Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [58]
None of the networks reported . . . the final resignation of the junta members. Even CBS, which had reported at length on the appointment of Román Mayorga, failed to report his resignation, or any of the others. For television news viewers, these political developments never happened. Television news coverage omitted every reference to this all-important political power struggle that could have accounted for the abuses that continued . . . The civilian lack of control, and even their resignation, had no effect on the way in which the news characterized the junta; it continued to be labeled moderate.27
And the Salvadoran government has continued to be “moderate” and “centrist” up to today.
Other media suppressions aided in bolstering the myth of the neutral junta standing between the extreme right and the extreme left. On March 29, 1980, the New York Times carried a Reuters dispatch noting the resignation of three high Salvadoran officials, who, according to the article, “resigned last night in protest against the junta’s inability to halt violence by leftist and rightist forces.”28 The preceding day, an AP dispatch recorded the same resignations, but without any explanation of the reasons for this. One of the resigning officials, Undersecretary of Agriculture Jorge Alberto Villacorta, issued a public statement saying that
I resigned because I believed that it was useless to continue in a government not only incapable of putting an end to the violence, but a government which itself is generating the political violence through repression . . . Recently, in one of the large estates taken over by the agrarian reform, uniformed members of the security forces accompanied by a masked person pointed out the directors of the self-management group and then these individuals were shot in front of their co-workers.29
It can be seen from the statement that the reference in the Reuter’s dispatch to protest “against the junta’s inability to halt violence by leftist and rightist forces” is a gross misrepresentation, and it is evident that an honest transmission of Villacorta’s statement would have contradicted the propaganda line.
At Archbishop Romero’s funeral, on March 30, 1980, where many thousands gathered to pay tribute, bomb explosions and gunfire killed some forty people and injured hundreds more. The version of the event provided by U.S. Ambassador Robert White and the Salvadoran government was that “armed terrorists of the ultra left sowed panic among the masses and did all they could to provoke the security forces into returning fire. But the discipline of the armed forces held.”30 Joseph Treaster’s account in the New York Times quotes Duarte that the violence was from the left. It also quotes a junta statement that the army was strictly confined to its barracks, and Treaster says, “There was no sign of uniformed government forces in the plaza before or during the shooting.” No other version of the facts is mentioned. However, a mimeographed statement on March 30, signed by twenty-two church leaders present at the funeral, claimed that the panic had been started by a bomb thrown from the national palace, followed by machine-gun and other shots coming from its second floor.31 This account was suppressed by Treaster and was never mentioned in the New York Times.
In a follow-up article of April 7, 1980, Treaster repeats that on March 30 the junta ordered all military forces into their barracks, and that they obeyed “even though they knew leftists with