Washing U.S. Hands of the Dirty Wars: News Coverage Erases Washington’s Role in State Terror

[Judi Lynn]

Washing U.S. Hands of the Dirty Wars: News Coverage Erases Washington’s Role in State Terror
By Kevin Young

Source: NACLA Report on the Americas
Saturday, June 29, 2013

Recently the Latin American “dirty wars” of the 1960s-80s have resurfaced in mainstream media discussion. One reason is the trials in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Peru, and Uruguay against some of the late twentieth century’s most vicious criminals, who are collectively responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of political dissidents and their suspected sympathizers. Some of the highest-profile defendants are Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83), Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971-86), and various officials from Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-83). Dozens of former Argentine military officials have been convicted since 2008, while prosecutions against Ríos Montt and other Guatemalan officials and Haiti’s Duvalier have been attempted since 2011.

Despite dedicating substantial coverage to these events, U.S. news outlets have usually ignored the role of the U.S. government in supporting these murderous right-wing regimes through military aid and diplomatic support. This pattern also applies to press coverage of current U.S.-backed “dirty wars,” in Honduras and elsewhere [1].

The U.S. and the Dirty Wars: An Amnesiac’s View

The documentary record leaves no doubt about U.S. support for state terror in Latin America’s dirty wars. Although historians debate whether U.S. support was decisive in particular cases, all serious scholars agree that Washington played at least an important enabling role [2]. Argentina, Guatemala, and Haiti are good examples.

Argentina’s military regime murdered, tortured, and raped tens of thousands of people, mainly leftists, who criticized government policy. During the height of the repression the U.S. government gave the junta over $35 million in military aid and sold it another $43 million in military supplies [3]. It was well aware of the state terror it was supporting. Three months after the 1976 coup, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger privately told Argentine Foreign Minister César Guzzetti that “we have followed events in Argentina closely” and “wish the new government well. We wish it will succeed…If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly” [4].

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/washing-u-s-hands-of-the-dirty-wars-news-coverage-erases-washington-s-role-in-state-terror-by-kevin-young

[Judi Lynn]

1. Worth seeing, from the article:

Argentina, Guatemala, and Haiti are just three examples of U.S. support for repression. Political scientist Lars Schoultz has measured the statistical relationship between U.S. aid and repression by Latin American governments for the years 1975-77, finding a clear pattern: “The correlations between the absolute level of U.S. assistance to Latin America and human rights violations by recipient governments” were “uniformly positive, indicating that aid has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens” [8]. The logic is not a mystery: Washington has always preferred U.S.-friendly oligarchs and murderers when faced with the threats of substantive democracy, economic redistribution, and independent nationalism.

Yet the documentary record and scholarly consensus are not reflected in U.S. press coverage. As the table below shows, even the nation’s leading liberal media almost never acknowledge U.S. support for the dictatorships in Argentina, Guatemala, and Haiti. Only 13 times over the past five years did any allusion to that support appear in coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio (NPR), despite 222 total news and opinion pieces that mentioned former dictatorship officials in those countries. In other words, these media outlets acknowledged U.S. support just 6 percent of the time.

~snip~
Recently the U.S. press has strongly condemned the Argentine, Guatemalan, and Haitian dictatorships, decrying for instance Duvalier’s “squalid legacy of disappearance, torture and murder” and interviewing Argentine torture victims and children stolen from their parents at birth by the military [10]. The problem is that the perpetrators appear simply as brutal criminals in far-off lands, with no connection whatsoever to the United States.

Coverage that does mention the U.S. role often casts the United States as an advocate for democracy and human rights. One 2011 Times report on Duvalier says only that the United States helped arrange for his “departure from Haiti” in 1986. A 2012 Times report on charges against Efraín Ríos Montt says that “Washington has demanded that Guatemala prosecute human rights violations as a condition for receiving military aid,” while saying nothing of past U.S. support for the man on trial or the fact that the current Guatemalan president, a U.S. ally, has also been implicated in civilian massacres during the country’s civil war [11].

[marmar]

2. k/r