Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [73]
When Ríos Montt was ousted in his turn, once again the State Department line shifted. It was admitted that things had been terrible under Ríos Montt in 1982, but now there was a dramatic improvement, and the government was showing “increased sensitivity to human rights questions.”89 It is evident that we have here a consistent pattern that may be formulated into a quasilaw: in the case of a terrorist state with which the administration wants “constructive engagement,” things are always OK and improving; but when that regime is ousted, its record deteriorates ex post facto and looks most unfavorable compared with the humanistic and sensitive one now in power! This droll pattern of identical apologetics for each successor terrorist, and ex post denigration of the one ousted, is an Orwellian process that the Western press associates with totalitarian states, but it happens here. And it can only occur if the mass media are cooperative. They must be willing to downplay or ignore the large-scale murders going on in Guatemala in the first place. In that context, the serial apologetics, the lies defending each murderer, and the mind-boggling hypocrisy will hardly be newsworthy.
Given the U.S. role in originating and sustaining the Guatemalan counterinsurgency state, and the fact that that state is dedicated to blocking the growth of popular organizations (i.e., “anti-Communist” in Orwellian rhetoric) and has a strong U.S. business presence, a propaganda model would anticipate a lack of media interest in its “unworthy” victims and an evasion of the U.S. role in its evolution and practices. We would expect reports on Guatemala put out by Amnesty International and other humanrights groups to be downplayed or ignored, despite their spectacular data and horrifying stories. This is a strong test of the model, as the number of civilians murdered between 1978 and 1985 may have approached 100,000, with a style of killing reminiscent of Pol Pot. As AI pointed out in 1981:
The bodies of the victims have been found piled up in ravines, dumped at roadsides or buried in mass graves. Thousands bore the scars of torture, and death had come to most by strangling with a garrotte, by being suffocated in rubber hoods or by being shot in the head.90
The expectations of a propaganda model are fully realized in this case. Referring to our table 2–1 comparison of media treatment of twenty-three religious victims in Guatemala with the coverage accorded Popieluszko, only four of the twenty-three were ever mentioned by name in our media sample, and the twenty-three taken together had approximately one-twentieth of the space in the New York Times that the newspaper of record gave to Popieluszko. In the case of the murder in Guatemala of the American priest Rev. Stanley Rother, the New York Times reported on August 5, 1981, in a tiny back-page article, that three men had been arrested for questioning in the shooting. What was the outcome of the arrests? Were the arrested persons tried? Readers of the Times will never know, and the Guatemalan government did not have to suffer the embarrassment and pressure of the press raising questions in this or any of the remaining twenty-two Guatemalan cases.
Along with the minuscule attention to the murder of Guatemalan priests, the details of the killings were brief, and no sense of outrage was generated or sustained.91 The few lengthier articles never discuss the role of the 1954 coup and the long training and supply relationship of the United States to the Guatemalan police and army;92 rather, they almost invariably put the killings in the format of a civil war with