11

Freedom of Expression in the Free World

In the case of Nicaragua, the compliance of elite opinion is revealed very clearly by what is called “the debate” over the U.S. intervention. This “debate” reached its peak in the first three months of 1986, as Congress prepared to vote on contra aid. During this period, the two major national newspapers—the New York Times and the Washington Post—devoted to this matter no less than 85 opinion pieces by regular columnists and invited contributors.1 All 85 were critical of the Sandinistas, the overwhelming majority bitterly hostile; thus total conformity was maintained on the central issue. In 85 columns, there was not a single phrase noting that in sharp contrast to our loyal allies and clients, the Sandinista government, whatever its sins, does not slaughter its own population; the irrelevance of this evidently insignificant fact is just another indication of the ease with which we tolerate horrendous atrocities committed by “our side.” In 85 columns, there were two phrases referring to the fact that the Sandinista government attempted social reforms before this dangerous development was aborted by the U.S. terrorist attack.

Naturally, there could be no contribution to the “debate” by the charitable development organization Oxfam, which reports that “Among the four countries in the region where Oxfam America works [Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua], only in Nicaragua has a substantial effort been made to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational, and agricultural services to poor peasant families”; “from Oxfam’s experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength” of the commitment of the political leadership “to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process.”2 Oxfam adds that it has been compelled to shift its efforts from development to war relief, a grand success for the American war, which also provides U.S. moralists with a welcome opportunity to denounce Sandinista failures and “mismanagement.” None of this can be known apart from narrow circles that escape the constraints of the indoctrination system, and it is inexpressible in the opinion pages of the national press when the time comes to “debate” the propriety of an escalation of the attack against Nicaragua.

The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire, thus succeeds in concealing what was plainly the real reason for the U.S. attack, sometimes conceded openly by administration spokesmen. “Few US officials now believe the contras can drive out the Sandinistas soon,” Central America correspondent Julia Preston reports. “Administration officials said they are content to see the contras debilitate the Sandinistas by forcing them to divert scarce resources toward the war and away from social programs.”3 These horrifying statements are blandly reported, evoking no comment, quickly forgotten. The U.S. will not permit constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere to terminate “the threat of a good example.” And elite ideological management will ensure that no such topics enter the arena of discussion, within respectable circles. Rather, the framework of discussion established by Operation Truth must be adopted, with no deviation tolerated, though it is then permitted to raise timid questions about whether the administration has selected the right means to achieve its “noble objectives.”

The narrow conformism of the media is in part a response to the needs of the state propaganda system, in part a contribution to guaranteeing its effectiveness. The task is also surely consciously pursued. It is intriguing, for example, to see how rarely professional Latin Americanists are called upon for comment, in striking contrast to other regions and other topics, where the academic profession can be relied on to provide the desired opinions, thus protecting the fabled “objectivity” of the press. To select one example, it is a staple of Operation Truth that the 1984 elections in Nicaragua were a hopeless fraud while those in El Salvador at the same time were a dramatic victory for democracy. Therefore, it is necessary to suppress the official report of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) on the Nicaraguan elections, along with corroborative reports by a balanced Irish Parliamentary Delegation and others, because it simply drew the wrong conclusions after a careful inquiry by American academic specialists on Nicaragua. Similarly, it was necessary to exclude or to falsify commentary by international observers on both elections, including even those highly supportive of the American project, because they compared the Nicaraguan elections quite favorably with those in El Salvador, concluding that in Nicaragua the elections “were more open than in El Salvador” and that by the elections, “the legitimacy of the government is thus confirmed.”4 Plainly such material is inappropriate, given that editors and other commentators have a serious responsibility: they must contrast “the elected governments” of the “fledgling democracies” and their “elected presidents” with the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of Nicaragua, just as their counterparts in Pravda must laud the “peoples democracies” of the peace-loving states of the Eastern zone, and contrast them with the warmongers controlled by fascists.

The practice is far more general, and it is understandable. Pursuing their commitment to objectivity in reporting on “the fledgling democracies” and “the resistance” to tyranny in Nicaragua, the national press can hardly be expected to report the conclusions of international observers who found that the Salvadoran elections of 1984 were conducted in an “atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality,”5 or to approach mainstream scholars who describe the contras as “a hopeless band of blood-thirsty mercenaries” and observe that “The willingness of the Nicaraguan population to fight in defense of their revolution is what turned back the Contra attacks and gave pause to policy makers contemplating an invasion.”6

The media have, in fact, been compelled to develop a new cadre of experts who can be called upon to define the approved spectrum of opinion. Thus in the news columns of the New York Times, R. W. Apple presents the spectrum of responsible opinion, ranging from Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute to contra lobbyist Robert Leiken. Falcoff tells us that the Reaganites whom he supports have been “stupid and maladroit” while “the Democrats on the Hill keep pretending that this Government in Managua is a Social Democratic humanist regime bumbling its way toward democracy” (in the real world, congressional opinion is as uniformly anti-Sandinista as the press7). And Leiken comments that “both sides are basically hysterical,” refusing to cope with reality,” the reality being that Nicaragua is caught in a “contest between Moscow and Washington” with the superpowers represented locally by the “Soviet-backed expansionist Sandinista regime” for which popular support has “virtually vanished,” and the peasant-based “resistance” that he supports, which expresses “the antihegemonist sentiments of the Nicaraguan people” and must undertake a “protracted struggle” of “armed resistance to the Sandinistas,” leading the defense of Latin America against “Soviet hegemonism.”8 Beyond the respectable Falcoff-Leiken spectrum, the Times news columns inform us, the “issue’s subtleties” are “buried in epithets,” mere “mudslinging,” entirely unserious.

Other views could be discovered, even within the narrow ideological confines of the media. They include not only charitable development agencies with ample experience in the region and elsewhere and professional Latin Americanists, but also respected Latin American figures with long and close associations with the United States: for example, the founding father of Costa Rican democracy, three-time President José (Pepe) Figueres, who describes Nicaragua as “an invaded country” and calls upon the United States to allow the Sandinistas “to finish what they started in peace; they deserve it”:

After all, the Sandinistas were elected as fairly as anyone else in Central America, except for Costa Rica, where we have a real democratic tradition that the other countries lack . . . All my life I fought against the Somoza dynasty because it was expansionist. They bought large properties in Costa Rica and persistently interfered with our internal affairs. Moreover, they were accomplished torturers and villains. The U.S. embassy in Managua supported them. I helped to organize countless movements to overthrow them and am grateful to the Sandinistas for finally achieving their ouster. Now, for the first time, Nicaragua has a government that cares for its people. I would have preferred a different approach to government in Managua. I am a fervent democrat and favor an electoral system along with freedom of the press. I was very sorry that they recently closed La Prensa but I also understand that Nicaragua is a nation at war, besieged by the United States and the regional oligarchies. When Somoza invaded Costa Rica in 1948 and again in 1955, we too established censorship of the press until the threat was over. As much as I disagree with the closing of La Prensa, I also understand why it happened.9

Clearly these sentiments do not serve the needs of Operation Truth, so the media must be careful to protect the inhabitants of “enemy territory” from the pernicious influence of the leading democratic figure in Central America.

As distinct from Leiken and other media favorites, Figueres reports that he found “a surprising amount of support for the government” on a recent visit. The same is true of other visitors, e.g., British TV correspondent Trevor McDonald who concludes that Daniel Ortega’s “greatest achievement is that he has been able to convince most Nicaraguans that the Sandinista revolution is still worth fighting and suffering for.”10

While the founder of Costa Rican democracy is not worth hearing, Costa Rican opinion is not excluded in principle from the media. Thus there is space for a columnist of the ultra-right-wing journal La Nación condemning Nicaragua for such sins as “its defamatory claims about Costa Rica”—meaning, its true charges about use of Costa Rican territory for attacks against Nicaragua, brought by Nicaragua to the World Court in accordance with international law, an infuriating violation of good form by the standards of a terrorist culture.11

Or the press might report the conclusions of Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, whose visit to Central America showed him “the intervention, the repression, and the grave violation of human rights which the United States is committing” and who condemns the U.S. violation of international law and its efforts to undermine negotiations.12 Or the Catholic Institute of International Relations in London, which identifies the “fundamental cause for the conflict between the US and Nicaragua” as “the relations between rich and poor on the Latin American continent”:

The Sandinistas have brought about a shift of power within Nicaragua from the rich to the poor. Their chief opponents in Nicaragua are those who have lost wealth or status through the revolution. It is with these people, and with their like throughout Latin America, that U.S. governments are allied, militarily, through investment and commercial relations and by ties of friendship. The consequences of these links have been demonstrated on many occasions, from Guatemala in 1954, through Chile in 1973 to El Salvador today. To most of the population of the continent, therefore, President Reagan’s talk of freedom means the freedom of the rich to humiliate, exploit, and, if they judge it necessary, murder the poor

—the “Fifth Freedom” that is a determining factor in U.S. policy planning.13 “The practical achievements of the Nicaraguan revolution,” they continue, offer the poor “an alternative model and make Nicaragua a symbol of the hope that, despite all the odds, a better life is possible.”14

Similarly, one is unlikely to find in the U.S. media a November 26, 1985 message to the Nicaraguan people by Fr. Manuel Henrique, president of the Brazilian National Commission of Clergy, expressing

our solidarity with your struggle for a democratic and free nation based on justice. We condemn the cowardly aggression inflicted on your land by the Reagan administration, and we protest against every form of slavery imposed by the capitalist powers on our poor countries. That enslavement is sinful.

Even statements by Nicaraguan church groups critical of the Sandinistas are inappropriate when they are not useful for the cause, for example, the Pastoral Letter of the Baptist Convention of Nicaragua of May 1985, denouncing the “illegal . . . blockade carried out by the United States Government” and expressing their “hurt” over the fact that

in the last few months more than 150 children have been murdered by the aggression financed and sustained by the United States Government . . . 9000 people have been murdered by the counter-revolution, 900 adult education centers have been obliged to close, with 250 of their participants being murdered; 17 schools were totally destroyed and 360 have been forced to close; 170 teachers were murdered and 180 kidnapped, 150 agrarian cooperatives were destroyed and 11 infant care centers have been closed down. It hurts us deeply that a country like Nicaragua— small, poor, indebted and lashed by every kind of calamity—suffer economic damages that already surpass $1 billion.15

Equally abhorrent to the Free Press is the Resolution of the Conference of the Interparliamentary Union, convening in Managua in April-May 1987 with delegates from 90 nations. Approved unanimously except for El Salvador, whose proposal to add their contention that their country was being attacked by a foreign power was rejected, the Resolution “Calls on the United States to pay heed to the findings of the World Court, to cease all military activities within and against Nicaragua,” and condemns the U.S. embargo.16 It was not mentioned in the New York Times or Washington Post (or elsewhere, to my knowledge), though the press reported the conference, dismissing it as “of little real importance”17—as indeed it is, given the realities of power and the doctrines of Operation Truth.

Nor is attention likely to be drawn to the denunciation of U.S. policy by the representatives of the elected legislatures in Latin America, meeting in April 1986 under the auspices of the World Parliamentary Union, whose declaration, adopted unanimously, said: “Deserving special condemnation is the open intervention in the problems of Nicaragua by the U.S. government and sectors of the U.S. Congress,” an intervention in “flagrant violation of international law” that is a “threat to the sovereignty of the republics of Latin America.”18

Such conclusions, or the evidence that supports them, would not be consistent with the required image of Nicaragua as a totalitarian dungeon and of the U.S. as engaged in the “noble cause” of bringing “democracy” to its suffering people, as it has done under the Reagan Doctrine in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Consequently, the media must be careful to exclude such perceptions rigorously, keeping to the approved guidelines as to how facts may be selected, presented and interpreted, in accordance with the dictates of the Office of Public Diplomacy. And so they do, with impressive consistency and only rare departures, as illustrated in the sample of the national press above.

It is striking that even this level of media subservience to the state propaganda system does not suffice for the respected “democrats” of the Nicaraguan opposition or their advocates here. Thus in a cover story of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Arturo Cruz, Jr. informs us that “the contras, so charismatic in Nicaragua, were always terrible at public relations in America” where the Sandinistas “won the [Madison Avenue] war handily.” “They learned how to please America and how to play with American public opinion . . . The Sandinistas have hired the effective American mercenaries: not the soldiers, but the public relations firms—American mercenaries of ideas.” American Senators want “to align with” the Sandinistas “so that they could take their alignment back to the United States and pose with it for their constituency,” which explains the constant stream of pro-Sandinista propaganda on the Senate floor and in the mass media. The problem faced by the contras, he explains in the New Republic, is that they are “unable to speak the very special language necessary to communicate with American journalists,” offering responses that are considered “too pedestrian and tacky to be truly revolutionary” by the ultraleftists who dominate the U.S. press.19 Cruz Sr., the leading official democrat, chimes in as well. As distinct from José Figueres and others, his thoughts are reported in the Free Press, which naturally takes his perceptions to be accurate, describing him as the spokesman of “the center-left leadership”:

After watching the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua consistently score public relations victories in the United States, notes Mr. Cruz, [Oliver] North’s riveting testimony has turned the tables. “This could be the first time the contra movement has had its day in court, so to speak, in this country,” Cruz says.20

Finally, through the intervention of the great democrat Oliver North, the contras were able to break through the incessant barrage of pro-Sandinista propaganda that floods the U.S. media and Congress, and to overcome the barriers erected by the Sandinista dominated media to the expression of any criticism of Nicaragua or, surely, any support for the contras, whose advocates have languished in enforced silence.

Cruz Sr. and his associates also offer other typical Reaganite fantasies with no harm to their reputations. Thus the South American governments only pretend to be opposed to the contra attack; “usually they act in Central America in terms of their own extreme left constituencies” (Cruz), fearing their “Marxist-Leninist minorities” (Alfonso Robelo).21

Similarly, U.S. supporters of the contras complain that “Left-wing opponents of contra aid have thrashed the administration in the propaganda battle on campuses, in churches, and in the press” (Morton Kondracke) and tell us that “the American public is caught in a bitter propaganda war over Nicaragua,” between the Reaganites and the Sandinistas’ “well-organized network of ‘opposition’ figures, ‘witnesses,’ ‘correspondents,’ and professional writers of letters to editors” (Robert Leiken). No less frustrated over the awesome power of the Sandinista lobby, A. M. Rosenthal denounces “the pro-Sandinistas in press and politics” who are “contemptuous about the goal of political democracy in Nicaragua” because “they are more interested in continuation of Sandinista rule than in peace,” and who act “as if it were a damnable sin to suggest that the United States should not immediately destroy the contras, whose existence brought about the opportunity for negotiations”22—in the manner that we have reviewed.

In short, the extraordinary constraints on expressible opinion just illustrated and the virtually unswerving loyalty of the media and Congress to the fundamental doctrines of Operation Truth are not sufficient. Even the tactical objections raised to the pursuit of the “noble cause” by bitter opponents of the Sandinistas are intolerable, a proof that the media are controlled by pro-Sandinista “mercenaries of ideas” and that the critics are so committed to Sandinista rule that they prefer it to democracy or peace. As long as no way has been found to stop talks in churches or letters to the editor by people who have lived and worked in Nicaragua, and are therefore naturally to be dismissed with sneers drawn from the familiar litany, as long as the slightest deviation from total servility to the state is still visible, then that proves that the enemy is within the gates and all is lost.

The totalitarian mentality is revealed with much clarity in such pronouncements.