fear, and the meaning of turnout—amounts to massive deceit. His Nicaraguan coverage also involved large-scale misrepresentation.