During the nine months of Aristide’s tenure, the US embassy gave every appearance of maintaining friendly relations with him. On September 30, 1991, the Haitian military with the support of rich landowners and the business community overthrew the president, killing two of his bodyguards and hundreds of his supporters. Aristide fled into exile. The United States refused to recognize the junta. Still it is hard to imagine that the Haitian military, trained and aided by the Pentagon, would have taken such drastic action if it had not received a quiet nod from Washington.
At first, the US media called for the restoration of Aristide’s presidency.42 One New York Times reporter, displaying his delusions about US foreign policy, wrote that the “only reason” the United States pushed “aggressively to restore President Aristide” was that his democracy was “the last link in a chain of democratic governments Washington has been trying to nurture next door for the last 20 years.”43
President Bush, who earlier that year had used massive military violence to restore a feudal aristocracy in Kuwait, now made it clear he would not consider using force to reinstate a democratically elected president in Haiti. Bush was even reluctant to impose sanctions on Haiti, supposedly out of fear of hurting the Haitian people, a consideration that did not deter him in regard to Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam, or Iraq.44
Once they realized that Washington was not really unhappy about the overthrow of a leftist priest who was more loyal to the poor than to the class that Bush and their own media bosses represented, mainstream journalists began to give Aristide the usual mistreatment. A New York Times story referred to his “provocative and legally questionable behavior.”45 A Times news analysis found him to be “an insular and menacing leader” who “alienated his allies.”46 The Washington Post reported that “independent observers and diplomats” were troubled because Aristide had used “explicit and implicit threats of mob violence to intimidate opponents in the wealthy business class, in the National Assembly and in the army.” For years, the Post story continued, there had been concern about “Aristide’s rhetoric,” and his using “the threat of violence to enforce his will,” and “fomenting class warfare in his sermons.”47 (The media refer to “class warfare” only when the poor fight back against the class warfare that is continually waged against them by the rich.)
The Post had other criticisms of Aristide: When a despised leader of the Tontons Macoutes (a terrorist Duvalierist organization) was thwarted in his January attempt to keep the newly elected president from office, Aristide “was only mildly critical of the mob violence that crushed the attempt.”48 In other words, when the people mobilize as a counterforce to protect a democratic president from an unlawful and violent coup, they should be more thoroughly condemned by that same president because they too committed violent acts in the course of the struggle. The Post meanwhile said nothing about the failure of the Haitian business community to condemn the military violence that overthrew Aristide and killed hundreds of his followers.
A New York Times article headlined: “HAI HAN GENERAL SAYS MISDEEDS PROMPTED THE COUP” gave generous exposure to the coup leader, Brigadier General Raoul Cedras, a member of a counterinsurgency unit set up under the former Duvalier dictatorship and trained by US Special Forces. Cedras claimed that Aristide’s “human rights abuses” were what prompted the coup.49 It was ironic to hear such a charge from the general who repeatedly had committed brutal violations under Duvalier and had just overthrown a popularly elected president, executing many of his democratic supporters.50 The press seemed to forget that it was the military, not the impoverished people of Haiti, who had the guns and who were doing the killing. The US media gave more critical attention to Aristide’s rhetorical denunciations of the military’s atrocities than to the atrocities themselves. The media gave almost no attention to Aristide’s call for a minimum wage, land reform, and enforced tax collection on the affluent—the real reasons for his overthrow.51
Aristide denied ever inciting his people to violence, although he certainly did urge them to unify and defend democracy against violence.52 Surveys by non-Haitian groups indicate that human rights violations had fallen sharply during Aristide’s tenure in office. Even the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, admitted it had not received one human rights complaint since Aristide came to power.53
By late 1991, the new prime minister of Haiti, picked by the army, was Jean-Jacque Honorat, a conservative and the recipient of funds from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded organization that supports leaders who do what Washington wants. The message was the same as in so many other countries: If democracy picks a leftist leader, then democracy has to go.
ECONOMIC “FAILURES”
Countries that take a revolutionary or even reformist road are regularly accused of economic “mismanagement.” The press views any attempt to get out from under the domination of US policy as a first step toward economic disaster. What might be harmful to powerful corporate interests is treated as harmful to all of society itself. Likewise, any challenge to the privileged class order is portrayed as an attack on all social order and an invitation to “chaos.”
Thus, in 1964, when Brazil’s reformist president Joao Goulart was overthrown in a military coup, the New York Times quickly editorialized that Goulart “has been turning Brazil over to chaos.”54 In 1975j when leftist officers in the Portuguese military overthrew the hated Salazar dictatorship and began initiating social programs for the poor and cuts in military spending, the New York Times concluded that such measures threatened to “dismantle the economy and cause an even deeper economic crisis.”55 The Times offered not a word of evidence to support this conclusion nor any specific information about the reforms.
After the New Jewel movement in Grenada overthrew the Gairy dictatorship and began making economic changes on behalf of the people, the United States suspended aid and credits and discouraged tourism to the island. Yet Grenada’s gross national product grew by 5.5 percent and its inflation rate dropped to 7 percent.56 But soon after the US invasion, the Washington Post, without any supporting information, transmitted the White House view that “the economy of Grenada was left 'bankrupt' by its former Marxist rulers.”57
To better create an impression of economic failure and widespread disaffection, the news manufacturers concentrate on the discontent of “middle-class” persons—without mentioning that in Third World countries the “middle class” is usually a small and markedly privileged group. These landowners, lawyers, business-people, company managers, and conservative political leaders often lose some of their wealth and privileges under a leftist government. So they are ready to complain about their “hardships” to a receptive US press. To give only one example among many, the New York Times in a story headlined “IN LIBYA, WARY MIDDLE CLASS ENDURES,” described a “well-educated young woman, smartly dressed” who expressed her disenchantment with the Libyan government’s increasingly restrictive travel policies. It seems she replenished her wardrobe each year on a shopping trip to Italy but this time she was allowed to take only $300 instead of the usual $1,000 and, as if that weren’t bad enough, she would have to wait at least two months for an exit visa.58 One could only admire her courageous steadfastness in the face of such hardship.
The deprivations and oppressions faced by the Third World masses usually fail to catch the attention of the US media. “I cannot say I interviewed many peasants, and nobody else did either,” admitted one reporter, referring to his experience in Chile—but he could have been talking about almost any other Third World country.59 When a left government takes office, what wins sympathetic attention of the press is not the distribution of bread and powdered milk, the development of clean drinking water, the literacy campaigns, or the creation of jobs in government-sponsored projects in the impoverished countryside; rather, it is the “empty shops” in posh neighborhoods— which are treated as evidence of the revolutionary government’s “economic failure.�
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In sum, there are several rules that govern media coverage: (1) Do not say anything positive about the democratic economic reforms of a leftist government. (2) Show sympathy for the haves and ignore the have-nots, unless you can find a have-not who does not like the government. (3) Say nothing about the devastating effects of US policy—the proxy wars, invasions, economic embargoes, and sanctions—on the economy of the country in question. (4) Assume that economic adversity is due exclusively to the “mismanagement” perpetrated by those who would have the audacity to chart a self-determining course.
DEMOCRACY IS IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER
As we have seen, elections in revolutionary countries like Nicaragua are dismissed as a sham—until the revolutionary party is voted out. But when a client state holds an election, no matter how rigged it is, US officials and the press see democracy blooming.
In El Salvador by 1981, the military had driven all opposition parties and leftist newspapers out of existence, murdered hundreds of labor leaders and thousands of political opponents. Whole villages suspected of supporting the guerrilla insurgents were massacred by the army or bombed out of existence by the air force. The military regime’s support came principally from large investors, big landowners, cryptofascist organizations, and the US government.60
It was against this backdrop that the 1984 Salvadoran presidential election was conducted. Guided and financially assisted by the US government, the contest pitted Jose Napoleon Duarte, a right-wing Christian Democrat and long-time apologist for state terrorism, against Roberto d’Aubuisson, head of the ARENA party and long-time practitioner of death-squad terrorism. The US press was filled with stories of polling places crowded with people eager to cast their ballots, but never was it mentioned that voting was obligatory and that the failure to vote—as detected by the absence of a stamp on one’s identification card—could lead to arrest. The press also did not mention that ballots were numbered and the numbers recorded on registration lists next to voters’ names so officials could find out how any person voted.
Rather than dismissing the election as a meaningless charade, the New York Times called it “a step toward democracy.”61 The absence of a major opposition was dismissed by the Times as a “boycott” by leftwing parties.62 ABC reported that “the left was invited by the government to participate but refused.”63
US-SPONSORED MURDER: THE MEDIA LOOK THE OTHER WAY
Thousands of Salvadoran soldiers, members of one of the world's most repressive armed forces, have received training at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning.
The following testimony was given by Salvadoran soldiers to the congressional task force investigating the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women:
While leaving, Avalos Vargas ... passed in front of the guest room where the two women had been shot and heard them moaning in the darkness. He lit a match and saw the two women on the floor embracing each other. He then ordered a soldier ... to “re-kill” them. Sierra Ascencio shot the women about ten times, until they stopped moaning.
What kind of training would lead to such atrocities? According to documentation provided by the congressional task force, Sgt. Avalos Vargas and four of the other eight soldiers arrested for the Jesuit massacre were graduates of Fort Benning’s SOA.
What kind of training does the SOA provide? The emphasis is on the omnipresence of communism and subversion, on low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency. It makes the graduates more hostile to popular movements and more ruthless than previously. SOA graduates return to their countries to overthrow constitutional governments and set up regimes characterized by terror and mass murder. In Brazil, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere, torture and death squads followed closely on US intervention and training. In El Salvador, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion killed 482 civilians at Mozote, 280 of whom were children under fourteen years old.
The major US media have, overall, chosen not to cover this significant aspect of US involvement in the war in El Salvador. A database search of the major wire services and newspapers revealed only two references to the SOA in the last three years: a brief and innocuous Associated Press item on fighting drug traffic and one hard-hitting column by Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post. Not a word in the New York Times or any other paper.
Adapted from Mary Swenson, “School of the Americas: A Well-Kept Secret," Lies of Our Times, June 1991, p. 11.
ABC failed to mention that the invitation contained a suicidal precondition: the guerrillas were to lay down their arms and campaign under the guns of the very state that had been systematically killing large numbers of their people. In sum, the background of terror and death-squad assassination that made free elections impossible in El Salvador was ignored by the press, which instead chose to treat a contest between two right-wing candidates as proof of democracy.64
In 1991, a left opposition dared to enter candidates in the legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador. Despite an atmosphere of intimidation and terror, the left parties together won 20 percent of the vote and took third place behind the two right-wing parties, including the sinister ARENA party. The US media again hailed the election as a major achievement for democracy. True, as an article in the San Francisco Chronicle admitted, a bombing shut down a leading opposition newspaper; at least three supporters of the Marxist Nationalist Democratic Union were murdered; and leftist candidates received threats on their lives. Still, looking at the brighter side, the Chronicle concluded that, election day “was relatively calm”; the election itself “was relatively clean”; and the voter fraud was “small scale.”65 But the alternative press reported that the election was marked by “repression, intimidation, vote-buying, threats against opposition observers and manipulation of the count.”66 Such happenings escaped the attention of most of the mainstream media.
“INFERIOR” PEOPLES AND THEIR HOPELESS WAYS
For centuries imperialists have justified their mistreatment of other peoples by portraying them as wanting in ethical, cultural, and political development. If there be turmoil in some part of the Third World, then the trouble supposedly rests with the people themselves and not with anything the intruders are doing to them. When the US-supported coup overthrew Allende and led to the bloody repression of the Pinochet regime, “blaming the people” became the media’s favorite explanation. Thus CBS commentator Eric Sevareid opined that the Chilean people brought it on themselves, another Latin American example of “an instability so chronic that the root causes have to lie in the nature and culture of the people.”67 By way of explaining why Chileans would support Allende and the Popular Unity government, Barnard Collier wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “The Chileans do not believe in facts, numbers or statistics with the earnest faith of an English-speaking people.”68
While talking to a correspondent who had just reported on the rebellion and famine in Tigre, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw could only think of asking, “You’re in London now, which is one of the most sophisticated and civilized cities in the world. Do you have much culture shock after being in that part of Africa?”69
During the cold war years, the Russians were a prime target of stereotypic pronouncements, described as “unsmiling,” “rude,” and “unable to look you in the eye.”70 A former Washington Post correspondent, appearing on ABC’s “20/20” program, declared that “the Russians have a great urge for order. It is part of their personality.” To which host Barbara Walters responded that the Russian people lacked “a sense of responsibility because they are told what to do, when to do it.”71 In 1991, at a time of dramatic transition within the Soviet Union, the New York Times noted that the post-communist reformers faced “the mammoth task of civilizing their country.”72
Negative and stereotypic representations of Arabs are in superabundance. A CBS correspondent ended his report on the Middle East by saying, “But, of course, sound argument has not always dictated Arab behavior.”73 New York Times columnist Flora Lew
is saw “the Islamic mind” as unable to employ “step-by-step thinking.”74 Had such an assertion been applied to “the Christian mind” or “Hebrew mind,” the Times likely would have rejected it as nonsensical and bigoted.
The 1990-91 war waged by the United States against Iraq brought a plethora of anti-Arab stereotypes. (Iraq is an Arab nation but so were at least six of the nations allied with Washington in that war.) Neivsday referred to “the treacherous standards of Arab politics.”75 Judith Miller in the New York Times claimed that the Gulf Cooperation Council, in “typical Arab style,” made “a veiled reference” to the presence of US forces in the Gulf.76 Miller would never describe an Israeli leader as making a veiled reference in “typical Jewish style.”
U.S. News & World Report quoted Middle East specialist Judith Kipper on the devious nature of the “Arab mind”: “We go in a straight line; they zig-zag. They can say one thing in the morning, another thing at night and really mean a third thing.”77 New Republic editor Martin Peretz warned us, “Nonviolence is foreign to the political culture of Arabs generally and of the Palestinians particularly.”78 Performing at his usual level of accuracy, New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal listed Iranians as Arabs.79
One of the media’s favorite Middle East “experts,” Fouad Ajami (praised by New York Times columnist William Safire “for the amazing way he reads the Arab mind”80 ), described Iraq as “a brittle land ... with little claim to culture and books and grand ideas.” In fact, Iraq was the cradle of an ancient and fertile civilization. And before it was destroyed by American bombs, Baghdad was a major center of literature, art, and architecture.81
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