Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [67]
After a two-month investigation of the murders, the reporter John Dinges filed a story through Pacific News Service that showed the murders to have been preplanned in some detail.60 First, there were intercepted radio communications indicating military discussions of the arrival of the women at the airport, and other evidence of close surveillance of their flight plans, all suggesting a coordinated and extensive military operation. Second, a former deputy minister of planning described to Dinges a half-hour presentation by Salvadoran Defense Minister Guillermo García in the national palace, denouncing the nuns and priests in the very area of the murders and stating that something must be done, only two weeks prior to the murders.
In a remarkable feat of self-censorship, most of the mass media completely ignored the Dinges findings. Dinges’s report appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and some fifteen other papers, but not a word of it found its way into the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, or CBS News, and its leads were not pursued by any media. Instead, the media kept repeating the assurances of Duarte and U.S. officials that they were satisfied that the killings did not go beyond the local national guardsmen, and that the matter would be pursued diligently through proper legal channels.
In March 1984, Colonel Roberto Santivánez, a high official in Salvadoran intelligence, agreed to “talk” about the death-squad network in El Salvador, and his claims found their way onto CBS News and the front page of the New York Times.61 Santivánez gave highly credible details about the murder of the four women, indicating that the act had been committed on the specific order of Colonel Oscar Edgardo Casanova, who was in charge of the zone in which the killings took place. Colonel Casanova was transferred to another assignment two weeks after the murder as part of the official cover-up. His first cousin Eugenio Vides Casanova, the minister of defense chosen by Duarte and head of the National Guard in December 1980, knew about the murder order by his cousin, as did Duarte. Although this crushing evidence implicated a high officer in the murder and the current minister of defense and Duarte in the cover-up, there was no followup to this story, no connection back to the Dinges story of high-level discussions of the need to do something about the religious workers—no editorials, no indignation, and no pressure for action.
In sum, the leads provided by Dinges, and the testimony of Santivánez, strongly suggest that the killing of the women was based on a high-level decision. The evidence is even clearer that middle-level officials of the government ordered the killing, and that the highest-level officials engaged in a continuing and systematic cover-up. In the Polish case, the evidence of top-level involvement was never forthcoming, but the issue was pursued by the U.S. mass media relentlessly. In the case of the four churchwomen, where the evidence of top-level involvement was abundant, the U.S. mass media failed to press the matter, or even to engage in the pursuit of obvious investigative leads.
We cannot describe here the full details of the failure of the Salvadoran process of justice, which never moved forward except under U.S. pressure and threats.62 The mass media did at one point berate the Salvadoran government for “stonewalling” the investigation,63 but the media entirely failed to capture the depth and scope of the stonewalling process, or to remark on its significance in this “fledgling democracy,