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A telling manifestation of bias was the media’s ready acceptance of the Guatemalan elections as meaningful, even though they were admittedly for image-making, in a context of long-standing army rule and massacre, and despite new institutional arrangements in the countryside—the massive relocations of the population, the “model villages,” and the civil-defense patrols—that were, on their face, incompatible with a free election. In an enemy state where an election was held under comparable conditions, it would be designated a meaningless public-relations exercise.75 In the case of Guatemala, however, the civil patrols and ongoing massacres were rarely mentioned, sources that addressed these matters were ignored, and the overall tone of the news was cautiously hopeful and optimistic. It was the consensus that the 1984 election for a constituent assembly was “encouraging” and an important first step, and that the 1985 presidential election “ended [emphasis added] more than 30 years of military domination” (Newsweek, Jan. 17, 1986). Dan Rather, on CBS News, reported that Cerezo became Guatemala’s “first civilian leader after thirty years of almost uninterrupted military rule” (Dec. 9, 1985). This is ambiguous, but the implication, directly asserted by Newsweek, is that Cerezo, not the army, rules. Julio Méndez Montenegro was a civilian president from 1966 to 1970, but he did not rule, and he was eventually discredited by the fact that he presided over a huge escalation of army violence. Given the earlier experience, the fact that the generals had made it clear that the civilian government was “a project” of the military,76 and Cerezo’s own expressed reservations about his power, objective news reporting would have been careful about an alleged ending of military rule.

As in the case of El Salvador, the murderous rule of the Guatemalan generals did not delegitimize them for the U.S. mass media nor suggest any possible justice to the rebel cause. Time noted (Feb. 27, 1984) that a leftist insurgency “poses a permanent challenge to the regime,” but it did not inquire into the roots of this insurgency or suggest that its leaders constituted a “main opposition” whose ability to run would be an “acid test” of election integrity (as they pronounced in Nicaragua). Time also did not observe that the regime poses a permanent challenge to the survival of its population. The mass murders of the Guatemalan state were even semi-justified by the unquestioned need to quell insurgents—“Much of the killing,” says Time, “is linked to Mejía’s success against the insurgents.” The phrase “linked to” is an apologetic euphemism to obscure the fact that Mejía’s “success” was based on the mass murder of men, women, and children in literally hundreds of destroyed villages.77 Mejía has a “mixed record,” with the mass murder offset by “improvements in some important areas” (the State Department, quoted by Time). Mejía, says Time, “won support because he has kept the promises he made after seizing power.” Time never explains how it determined that Mejía “won support,” or from whom, other than the U.S. State Department. Was the press then free to speak out? Did a system of justice come into being?

In chapter 2 we summarized Americas Watch’s demonstration that the Reagan administration made serial adjustments in its apologetics for each successive Guatemalan terrorist general, with a lagged, tacit acknowledgment that it had previously been lying. This has no influence whatsoever on Time’s treatment of State Department pronouncements as authentic truth—the standard from which other claims may be evaluated. Thus Time says that “Americas Watch, a controversial group that is often accused of being too sympathetic to the left, called Guatemala ‘a nation of prisoners.’” Time doesn’t independently evaluate the quality of sources—the State Department is unchallenged because it expounds the official and patriotic truth. Americas Watch is denigrated (and only rarely cited, even with a dismissing put-down)