Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [57]
What gave Bushnell’s statement a certain credibility was the fact that there had been a “reformist coup” by young army officers in October 1979, and liberals and progressives entered the early junta. However, as Raymond Bonner points out,
The young, progressive officers who carefully plotted the coup lost control of it as swiftly as they had executed it. Their ideals and objectives were subverted by senior, more conservative officers who had the backing of [U.S. Ambassador] Devine and the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador and key Carter administration officials in Washington.21
The progressive elements on the junta found themselves entirely without power, and gradually exited or were forced out, along with large numbers from the cabinet and administration. José Napoleón Duarte joined the junta in March to serve as a fig leaf and public-relations agent of the army, but all those who were not satisfied to serve in that role departed.22
Once the old-guard military had seized control from the progressive officers in October 1979, it began a general war of extermination against all progressive individuals and organizations in El Salvador. By the end of May, church sources reported 1,844 civilian deaths already in 1980, a figure that reached 10,000 by the end of the year, almost all at the hands of the government. A guerrilla war was forced on the center and left by the policy of unconstrained violence of the Carter-supported government. The government was not centrist and reformist—it was a military regime of the right, closely linked to the terrorist force ORDEN and the death squads, and it used them regularly as proxies. The paramilitary groups were not uncontrollable—they were doing what the army wanted them to do. The paramilitary forces and death squads of EL Salvador had extensive interlocking relationships with the official military and security forces and their U.S. counterparts. There was a revolving door of personnel, close cooperation in sharing information, funding of the paramilitary groups by the official forces, and a division of labor between them. The paramilitary did jobs for which the official forces wished to disclaim responsibility.23
Although the paramilitary group ORDEN was formally abolished at the time of the October 1979 coup, it was secretly maintained and had a close relationship with the regular military establishment. According to one detailed account,
The reformers had officially abolished ORDEN, the old information network. But . . . military officers suspicious of the young reformers secretly reestablished and expanded much of the old intelligence system into a grass-roots intelligence network that fed names of suspected subversives to military and paramilitary death squads. Four days after the coup, D’Aubuisson said in an interview, he was assigned by members of the high command to help reorganize ANSESAL [an intelligence communication network] inside a military compound under the chief of staff’s office—out of the reach of civilians in the new junta.24
This secret assignment of D’Aubuisson was confirmed by junta member Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez, and then Deputy Defense Minister Colonel Nicholás Carranza.25
The U.S. mass media, however, followed the Bushnell formula virtually without deviation: there was a “civil war between extreme right and leftist groups” (New York Times, Feb. 25, 1980); the “seemingly well meaning but weak junta” was engaging in reforms but was unable to check the terror (Time, Apr. 7, 1980). The U.S. mass media had featured heavily the reformist character of the revolutionary junta, but they uniformly suppressed evidence of the powerlessness, frustrations, and early resignation of the progressives, and their replacement by civilians willing to