Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [77]
I this context of murder, fear, and the prior failure of all human-rights organizations, the Mutual Support Group, or GAM, was formed in June 1984. It was a product of the desperation felt by people seeking information on the whereabouts of disappeared relatives and willing to take serious risks to that end. Many of them had suffered enormous pain in frustrating searches and inquiries that never bore fruit. There is no legal redress in Guatemala, and nothing useful can be obtained by appeals to the police or courts of law. Mr. Hicho, looking for his disappeared daughter, saw some one hundred bodies in the months he spent at the morgue, and “seventy to seventy-five percent of them had been tortured.”102 Others took different painful routes in their search. In early 1985, one woman was told by an army officer that her husband was still alive, and that he would see to his return if she slept with him. She did so, and her husband turned up dead shortly thereafter.103
The intention of the organizers of GAM was to seek strength by collective action, and to use it to gather data and seek redress by petition and publicity. Their hope for survival and success rested, in part, on the fact that the chief of state, Mejía Víctores, was being built up by the Reagan administration as another “reformer,” and the Reagan–Mejía Víctores team was trying to establish the appropriate “image” to induce Congress to loosen the purse strings. GAM also had support within Guatemala from Archbishop Penados del Barrio and other church groups and lay persons, although few felt able to speak up in the system of unconstrained state terror. Internationally, GAM received significant political support from progressive and humanitarian political parties and human-rights groups.
Thirty members of the newly organized GAM held a press conference in Guatemala City in June 1984, denouncing the disappearances and calling on the government “to intervene immediately in order to find our loved ones.” In the latter part of June, and again in early August, masses were held in the Metropolitan Cathedral to express concern over the fate of the disappeared, with the initial services held by the university rector, Meyer Maldonado, and Archbishop Penados. A thousand people attended the August mass. On August 1, the group first met with General Mejía Víctores, at which time he promised to investigate the disappearances. In ads placed in the major newspapers on August 8 and 9, GAM put his promises on the public record. Subsequently the group began to call attention to the government’s failure to follow through on the August 1 promises, and they moved gradually to other actions. In October 1984 they sponsored a march and mass for the disappeared at the cathedral—the first mass demonstration in Guatemala since May 1, 1980 (at which time protestors were seized on the streets and an estimated one hundred were assassinated, or disappeared).
The organization continued to grow, from the initial handful to 225 families in November 1984 and then to 1,300 in the spring of 1986. Most of the members were women, a large majority peasant women from the countryside. They were persistent. After initial petitions, requests, meetings, and marches, they began to make explicit accusations and “publicly charge elements of the national security forces as directly responsible for the capture and subsequent disappearance of our family members.”104 They asked for an investigation, an accounting, and justice. They appealed to the constituent assembly and began regular protests in downtown Guatemala City, banging pots and pans and, on occasion, peacefully occupying buildings.
Nothing, of course, was done in response to the GAM demands. The assembly had no powers anyway, but was too fearful even to pass a resolution of support. The military rulers toyed with GAM. In public, with