Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [90]
The armed forces are waging a heroic battle against a cruel and pitiless enemy supported by great resources of ideological aggression. This goes parallel with armed aggression . . . This would be one more prey in the conquest plan in the Central American region that Moscow has designed to pursue. Immediately after that its greatest reward would be the North American nation . . .
In brief, the Salvadoran public was never offered the option that the press itself acknowledged the voters craved.
In Guatemala, as in El Salvador, no parties of the left participated in the 1984 election for a constituent assembly, and only one crippled party made a tentative but wholly ineffectual foray in the 1985 presidential election.43 The main guerrilla movements were, of course, outside the electoral orbit. Their leaders would have been killed if apprehended, but they would not have participated anyway without a drastic alteration in basic social and electoral conditions.44 Even a centrist party like the Christian Democrats had suffered scores of murders in the years 1980–83, and the current president of Guatemala, the Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo, survived three known assassination attempts. No seriously left party could have qualified in 1984–85 under the laws of “illicit association” mentioned earlier.
The peasant majority was not represented or spoken for by any candidate. The Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, an organization not able to function within Guatemala, has pointed out that national political parties that speak for major groups like the working class or indigenous people “do not exist and . . . as a result, these sectors are institutionally excluded from the political system.”45 Americas Watch states that one of the civil-patrol system’s functions is “to provide vigilance and control of the local population, preventing any form of independent political organization.”46 This exclusion of the peasantry from any political opportunity was reflected in two ways in the 1984–85 elections. One was that in registering for the election, only 3 percent of the electorate signed up as members of political parties. Another, more compelling, is that no candidate in the election urged land reform, although this was one of the two central issues in Guatemala (the other being unconstrained army murder, also not an issue in the election, given the understanding on all sides that the army will remain the ruling force, whoever gains office).
As with Duarte in El Salvador, the presence of Vinicio Cerezo as a candidate, and as the eventual winner in the 1985 election, raises the question of whether, despite the constraints on the left, Cerezo did not really offer a significant option to the voting public. Cerezo differentiated himself from his electoral rivals, especially toward the end of the campaign and the runoff, by expressing compassion for the masses and a determination to make changes in the human-rights picture and mass poverty. He occasionally mentioned the need for structural reform, although he was not specific and stressed that the first requirement was to reestablish civilian control. He was quite clear, however, that if he were elected, his power would be nominal at first and would have to be enlarged while he was in office:
The election will not bring automatic transfer of real power to the president. There will be a handover of formal power. What are my chances of consolidating that power? Fifty-fifty.47
During the election campaign, Cerezo never straightforwardly addressed the question of land reform, and news reports in Guatemala suggested that he had promised the landowners’ lobby that land reform was not on his agenda.48 Similarly, he did not promise any legal action against those who had murdered thousands, nor did he say that he would dismantle the counterinsurgency state. There would seem to have been at least a tacit understanding between Cerezo and the military that he would protect them against