Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [88]
Perhaps the most important fact about El Salvador in the two years prior to the election of March 1982 was the decimation of popular and private organizations that could pose any kind of challenge to the army and oligarchy. As we noted in chapter 2, this was the main thrust of policy of the revolutionary junta from late 1979 onward, and thousands of leaders were murdered and numerous organizations were destroyed or driven underground. The teachers’ union was decimated by several hundred murders; the university was occupied, looted, and closed down by the army; organized student and professional groups were destroyed by arrests and killings, and even the peasant union sponsored by the AFL-CIO (i.e., supporters of the regime) had some one hundred of its organizers and leaders murdered between October 1979 and the election of March 1982.34
In Guatemala, too, intermediate organizations such as peasant and trade unions, teacher and student groups, and professional organizations have been regularly attacked by the armed forces since 1954. The process of demobilization of institutions threatening the dominant elites culminated in the early 1980s, when by government proclamation “illicit association” was made punishable by law. All groups “which follow, or are subordinated to, any totalitarian system of ideology” (evidently an exception is made of the Guatemalan armed forces and the national-security ideology) are illicit. Only the armed forces determine when illicitness occurs. If General Mejía Víctores finds the GAM mothers to be agents of subversion, they may be killed (see chapter 2). Unions, peasant groups, student and professional organizations have grown up periodically in Guatemala, only to be crushed by systematic murder as soon as their demands were pressed with any vigor. The 1984–85 elections followed the greatest era of mass murder in modern Guatemalan history—under the regimes of Lucas García, Ríos Montt, and Mejía Víctores. Union membership in 1985 was below its 1950 level, and other urban groups were decimated or inactive; the peasant majority was totally demobilized and under the tight control and surveillance of the military.
In Nicaragua, again the contrast with the two U.S. clients is marked. Under Sandinista management there was a spurt in union and peasant organization. A deliberate attempt was made to mobilize the population to participate in decision-making at the local level and to interact with higher-level leaders. Oxfam compliments the Nicaraguan government highly for this effort, as we pointed out earlier.
There is legitimate debate over the extent to which the grass-roots and other organizations sponsored by the ruling FSLN are independent, and whether they might not be a vehicle for both state propaganda and coercion. Oxfam America and its parent organization in London clearly find them constructive. Luis Héctor Serra contends that the grass-roots organizations are relatively autonomous, and that their close relationship to the leadership of the FSLN “did not obstruct their capacity to express the concerns of their members at the local level.”35 He concludes that the popular organizations were “profoundly democratic” in their effects of involving the populace in decision-making and educating them on the possibilities of participation in public life.36 The difference with the organization of the Guatemalan peasantry in “poles of development,” where the essence of the organization was, quite openly, military control by terror and enforced nonparticipation, is quite dramatic, whatever one’s general assessment of the FSLN popular organizations may be.
We conclude that on the third basic condition for a free election, El Salvador and Guatemala did not qualify in the years 1984–85; Nicaragua did, at least to a significant degree.37
3.2.4. FREEDOM TO ORGANIZE PARTIES, FIELD CANDIDATES, AND CAMPAIGN FOR OFFICE
No party of the left could organize and present candidates in the 1982 and 1984 elections in El Salvador. The Democratic Front (FDR) had been quickly driven underground.