I was struck by this May 17 headline in the New York Times:
Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role
Reporter Elisabeth Malkin provides a pretty thorough accounting of U.S. support for Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. The “long history” of U.S. support for the brutal military went back to a CIA-backed coup in 1954, Malkin reported. She added:
When General Ríos Montt was installed in a coup in March 1982, Reagan administration officials were eager to embrace him as an ally. Embassy officials trekked up to the scene of massacres and reported back the army’s line that the guerrillas were doing the killing
The U.S. role in facilitating genocide was not central to the trial of Ríos Montt, but the fact remains that U.S. aid helped fuel the military, and Reagan-era officials like Elliott Abrams brushed off concerns about atrocities against indigenous villages. As Malkin put it, “For some in Guatemala, the virtual invisibility of the American role in the trial was disturbing.”
This kind of report raises at least one obvious question: How much has U.S. coverage of the Ríos Montt trial talked about U.S. support for genocide?
Genocidal Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt with supporter Ronald Reagan.
According to a search of the Nexis news database, some prominent outlets haven’t just ignored the U.S. role—they’ve ignored the story altogether. On the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), there have been no references to Guatemala genocide trial at all over the past two months. The Washington Post ran one brief item (5/12/13) about Ríos Montt’s conviction .
The PBS NewsHour, which covered the trial several times, made one reference (5/8/13) to Bill Clinton’s apology “for the U.S. government’s role,” and on another broadcast (5/10/13) directed viewers to the PBS website to watch a 1983 debate over U.S. support for Ríos Montt.
Other outlets were more direct. On MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes (5/14/13), the host noted that Rios Montt “oversaw the slaughter of nearly 2,000 indigenous people.” (Note: That’s the number of victims in the specific acts of slaughter for which Ríos Montt was convicted; the full death toll of the Guatemalan genocide is more like 200,000.) Hayes then played this soundbite from Ronald Reagan:
I know that President Rios Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.
And on Democracy Now! (5/15/13), investigative journalist Allan Nairn said that the killings of the era “were crimes not just of General Ríos Montt, but also of the U.S. government.”
And what about the New York Times? Malkin covered the trial fairly extensively for the paper, but before this May 17 piece did not spend much time discussing the U.S. role in supporting the genocide. The May 11 article announcing Rios Montt’s conviction noted that “the involvement of the United States in Guatemala’s politics received scant attention during the trial.” It made this point at the very end of the piece, which closed with Reagan’s comment that Rios Montt was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.”
In 1982 Reagan proclaimed the dictator was getting a “bum rap.” If accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that U.S. media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated. But the record suggests otherwise. Would coverage have looked different if the dictator convicted of genocide was not a U.S. ally?
For the corpress, the history of ignoring such history
Alway repeats itself
When you fail to learn from History, your doomed to reuse the bylines of Failure.
In 1982, the dictator was out of office. Where are the words Jimmy Carter in this piece? http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=6603
Ford was the dicator’s first year. Carter was the next four years. Reagan was sworn in January 1981 and March 1981 is when the dictator tyrant leaves office. Amnesty International did more than Jimmy Carter did. I was a Georgetown student during the dictator’s reign and I remember taking part in protests and wondering why my government couldn’t manage to do much of anything. That was the end of my belief in the two party system.
After chemical weapons were used to kill some 4,000-5,000 Northern Kurds in Iraq on March 16, 1988 during the al-Anfal Campaign/Kurdish Genocide, for years the US gov’t (friends with Saddam at the time) insisted Iran was behind the genocide even though investigations by other gov’ts found that Saddam ordered the attack in response to a failed assassination attempt.
It wasn’t some 14 years later when president-selected George W referenced the genocide specifically to make the case to go to war with Iraq. Keep in mind that Daddy Bush’s Operation Desert Storm (two years later) had absolutely nothing to do with the genocide, and everything to do with driving Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait.
If it had been Russia or China or Iran or any of the enemy of the month our corporate press would have covered it to excess.
The indigenous people in the Ixcan rain forest of Guatemala in 1982 by Rios Montt’s scorched earth campaign returned home from being refugees in Mexico in 1992, I was among the internationals who accompanied them, one of few estadounidenses.
This I know: it was not the resistance against the government repression that carried out massacres, it was the Guatemalan army. The survivors returned beginning in 1992 under a set of Accords the refugees had negotiated with the Guatemalan government, with some international support. One of the 6 points was the accompaniment on the return & during the resettlement by voluntary international observers. Living in return communities such as Victoria 20 de enero, Cuarto Pueblo & others for weeks or months at a stretch in the early 90s, I heard their stories of the Guatemalan army descending on villages on market day, some with identifiable U.S. weapons, of massive slaughter, of people fleeing with nothing but what they were wearing, screaming warnings to others in their scattered villages as they fled, of families separated, of soldiers crashing through the selva (jungle) in pursuit. It wasn’t pretty.
Public Broadcasting was established to better inform… a tool for citizenship.
Broadcasting, depending on advertisers, had been marginalizing critical voices. Public subsidies were provided to overcome the economic liabilities of informing.
Important to the “Reagan Revolution” was subduing public broadcasting….. hammering it as too “liberal”.
An informed public is now viewed as undesirable.
Would coverage have looked different if the dictator convicted of genocide was not a U.S. ally?
You bet Peter,the coverage would have been milked till the cows come home,and of course all for the sheeple public that most are.
Politicians are surrogates for a more powerful group in our country! We were born and raised to accept a bill of goods that is part of the overall lies we are still constantly subjected to! People fail to understand that the same people who took this country and plundered other nations of their human and natural resources, have made sure that their legacy continues! They pick and choose politicians and government officials here and abroad. They get large shares of public wealth here and abroad. They are responsible for abject poverty, slavery, starvation, mass insanity, deaths, and genocide here, and abroad!
Most of us cannot see the whole picture, because we have been assimilated into a small world of lies, fiction, fantasy, propaganda, misinformation, poor health and education, and we are made to believe everything that is bad in this world does not have a particular source. That source is a long heratige of sociopaths with a psychotic pension for hoarding wealth and power. We are ruled-over and manipulated in every way, by evil people who work hard at making us believe otherwise!
Although people like, ‘surrogate presidents’, etc., deserve blame for their roles in world plunder and genocide, they are well paid for their roles, and if they are smart, they do what they are told and do not veer from their particular roles. As for us, even the things we hear and see are difficult to believe, let alone the massive amount of secrets kept from us.
Well the year is 2013.End of May to be exact.Our economy is in a nightmarish death spin.Foreign policy in tatters.Our president and his administration are spurting lies and scandals in a growing frenzy.Each thread pulled leads to ten more.What to do,what to do?How about the president walks on the beach in jersey.Gives speeches on this and that as he hopes the moron brigade will talk about Reagan in 1982 as part of the smokescreen?Pass
Corporate sponcered media does not want revealed the brutal machinations of US foriegn interventionist policy; it’s bad pr for weapons and munitions industries and dealers, who lobby legistslators for these operations .