Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [94]
The role of the army was summarized by Warren Hoge in the New York Times:
Is the military playing any role in the election? Members of the military are not allowed to vote, and the armed forces are pledged to protect voters from violence and to respect the outcome of the contest.71
We may note that the army’s mass killing of civilians and systematic destruction and demobilization of virtually all popular organizations in El Salvador over the preceding thirty months, which bears on what Secretary of State Shultz referred to as the “preliminary aspects that make an election mean something,” is not part of the army’s “role” for Hoge and the Times. Hoge repeats the Salvadoran army’s pledge, not only taking it at face value, but never suggesting that it (and the election itself) was meaningless in a terror state where the “main opposition” was off the ballot and only the war parties were able to field candidates. In the propaganda framework, the security forces of client states “protect elections”;72 only those of enemy states interfere with the freedom of its citizens to vote without constraint.
As noted earlier, observers and reporters in El Salvador all agreed that the populace was most eager for an end to the war, and government propaganda even stressed that voting was an important vehicle to that end—the public was urged to substitute “ballots for bullets.” But no peace party was on the Salvadoran ballot. And after the election was over, the war went on, and the death squads continued to flourish. This is in accordance with the hypothesis that the real purpose of the election was to placate the home population of the United States and render them willing to fund more war and terror. It is a poor fit to the hypothesis that the people of El Salvador had a free choice. An honest press would point up the failure of the election to substitute “ballots for bullets.” The mass media of the United States did not raise the issue.
Nor did the experience of 1982 and its aftermath affect the media’s willingness to follow the patriotic agenda once again in 1984. We will return to this below in a statistical comparison of the New York Times’s coverage of the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan elections.
3.5. “FIRST STEP: GUATEMALA OPTS FOR MODERATION”73
The U.S. government was less deeply involved in the Guatemalan elections of 1984 and 1985 than it was in those held in El Salvador, but, as we saw in chapter 2, the Reagan administration went to great pains to put a favorable gloss on the murderous regimes of Lucas García, Ríos Montt, and Mejía Víctores, and to attempt to reintegrate them fully into the free-world alliance.74 It encouraged the 1984–85 elections, provided advisory and financial support for election management, and gave public-relations assistance and sent official observers to help put the election in a favorable light. There was little effort made to disguise the fact that the purpose of the election, from the standpoint of the Reagan administration and the ruling army, was to alter the international “image” of Guatemala in order to facilitate aid and loans.
With the administration supporting the new look, but without the intensity of commitment and propaganda backup brought to bear in El Salvador, and given the steady stream of reports of ongoing mass murder in Guatemala, a propaganda model would anticipate a media response that put the Guatemalan elections in a favorable light, but with qualifications. There was, in fact, far less coverage than of the Salvadoran election; what there was had a little more “balance,