Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [66]
2.4.3. THE LACK OF ZEAL IN THE SEARCH FOR VILLAINY
AT THE TOP
As we saw earlier, in the Popieluszko case the mass media eagerly, aggressively, and on a daily basis sought and pointed to evidence of top-level involvement in the killing. In the case of the killings of the four women, we can observe a completely different approach. Here the media found it extremely difficult to locate Salvadoran government involvement in the murders, even with evidence staring them in the face. Their investigatory zeal was modest, and they were happy to follow the leads of (“Trust me”) Duarte and U.S. officials as the case unfolded. They played dumb. The Salvadoran army and security forces had been killing Salvadorans, in the same way they had killed the four women, for months. What is more, the churches with which the women were connected had been recently threatened by the army. More direct evidence was that local peasants had been forced to bury the bodies by the local military. But the media did not use this information to help them find the locus of the murders.
The initial line of the U.S. and Salvadoran governments was that there was no proof of military involvement, although the military’s concealment of the bodies was not proper. A statement issued by the junta on December 8 claimed that the murderers were “terrorists of the extreme right,”55 and Duarte reiterated this view to the press, which passed it along. In keeping with the government line, twenty days after the murders, the New York Times still spoke only of “unidentified assailants,” although the leads to the National Guard were already plentiful, and it repeated the Rogers report finding that the security forces may have tried to “conceal the deaths” after the bodies had been found.56
Gradually, so much evidence seeped out to show that the women had been murdered by members of the National Guard that the involvement of government forces could no longer be evaded. A two-part process of “damage limitation” ensued, expounded by Salvadoran and U.S. officials and faithfully reflected in the media. One was a distinction between the government and the National Guard. In the Popieluszko case, the reader was never allowed to forget that the murdering police were part of the Polish government. In the case of the four American women, it was barely evident in the mass media that the killers had any connection with the Salvadoran government. This was in keeping with the basic myth, also consistently followed by the media, that the Salvadoran government was reformist and centrist, trying to control killings by extremists of the right and left.57 This fabrication allowed a two-track system of massive killing by the army and its affiliates and simultaneous claims of regret by the reformers unable to control the extremists. This was reminiscent of the heyday of mass murder in Argentina, when the New York Times regularly portrayed the junta and people like the recently convicted General Videla as moderates “unable to control the right-wing extremists” who were killing people.58
The most important goal of the immediate damage-containment process was to stifle any serious investigation of the responsibility of the officials of the Salvadoran government. The Salvadoran strategy was foot-dragging from beginning to end, as the idea of convicting soldiers for killing anybody was contrary to Salvadoran practice, and, moreover, there is little doubt that the responsibility for the crime went high. The U.S. official strategy, once it was clear that the National Guard was responsible for the killing, was to get the low-level killers tried and convicted—necessary to vindicate the system of justice in El Salvador, at least to the extent of keeping the dollars flowing from Congress—while protecting the “reformers” at the top. On September 30, 1981, Ambassador