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and two employees were murdered and mutilated by the security forces, the second because the army arrested its personnel and destroyed its plant. The church paper and radio station were repeatedly shut down by bombing attacks. No paper or station representing the principal opposition has been able to operate except clandestinely. Over thirty journalists have been murdered in El Salvador since the revolutionary junta took power. An intensified campaign against the press occurred just prior to the 1982 election. On March 10, a death list of thirty-five journalists was circulated by a “death squad,” and on March 18 the mutilated bodies of four Dutch journalists were recovered.27 None of the murders of journalists in El Salvador was ever “solved”—they were essentially murders carried out under the auspices of the state.

In Guatemala, forty-eight journalists were murdered between 1978 and 1985,28 and many others have been kidnapped and threatened. These killings, kidnappings, and threats have been a primary means of control of the media. As in El Salvador, nobody has yet been apprehended and tried for any of these crimes, which must be viewed as murders carried out by the state or with state approval. There are no papers or radio or television stations in Guatemala that express the views of the rebels or the majority Indian population or the lower classes in general. “At most, the variants reflect shades of strictly conservative thinking.”29 Given the extreme climate of fear, and threats for stepping out of line, even the conservative press is cautious and engages in continuous self-censorship. All the central topics that should be debated in this terrorized society are carefully avoided.30

In Nicaragua, once again, there have been no reported deaths of journalists by state terrorists, nor even threats of personal violence. In 1984, the majority of the fifty-odd radio stations were privately owned, and some of them provided their own news programs; four other independent producers supplied radio news programs without prior censorship. Foreign radio and television from commercial and U.S. propaganda sources broadcasting from Costa Rica, Honduras, and elsewhere were of growing importance in 1984.31 Two of the three newspapers were privately owned, one supportive of the government but critical of specific programs and actions, the other violently hostile. The latter, La Prensa, which represented the small, ultra-conservative minority and supported the contras and a foreign-sponsored invasion of the country, was allowed to operate throughout the 1984 election, although it was censored. The censorship still allowed the paper to publish manifestos of opposition groups and a pastoral letter critical of the regime. No comparable paper has been allowed to exist above-ground, even briefly, in El Salvador and Guatemala.

There is no doubt that the media in Nicaragua have been under government constraint, with censorship and periodic emergency controls that seriously encroached on freedom of the press.32 It should be noted, however, that Nicaragua is under foreign attack and in a state of serious warfare. John S. Nichols points out that under the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917, over one hundred publications were banned from the mails, and hundreds of people were jailed for allegedly interfering with military recruitment. Furthermore,

Given that the United States was a relatively mature and homogenous political system during World War I and was not particularly threatened by the fighting, the range of public discussion tolerated in Nicaragua during the first five years of the revolution was remarkable. Despite assertions by President Reagan, IAPA, and others that the control of the Nicaraguan media was virtually totalitarian, the diversity of ownership and opinion was unusual for a Third World country, particularly one at war.33

Our conclusion is that the condition of freedom of the press necessary for a free election was clearly absent in El Salvador and Guatemala, and that it was partially met in Nicaragua.

3.2.3. FREEDOM OF ORGANIZATION