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By Root 2617 0

We will see in the next chapter that Time magazine cooperated with the campaign, citing Americas Watch only once on Guatemala, but with the qualifying explanation that it is “a controversial group that is often accused of being too sympathetic to the left” (the State Department, on which Time relies very heavily, is never subject to any adjective suggesting any bias). The Washington Post (Dec. 4, 1982) had one back-page article by Terri Shaw, on the Enders letter, which features the State Department charges in the title—“Embassy Sees ‘Disinformation’ on Guatemala: U.S. Report Says Rights Groups are Used”—and in the text. The author allows the embassy claim that “the report never was meant to be made public” to stand unchallenged, and never refers to the threat posed to human-rights monitors by the release of such State Department charges. The human-rights groups are allowed to suggest a State Department intent to discredit, but the word “disinformation” is never applied to State Department allegations, and no serious examination of the content of those charges is provided. This superficial piece exhausts the sample media’s coverage of this State Department campaign. The AW report Human Rights in Guatemala: No Neutrals Allowed, which discusses this campaign and the Enders letter, was never mentioned.

2.6. THE MUTUAL SUPPORT GROUP MURDERS IN

GUATEMALA

Human-rights monitoring and protective agencies have had a very difficult time organizing and surviving in the “death-squad democracies” of El Salvador and Guatemala. Between October 1980 and March 1983, five officials of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador were seized and murdered by the security forces. In accord with a propaganda model, these murders should have been of little interest to the U.S. mass media, and this expectation is borne out by evidence. As an illustrative comparison, the New York Times had a grand total of four back-page articles on these five murders,96 whereas, during the same period, the Times had thirty-five articles on the Soviet human-rights activist Natan Sharansky, not all of them on the back pages. The proportionality of attention fits well our general propagandamodel analysis of the media’s treatment of worthy and unworthy victims.

Guatemala has been even more inhospitable to human-rights organizations than El Salvador. Guatemalan Archbishop Monsignor Próspero Penados del Barrio asserted in 1984 that “It is impossible for a human rights office to exist in Guatemala at the present time.”97 “Disappearances” as an institutional form began in Guatemala in the mid-1960s and eventually reached levels unique in the Western Hemisphere, with the total estimated to be some 40,000.98 Protest groups that have formed to seek information and legal redress have been consistently driven out of business by stateorganized murder. The Association of University Students (AEU) sought information on the disappeared through the courts in the course of a brief opening in 1966, but after one sensational exposé of the police murder of twenty-eight leftists, the system closed down again. As McClintock points out, “In the next few years many AEU leaders and member law students were hunted down and killed.”99 In the 1970s, a Committee of the Relatives of the Disappeared was organized by the AEU, with headquarters in San Carlos National University. As Americas Watch points out, “It disbanded after plainclothesmen walked into the University’s legal aid center on March 10, 1974, and shot and killed its principal organizer, lawyer Edmundo Guerra Theilheimer, the center’s director.”100 Another human-rights group, the National Commission for Human Rights, was created in the late 1970s by psychologist and journalist Irma Flaquer. Her son was murdered, and she herself “disappeared” on October 16, 1980.

According to the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, in 1984 alone there were an average of one hundred political murders and over forty disappearances per month in Guatemala.101 These figures are almost surely an underestimate, as only the disappearances that took