The new Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border is raising awareness of the often shabby U.S. media treatment of Latin America.

A  recent example is a June 24 L.A. Times piece by Alex Renderos headlined "El Salvador President Under Fire."

The president is former FMLN leader Mauricio Funes, who was elected  last year. According to the Times, things are going poorly for him: Crime and corruption are still problems, he is facing an "avalanche of criticism," and "Salvadorans are growing impatient."

The paper adds:

Funes' failures have hit the poor and working class especially hard. After two decades of one-party right-wing rule, they greeted the rise of the left with great hope. Today they are deeply disillusioned.

When the evidence of public discontent--especially in Latin America--is at least in part based on a newspaper editorial, one should be cautious.

The paper cites recent poll results concerning how Salvadorans  feel about crime and corruption. But what about how they feel about their president? The same poll the Times is citing to show discontent asked direct questions about Funes, and he's actually still very popular, according to this summary:

A full year into his presidency, the 50-year-old Funes remains a popular figure. Respondents in a recent poll by the Universidad Centroamericana's Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública (IUDOP) gave the president a grade of 6.8 out of 10, down somewhat from the 7.16 score he earned last September but still a sign of continued support. Figures released in April by the polling firm Mitofsky put Funes' approval rating at 83 percent, the highest of any Latin America leader.
 

For years U.S. coverage of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told readers that he was highly unpopular, based on dubious polling data. In this case, there are certainly polls relevant to the question of whether Funes is popular--but they undermine the premise of the article, and thus aren't mentioned.

Kudos to the New York Times for publishing a front-page article (10/8/09) about the U.S. advisers and lobbyists who have been working (in one form or another) on behalf of the coup government in Honduras. But the piece glosses over the U.S. history in the region. Reporters Ginger Thompson and Ron Nixon write that the coup government "has also drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and '90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war."

When "the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies"? A little more clarity is needed there. The U.S.--to take two examples--supported a thuggish military government in El Salvador and created a "guerrilla insurgency" to try and defeat a left-wing government in Nicaragua. In other words, while "the region" may have wanted one thing, U.S. foreign policy sought to bolster violent, anti-democratic force. Stating these facts clearly would give readers a better sense of of the context--and demonstrate that people like Otto Reich and Roger Noriega are still on the wrong side.

Proving that the Washington Post is not the only purportedly "liberal" outlet interested in whitewashing the dark history of U.S. involvement in Latin America, Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/23/09) has blogged NPR's March 21 episode of Weekend Edition Saturday, in which the show

returned to the scene of the crimes of El Salvador's 1980s bloodbath--a U.S.-nurtured extreme-right orgy of torture and murder against organized labor, the poor, church leaders and leftists (and their families, friends, associates or potential associates).

There were a few problems with the report. Jason Beaubien's reporting isn't great; he does a little plastic surgery on history, claiming "the Reagan administration jumped into the Cold War conflict, spending billions of dollars to fight the Marxist guerrillas while Cuba and other communist states backed the FMLN." That's a rather tidy and truncated version of the long history of U.S. support for the murderous right in El Salvador--gathering steam and corpses especially in the 1960s.

Mytwords notes how Beaubien's segment conveniently "also ignores the historical record of who killed most of those 75,000-plus civilians in the 'Cold War conflict.'"

The Washington Post editorial page produced a remarkable editorial on Saturday (3/21/09) headlined "Victory in El Salvador." It's not surprising that the Post would try to  argue that the victory of left-wing FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes was not another sign that the region's politics are shifting to the left. No, in fact it was a blow to folks like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez: "El Salvador's election was also a triumph for a system that Mr. Chávez has disregarded: liberal democracy."

The Post didn't elaborate on that idea. They did, unfortunately, attempt to recast U.S. involvement in El Salvador's bloody civil war.  The U.S. provided support to the death squad-linked military leaders over the course of the conflict--a war in which the U.S.-backed government and its allies killed 75,000 Salvadorans, mostly civilians.

Somehow, though, this election was what the U.S. had in mind for El Salvador all along (see bold):

If Mr. Funes as well as the election's losers now respect the rule of law, the result could be the consolidation of the political system the United States was aiming for when it intervened in El Salvador's civil war during the 1980s. At the time, the goal of a successful Salvadoran democracy was dismissed as a mission impossible, just as some now say democracy is unattainable in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the right-wing ARENA party, whose leaders were linked to death squads in the 1980s, proved during the last few years that it could embrace democratic practices. Its presidential candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, acknowledged his defeat on election night.

Official U.S. policy towards El Salvador was based on a paranoid anti-Communism that insisted on supporting any government threatened by left-wing guerrillas, no matter its record of brutality. To suggest the goal was merely the "consolidation of the political system"--the mind reels.

The Post closes by saying the Funes goverment "has the potential to complete a victory for Latin American democracy--and U.S. foreign policy."