Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [75]
We described earlier the important Americas Watch study Guatemala Revised: How the Reagan Administration Finds “Improvements” in Human Rights in Guatemala, whose most striking and important theme was the ex post facto admission by the State Department that its apologetics for the previous general had been false. This illuminating document was ignored in our media sample, except for the New York Times, which gave it a threeinch article on page 7 under the benign title “Rights Group Faults U.S. on Guatemala Situation” (Sept. 24, 1985). The article describes the report as saying that the administration has refused to acknowledge major humanrights abuses in Guatemala, but it fails to mention the stress on the ex post facto tacit admission of lying. Mentioning this would, of course, suggest that the Times’s primary source for its “news” is thoroughly untrustworthy. The last paragraph of the article, which absorbs a quarter of the three inches devoted to this document, gives a State Department response to the AW report, which is that AW is “less a human rights organization than it is a political one.” The brazen hypocrisy of this retort would have been clear and dramatic if the article had given the gist of AW’s evidence that the administration was not merely an apologist for state terrorism in Guatemala, but was also demonstrably dishonest.
In its concern to protect the Guatemalan generals in their terroristic assault on the population, the Reagan administration took umbrage at organizations like Amnesty International and Americas Watch and mounted a systematic campaign in 1981 and 1982 to discredit them as left-wing and politically biased. In a letter dated September 15, 1982, directed to AI and the Washington Office on Latin America, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders assailed the reporting of these organizations as one-sided and apologetic for the “ferocious” and “terrorist attacks”—of the guerrillas. Enders writes that
No one would deny the possibility [sic] of units of the military, in contravention of stated policy, having been involved in violations of human rights. What is important is that since March 23 the Government of Guatemala has committed itself to a new course and has made significant progress.95
This amazing piece of apologetics for an army that was in the midst of slaughtering thousands of civilians was distributed within Guatemala as an official U.S. document, and its full text appeared in the Guatemalan press. AW states:
We find this use of the letter unconscionable in light of the risks run by human rights investigators in a political climate like Guatemala’s. It also appears to us to be further evidence that the State Department, like the Guatemalan government, admits no neutrals in the Guatemalan conflict; the bringer of bad news becomes, through this reasoning, part of the enemy, to be publicly discredited if possible.
Americas Watch also indicated that the State Department’s substantive criticisms of AW and AI were not merely incompetent but, more important, were based largely on the assumed truthfulness of Guatemalan army claims (a form of gullibility displayed clearly in the statement by Enders quoted above).
As we discussed in chapter 1, the government is a primary flak producer as well as information source. This Guatemala episode is an important illustration of the government’s efforts to silence competing sources of information. It is interesting that the New York Times never mentioned or criticized this sinister campaign, even though it was carried out in the context of a policy protecting mass murderers.