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unexplained atrocities of extremists of the right and left (see “Archbishop Oscar Romero,” p. 48). An AP dispatch in the New York Times of May 16, 1981, is entitled “Four Guatemalans Slain in Leftist-Rightist Rivalry.” The article, which reports on the murder of one of our twenty-three priests, the Reverend Carlos Gálvez Galindo, says: “The attacks appeared to be related to the long struggle for power between leftists and rightists.” A UPI dispatch in the Times of July 29, 1981, reporting on the murder of Rev. Stanley Rother, also relates the attack to “right-wing extremists”—not the Guatemalan government.

Time has Rother and his Guatemalan villagers “caught in the middle of an undeclared civil war . . .”93 Time never explains the roots of the civil war, nor the crucial role of the United States in refusing to allow peaceful social change and installing the institutions of permanent counter revolution. Time does, in most unusual fashion, point out that the government was responsible for the “overwhelming majority” of the killings, and even more exceptionally, it cites Amnesty International’s evidence that the paramilitary death squads are an arm of the government. But the article fails to give illustrations of the scope and quality of the murders, and retreats, as noted, to the civil-war rationale. Even more compromising is its framing of the U.S. policy debate. According to Time, “Yet Guatemala confronts the Reagan administration with one of its toughest foreign policy challenges: on one hand, the country is viewed as a victim of Cuban-sponsored insurgency, needing U.S. support; on the other, the government obviously violates human rights.” The dichotomy offered by Time is a bit uneven: the Cuban sponsorship is a Cold War ploy for which no evidence has ever been given, but it provides a convenient propaganda framework that is regularly deployed by the State Department to divert attention from its support of mass murderers. Time thus elevates it to equality with a real and extremely serious charge—and without an honest citation even to a political hack. The “on the other hand” is, despite the “obviously,” a gross understatement. The Reagan administration chose to support and provide regular apologetics for a genocidal government that was using a policy of massacre to destroy a purely indigenous revolt. The “challenge” for the Reagan administration—quite different from that portrayed by Time—was how to sell the support of mass murder. Time did its little bit by unqualified transmission of the claim of a Cuban-based insurgency, which posed a serious dilemma for policy-making.

The holocaust years 1978–85 yielded a steady stream of documents by human-rights groups that provided dramatic evidence of a state terrorism in Guatemala approaching genocidal levels. Many of these documents had a huge potential for educating and arousing the public, but as a propaganda model would anticipate, they were treated in our media sample in a manner that minimized their informational value and capacity to create and mobilize public indignation. Using a selection of ten important reports on Guatemala by Amnesty International and Americas Watch issued in the years 1981–87, we could only find mention of four of them in our media sample.94 None of these four made it to the first page, and none provided the basis for an editorial or the building up of a press campaign of sustained coverage and indignation. The spectacular AI report of 1981 on “Disappearances”: A Workbook, describing a frightening development of state terrorism in the Nazi mold, was entirely ignored in our media sample, as was AI’s March 1985 report on “Disappearances” . . . under the Government of General Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores, which if publicized would have interfered with the media’s portrayal of the Guatemalan elections of 1984–85 as exercises in legitimation (as described in the next chapter). AW’s 1985 report on the Mutual Support Group was ignored, as was the 1987 study of human rights in Guatemala during Cerezo’s first year. We return to the Mutual Support Group