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By Root 2877 0

He did not point out the absence of mass killings, and he failed to mention the absence of a coercion package—no transparent boxes, no requirement that an ID card be stamped, and no legal obligation to vote. Kinzer’s one notice of the voting requirement in his fourteen articles on the election amounts to serious deception—he quotes a voter as follows: “‘I’ve always voted because it is always required,’ he said. ‘Of course, the law says one thing, but after a while one realizes that voting is part of patriotism, and patriotism leads to long life.’”98 Kinzer’s source implies but doesn’t say directly that voting is not legally required in Nicaragua, and this murky statement—the closest Kinzer ever comes to acknowledging the absence of a voting requirement—is counter-balanced by his respondent’s suggestion that voting may be based on some kind of threat.

Both the Irish and LASA delegations stressed the superior protection of secrecy in the balloting, which, in LASA’s words, was “meticulously designed to minimize the potential for abuses” (p. 15). They also emphasized the fact that voting was not required by law, and that, contrary to the U.S. government propaganda expounded by Time and other media entities, the coercive elements in getting out the vote were small. Human-rights abuses by the government that contribute to an environment of fear, LASA pointed out, were “on a very small scale” when “compared to other nations in the region . . .” (p. 28). In fact, they note that fear in Nicaragua is directed more to the United States and the contras than to the government in Managua.

3.6.5. THE “MAIN OPPOSITION” TO THE FORE

As we saw, in El Salvador and Guatemala, the fact that the insurgents were off the ballot did not faze the U.S. media one bit. Neither did Duarte’s acknowledgment in 1981 that “the masses were with the guerrillas” when he joined the junta a year earlier (which would clearly make them a “main opposition”).99 Nor were the media affected by the army’s murder of the opposition leadership in both El Salvador and Guatemala. In El Salvador, the exclusion of the rebels was part of the U.S. government’s electoral plan; they were, therefore, not a “main opposition,” and the debarment and even murder of their leaders did not compromise election quality. In the Nicaraguan case, in sharp contrast, the U.S. government worked with a different frame—the exclusion of its sponsored rebels and any other candidates was a serious matter that threatened the quality of the election. The media followed like good little doggies (lap- rather than watch-).

The central dramatic propaganda line for the Nicaraguan election pressed by U.S. officials was the alleged struggle of Arturo Cruz to induce the Sandinistas to create an open system in which he would be able to compete fairly, the failure of the “Marxists-Leninists” to make adequate concessions, Cruz’s refusal to compete, and the subsequent “exclusion” of the “main opposition.” Cruz, however, was a “main opposition” only in the propaganda construct of the U.S. government and mass media. A long-time expatriate (who now concedes that he was on the CIA payroll), with no mass base in Nicaragua, Cruz would almost certainly have done poorly in a free election.100 There is good reason to believe that Cruz never intended to run, but that he and his sponsors had held out this possibility precisely to allow the propaganda frame to be used effectively.101

The mass media focused on the Cruz drama heavily and uncritically. Cruz was given enormous play: he was continually referred to as the “main opposition” or “leading opponent” of the ruling party (without any supporting evidence), and his candidacy was made “an acid test of the Sandinistas’ democratic intentions” (Time, Oct. 29, 1984). For the Times, the election would be a “sham” without Cruz (editorial, Oct. 7, 1984), and its news columns placed “main opposition” Cruz on center stage, from which vantage point he could regularly denounce the proceedings as a “farce” or sham.102 The Times did have one good back-page article that provided