Thimbles worth of opinion
Symetrically challenged
Registered: Aug 2000
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Nah, I will say that making a big deal about Violetta Chamorro when comparing her situation to the ones in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and Columbia is a little crass.
Ortega was no saint, maybe, but he let her live while the country was in an illegal state of seige by president do-no-evil Reagan.
In any of the countries above, each under less dratic circumstances, she would be dead, just like her husband under the Somozas. To Ortega's credit, she lived.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c05-s01.html
An interesting chapter from "Neccessary Illusions".
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c05-s07.html
quote:
Freedom of the press, for example, is a prime concern for the media and the intellectual community. The major issue of freedom of the press in the 1980s has surely been the harassment of La Prensa in Nicaragua. Coverage of its tribulations probably exceeds all other reporting and commentary on freedom of the press throughout the world combined, and is unique in the passion of rhetoric. No crime of the Sandinistas has elicited more outrage than their censorship of La Prensa and its suspension in 1986, immediately after the congressional vote of $100 million for the contras, a vote that amounted to a virtual declaration of war by the United States, as the Reaganites happily proclaimed, and a sharp rebuff to the World Court. La Prensa publisher Violeta Chamorro was at once given an award by the Nieman Journalism Foundation at Harvard for her courageous battle for freedom of speech. In the New York Review of Books, Murray Kempton appealed to all those committed to free expression to provide financial aid for the brave struggle of the owners and editors to maintain their staff and equipment; such gifts would supplement the funding provided by the U.S. government, which began shortly after the Sandinista victory, when President Carter authorized the CIA to support La Prensa and the anti-Sandinista opposition. Under the heading "A Newspaper of Valor," the Washington Post lauded Violeta Chamorro, commenting that she and her newspaper "deserve 10 awards." Other media commentary has been abundant and no less effusive, while the Sandinistas have been bitterly condemned for harassing or silencing this Tribune of the People.
We now ask whether these sentiments reflect libertarian values or service to power, applying the standard test of sincerity. How, for example, did the same people and institutions react when the security forces of the Duarte government that we support eliminated the independent media in the U.S. client state of El Salvador -- not by intermittent censorship and suspension, but by murder, mutilation, and physical destruction? We have already seen the answer. There was silence. The New York Times had nothing to say about these atrocities in its news columns or editorials, then or since, and others who profess their indignation over the treatment of La Prensa are no different. This extreme contempt for freedom of the press remains in force as we applaud our achievements in bringing "democracy" to El Salvador.
We conclude that, among the articulate intellectuals, those who believe in freedom of the press could easily fit in someone's living room, and would include few of those who proclaim libertarian values while assailing the enemy of the state.
To test this conclusion further, we may turn to Guatemala. No censorship was required in Guatemala while the United States was supporting the terror at its height; the murder of dozens of journalists sufficed. There was little notice in the United States. With the "democratic renewal" that we proudly hail, there were some halting efforts to explore the "political space" that perhaps had opened. In February 1988, two journalists who had returned from exile opened the center-left weekly La Epoca, testing Guatemalan "democracy." A communiqué of the Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA) had warned returning journalists: "We will make sure they either leave the country or die inside it." No notice was taken in the United States.
In April great indignation was aroused when La Prensa could not publish during a newsprint shortage. For the Washington Post, this was another "pointed lesson in arbitrary power...by denying La Prensa the newsprint." There were renewed cries of outrage when La Prensa was suspended for two weeks in July after what the government alleged to be fabricated and inflammatory accounts of violence that had erupted at demonstrations.
Meanwhile, on June 10, fifteen heavily armed men broke into the offices of La Epoca, stole valuable equipment, and firebombed the offices, destroying them. They also kidnapped the night watchman, releasing him later under threat of death if he were to speak about the attack. Eyewitness testimony and other sources left little doubt that it was an operation of the security forces. The editor held a press conference on June 14 to announce that the journal would shut down "because there are not conditions in the country to guarantee the exercise of free and independent journalism." After a circular appeared threatening "traitor journalists" including "communists and those who have returned from exile," warning them to flee the country or find themselves "dead within," he returned to exile, accompanied to the airport by a Western diplomat. Another journalist also left. The destruction of La Epoca "signalled not only the end of an independent media voice in Guatemala, but it served as a warning as well that future press independence would not be tolerated by the government or security forces," Americas Watch commented.
These events elicited no public response from the guardians of free expression. The facts were not even reported in the New York Times or Washington Post, though not from ignorance, surely. It is simply that the violent destruction of independent media is not important when it takes place in a "fledgling democracy" backed by the United States. There was, however, a congressional reaction, NACLA reported: "In Washington, liberal Democratic Senators responded by adding $4 million onto the Administration's request for military aid. With Sen. Inouye leading the way, these erstwhile freedom-of-the-press junkies have offered the brass $9 million plus some $137 million in economic aid, including $80 million cash, much of which goes to swell the army's coffers," while La Epoca editor Bryan Barrera "is back in Mexico" and "Guatemala's press is again confined to rightwing muckraking and army propaganda." The vigilant guardians of freedom of the press observed in silence.
A few weeks later, Israeli security forces raided the offices of a leading Jerusalem daily, Al-Fajr, arresting its managing editor Hatem Abdel-Qader and jailing him for six months without trial on unspecified security grounds.49 There were no ringing editorial denunciations or calls for retribution; in fact, these trivialities were not even reported in the New York Times or Washington Post. Unlike Violeta Chamorro, to whom nothing of the sort has happened, Abdel-Qader does not "deserve 10 awards," or even one, or even a line.
Once again, the facts are clear: the alleged concern for freedom of the press in Nicaragua is sheer fraud.
Perhaps one might argue that censorship of La Prensa is more important than the murder of an editor by U.S.-backed security forces and the destruction of offices by the army or its terrorist squads, because La Prensa is a journal of such significance, having courageously opposed our ally Somoza under the leadership of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, assassinated by the dictator in 1978. That would be a poor argument at best; freedom of the press means little if it only serves powerful institutions. But there are further flaws. One is that the post-1980 La Prensa bears virtually no relation to the journal that opposed Somoza. After the murder of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, his brother Xavier became editor and remained so until the owners ousted him in 1980; 80 percent of the staff left with him and founded El Nuevo Diario, which is the successor to the old La Prensa if we consider a journal to be constituted of its editor and staff, not its owners and equipment. The new editor of La Prensa, son of the assassinated editor, had previously been selling advertising; later, he joined the CIA-run contra directorate, remaining co-editor of the journal, which publicly supports his stand.
These facts are not be found in the media tributes to the brave tradition of La Prensa; they are either unmentioned in the course of lamentations over the fate of this "newspaper of valor," or treated in the style of Stephen Kinzer, who writes that El Nuevo Diario "was founded...by a breakaway group of employees of La Prensa sympathetic to the Sandinista cause" -- a "breakaway group" that included 80 percent of the staff and the editor, who opposed the new line of the CIA-supported journal.
The extent of the hypocrisy becomes still more obvious when we consider the "newspaper of valor" more closely. The journal has quite openly supported the attack against Nicaragua. In April 1986, as the campaign to provide military aid to the contras was heating up, one of the owners, Jaime Chamorro, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post calling for aid to "those Nicaraguans who are fighting for democracy" (the standard reference to the U.S. proxy forces). In the weeks preceding the summer congressional votes, "a host of articles by five different La Prensa staff members denounced the Sandinistas in major newspapers throughout the United States," John Spicer Nichols observes, including a series of Op-Eds signed by La Prensa editors in the Washington Post as they traveled to the United States under the auspices of front organizations of the North contra-funding network. Under its new regime, La Prensa has barely pretended to be a newspaper; rather, it is a propaganda journal devoted to undermining the government and supporting the attack against Nicaragua by a foreign power. Since its reopening in October 1987 the commitments are quite open and transparent. To my knowledge, there is no precedent for the survival and continued publication of such a journal during a period of crisis in any Western democracy, surely not the United States.
Advocates of libertarian values should, nonetheless, insist that Nicaragua break precedent in this area, despite its dire straits, and deplore its failure to do so. As already mentioned, however, such advocates are not easy to discover, as the most elementary test of sincerity demonstrates.
It should also be mentioned that under Chamoro's neo-liberal leadership the country has turned into a shithole and that the Sandanista's have made a resurgence in Nicaruagan politics, propmting the likes of Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld to make veiled threats around election time.
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01-20-2005 08:46 AM
