Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [270]
42. Bonner, 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 Weekly Report, October 25, 1985, p. 11.
45. HRC, Report, p. 7.
46. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986), p. 2.
47. “El Señor Presidente?” An interview of Cerezo by George Black in October 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 refrain from agrarian and banking reforms, investigation into human rights abuses by the armed forces, and any interference in the counterinsurgency program” (“Guatemala Votes,” Washington Report on the Hemisphere, 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, (June 30, 1986), describe the “tactical alliance” between Cerezo and the army, which protected them against any accountability for past actions, 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 likelihood 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 of El Salvador, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong., 2d sess., 1982, vol. 1, 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 El Salvador” (1984, mimeographed), p. 4.
61. Based on conversations with voters, the Long group states that “most people waited these