Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [86]
the military and civil defense patrols and the climate of fear also made it difficult for many Guatemalans to organize and assemble. One local observer said that years of terror and oppression against local organizations had demobilized the whole rural population: “Four CUC [peasant league] members were killed in this village alone. Now it would be very difficult to organize any kind of group.” Civil patrols, police and army checkpoints on highways, and the need for travel permits for residents of the model villages impeded free movement. In the rural areas the civil patrols discouraged gatherings because people feared being reported.23
It was noted by many observers of the Guatemalan elections that although the big issues in that country were land distribution and reform and human rights, no political candidates discussed or advocated either land reform, or restructuring the military and forcing an accounting of tens of thousands of “disappearances.” One Christian Democratic adviser explained to the law group that “We Christian Democrats haven’t raised such issues because this isn’t the moment to start a confrontation with either the army or the private sector.”24
In short, despite the “momentary improvement in the conditions of free speech” that occurred during the election campaign, Guatemala did not meet the first condition of a free election. The rural masses were under army discipline and traumatized by mass killings and the absence of any vestige of rule of law, and the candidates were unable to raise openly the fundamental issues of the society.
Free speech and rights of assembly were constrained in Nicaragua in 1984 by social pressures and threats and by a state of siege that had been terminated some six months prior to the November 1984 election. Very important differences existed, however, between the Nicaraguan constraints and those prevailing in El Salvador and Guatemala. Most important, in Nicaragua the army and police did not regularly seize alleged subversives, and torture and murder them. Mutilated bodies have not been put on public display as a part of the system of public education. What the law group called the “constant, overt political terror” in Guatemala, based on “numerous documented massacres of whole villages,” and what the former Salvadoran official Leonel Gómez called the state of “fearful passivity” prevalent in El Salvador, did not apply to Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, in 1984, dissidents were able to speak freely without fear of murder, and the LASA group noted that “Every member of our delegation was approached at least once by an irate citizen as we walked around Managua and other cities. Several of these encounters turned into heated arguments between the individual who had approached us and passers-by who joined the discussion . . . These people did not feel intimidated.”25
Freedom of assembly in Nicaragua was somewhat limited by harassment, but, once again, it was not ruled out by state terror, as was the case in El Salvador and Guatemala. The LASA delegation examined in detail the charges of Sandinista harassment of opposition-group meetings and found them largely unfounded, concluding that the contesting parties “were able to hold the vast majority of their rallies unimpeded by pro-FSLN demonstrations . . .”26
Our conclusion is that the first basic condition of a free election was partially met in Nicaragua, but was not met at all in El Salvador and Guatemala.
3.2.2. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
In El Salvador, the only substantial newspapers critical of the government, La Crónica del Pueblo and El Independiente—neither by any means radical papers—were closed in July 1980 and January 1981, respectively, the first because its top editor