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accurately summarizes the contents, although they contain an undercurrent of reserved final judgment. That central message was false, however, if the basic conditions of a free election were not met, if the army’s power remained unimpaired, and if these were confirmed in a written constitution that allows the army freedom from the rule of law and a license to kill without constraint from the nominal “democracy.”83 Kinzer could only convey this false message by ignoring the Sagastume case, the institutional arrangements of the counterinsurgency state, the ongoing murders, and the omnipresent fear—i.e., the basic conditions of a free election—and by laying stress instead on expressions of hope, orderliness of the election processes, and army promises—i.e., the government’s propaganda agenda in a demonstration election.

In what must be one of the low points of his journalistic career, in an article of December 27, 1985 (“Guatemala Vote Heartens Nicaragua Parties”), Kinzer even implies that the Guatemala election establishes an electoral model for Nicaragua. He describes a Cerezo visit to Nicaragua, in which Kinzer features the encouragement Cerezo gives to the dissident parties that perhaps the power of the Sandinistas can be broken by patience (implying that Cerezo had broken the power of the army in Guatemala and was in full command). The article closes with a quote from an opposition figure: “Ortega is now the last President in Central America who wears a military uniform, and the contrast is going to be evident.” Nowhere in the article does Kinzer point out that army power can not be read from whether the head of state wears a uniform, or that the rule of the army in Guatemala has not yet been overcome. He does not refer to the fact that the Guatemalan army has killed tens of thousands of ordinary civilians. Nor does he show any recognition of the fact that the election held in Nicaragua was much more open than that held in Guatemala. On the contrary, this is a fact that the media, including the New York Times, explicitly and consistently deny, in accordance with state imperatives.

As in the case of El Salvador, the U.S. mass media never suggested that the exclusion of the Guatemalan insurgent groups rendered the Guatemalan election meaningless. Kinzer several times mentioned with extreme brevity that the left was off the ballot, but he never asked anybody to discuss the meaning of this in terms of the options available to the various segments of society. As coauthor of an important book on this topic, Kinzer is well aware of the facts.84 The vast majority of Guatemalans are very poor, and they have been entirely excluded from political participation or representation since 1954. The insurgency grew out of the parlous condition and exploitation of that mass, and the absence of any possibility of a democratic process to alleviate injustice and misery. The ruling army had allowed only parties to run and civilians to hold office who agreed, tacitly or explicitly, to keep off the policy agenda all matters of central concern to the impoverished majority. There is no way to measure the strength of popular support for the insurgents, but in light of the fact that they espouse programs well oriented to the interests of the general population and have been able to maintain an insurgency without significant external aid, and that the army response has been a war against virtually the entire rural population, the rebel claim to be a “main opposition” would appear to be stronger than that of Arturo Cruz and his upper-class Nicaraguan associates. And if the rebels—or any candidates who would threaten the army and oligarchy in ways appealing to the majority—cannot qualify in a Guatemalan election, is it not essentially fraudulent? This was strongly suggested in both 1984 and 1985 by the Guatemalan Bishops’ Conference, but this respectable source, in contrast with Arturo Cruz and Robert Leiken, is blacked out. As with El Salvador, the election was not evaluated, either in advance or in retrospect, on the basis of whether or not the