Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [84]
A third factor affecting electoral conditions was that in El Salvador and Guatemala the conflict was internal, and violence against the majority was integral to the struggle. In Nicaragua, the conflict was one involving an externally sponsored aggression that had very limited internal support. The Sandinistas could appeal to nationalist sentiments, easily mobilized against Yankee-organized terrorism. The Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments could hardly do the same—the Salvadoran government especially had to contend with a negative nationalist reaction to obvious foreign (i.e., U.S.) domination and manipulation of its affairs, a fact that reached the level of absurdity when Duarte, visiting Washington in the fall of 1987, made himself an object of ridicule throughout Latin America by promptly kissing the American flag. While the Sandinistas did increasingly crack down on internal supporters of the contras as the conflict intensified, by the standards the United States usually applies to this region dissenters were dealt with remarkably benignly in Nicaragua.14 In El Salvador and Guatemala, the ruling elites could not afford such toleration, and repression by largescale terror had long been institutionalized in these states.
A fourth factor making for a more benign electoral environment in Nicaragua, paradoxically, was U.S. hostility and the power of its propaganda machine. Every arrest or act of harassment in Nicaragua was publicized and transformed into evidence of the sinister quality of the Sandinista government in the free press of the United States. Meanwhile, as we described in chapter 2, the Guatemalan and Salvadoran regimes could indulge in torture, rape, mutilation, and murder on a daily and massive basis without invoking remotely proportional attention, indignation, or inferences about the quality of these regimes. In the context, the Nicaraguan government was under intense pressure to toe the mark, whereas the U.S. satellites were free to murder at will without serious political cost.
Let us examine briefly how El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua compared in the individual categories of conditions of a free election, before we turn to the media treatment of these issues.
3.2.1. FREE SPEECH AND ASSEMBLY
In El Salvador, the right to free speech and free assembly was legally suspended under a state-of-siege order of March 7, 1980. Decree No. 507 of December 3, 1980, essentially destroyed the judicial system, permitting the armed forces to hold citizens without charge or evidence for 180 days. Under these rulings, in the thirty months before the March 1982 election, and prior to the 1984 elections, many thousands of civilians were seized, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and murdered outside of legal processes for alleged “subversive” actions and thoughts. The state of siege was lifted in early 1982 solely for the six parties contesting the election, and it was lifted entirely ten days before the election for all Salvadorans—although, unfortunately, the citizenry was not informed of this fact until after the election was over and state-of-siege conditions were reimposed.15 The practice of exposing mutilated bodies for the edification of the citizenry became institutionalized in the early 1980s in El Salvador. We described in chapter 2 the difficulty the U.S. government had in getting underlings