• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2700 0

the press on hand, Mejía Víctores would say, “I don’t want to shirk responsibilities and something has to be done.” But when the press was not there, he said, “It seems as though you are accusing me—and we don’t have them [the disappeared].” “You have them,” we said. “We don’t have them,” he replied.105 The military rulers were getting annoyed, and phone threats, letters of warning, and open surveillance intensified. Two days after the exchange between Mejía Víctores and GAM, the tortured bodies of two disappeared associated with GAM members showed up, one placed in front of his house with his eyes gouged out and his face barely recognizable.

In a television interview on March 14, 1985, Mejía Víctores said that GAM was “being used by subversion, because if they have problems, solutions are being found, and they have been given every advantage to [solve these problems].”106 A spate of newspaper headlines followed, stressing government warnings and allegations that GAM was being manipulated by subversives. In mid-March, General Mejía Víctores was asked on television what action the government would take against GAM. He replied, “You’ll know it when you see it.”107

On March 30, 1985, GAM leader Héctor Gómez Calito was seized, tortured, and murdered. (The six policemen who had come for him were themselves assassinated shortly after his death.)108 He had been burned with a blowtorch, on the stomach and elsewhere, and beaten on the face so severely that his lips were swollen and his teeth were broken; his tongue had been cut out. Then, on April 4, another leader of GAM, María Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, her twenty-one-year-old brother, and her two-year-old son were picked up, tortured, and murdered. Her breasts had bite marks and her underclothing was bloody; her two-year-old son had had his fingernails pulled out.

On grounds of newsworthiness, the murders of the two GAM leaders, along with the brother and the child of one of them, would seem to deserve high-order attention. Their bravery was exceptional; the villainy they were opposing was extraordinary; the justice of their cause was unassailable; and the crimes they suffered were more savage than those undergone by Popieluszko. Most important of all, these were crimes for which we bear considerable responsibility, since they were perpetrated by clients who depend on our support, so that exposure and pressure could have a significant effect in safeguarding human rights. On the other hand, the Reagan administration was busily trying to enter into warmer and more supportive relations with the Guatemalan military regime and, as we described earlier, was going to great pains to put the regime in a favorable light. A propaganda model would anticipate that even these dramatic and horrifying murders would be treated in a low-key manner and quickly dropped by the mass media—that, unlike Popieluszko, there would be no sustained interest, no indignation capable of rousing the public (and disturbing the administration’s plans). These expectations are fully vindicated by the record.

Table 2–3 compares media coverage of the Popieluszko case with that of the murders of the GAM leaders. It is immediately obvious that the treatment is radically different in the two cases. The GAM murders couldn’t even make “the news” at Time, Newsweek, or CBS News. The New York Times never found these murders worthy of the front page or editorial comment, and we can see that the intensity of its coverage was slight. The first report of the quadruple murder was on April 7, 1985, in a tiny item on page 5 of the paper in which it is mentioned that the body of María Rosario Godoy de Cuevas was found in her car in a ravine, along with the bodies of her brother and her young son. In neither this item nor any succeeding article does the Times provide details on the condition of the bodies, or mention that the two-year-old child had his fingernails torn out.109

In other respects, too, the Times articles, all written by Stephen Kinzer, generally employ an apologetic framework. That is, they don’t focus on the murders