Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [97]
This letter was not mentioned in the major media or anywhere else, to our knowledge, although the bishops are conservative, credible, and one of the few organized bodies in Guatemala not crushed by state terror.
There were other dissenting voices in Guatemala—politicians of the lesser parties, union officials, human-rights groups, lawyers, and jurists—who spoke out occasionally on the limits to free electoral conditions in Guatemala. And there were events of note that threw a powerful light on the subject. Most of these were blacked out in the U.S. mass media. For example,81 on July 4, 1984, the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission issued a statement in Mexico saying that the election’s meaning should be viewed in the context of three important facts: namely, that the requirements for a meaningful election stipulated by the United Nations in a March 14 statement had not been met; that the left had been excluded from participation in the election; and that 115 persons had been murdered or disappeared in the thirty days prior to the election of July 1. This statement, and the facts cited by the commission, were ignored in the U.S. press.
Consider also the following facts: On May 3, General Oscar Mejía Víctores removed Ricardo Sagastume Vidaure from his position as president of the judiciary and the supreme court. On April 11, the judiciary had issued writs of habeas corpus on behalf of 157 kidnapped individuals, and Sagastume had protested to Mejía Víctores over the difficulty in proceeding against military abuses. On May 4, Acisco Valladares Molina, head of the Populist party, noted that Sagastume had been “fired like a simple subordinate.” On May 8, a communiqué from the Guatemalan bar association stated that in Guatemala there is no rule of law, as demonstrated by the constant violation of human rights and uncontrolled exercise of arbitrary power. By May 8, at least sixteen judicary officials, including supreme court and court of appeals magistrates, had resigned in protest at Sagustume’s removal.
Stephen Kinzer never discussed any of these events, or their meaning, in the Times, nor did any of his colleagues elsewhere in the mass media. This is in accord with our hypothesis that in elections held in client states, fundamental electoral conditions, such as the presence or absence of the rule of law, are off the agenda. The point applies to other relevant structural conditions. Thus, while Kinzer occasionally mentioned the civil-defense patrols, he never described them and their operations in any detail or tied them in with other institutional structures of control, and he failed to relate them in a systematic way to army power. The numerous reports on these coercive institutions and their terrorist role by Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group were almost never cited by Kinzer in providing facts relevant to the Guatemalan elections. Although the constituent assembly elected in 1984 produced a new constitution, Kinzer never once discussed the nature of this instrument, which validated the special army role and structural constraints on freedom of the press.
Kinzer was reporting news in a way that fit the Times’s editorial position and the U.S. government agenda. The Times editorial frame was that “The military, in power for most of 31 years, has honored its promise to permit the free election of a civilian president.”82 Kinzer’s news articles of the same period convey the same message—one of them is entitled “After 30 Years Democracy Gets a Chance in Guatemala” (Nov. 10, 1985)—which