THE TIMES AND CENTRAL AMERICAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000200990019-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: March 13, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

-STAT
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LOS ANGELES WEEKLY (CA)
13 March 1987
THE TIMES
AND CENTRAL AMERICA
,DISINFORMATION IN L.A.
The paper of record in Los
Angeles cannot be believed
about Central America. Just
why it misinforms and disin-
forms its readers is an ex-
planation it owes the public.
BAD TIMES FOR CENTRAL AMER
ICA: It was all there in black and white.
Seymour Hash's blockbuster New York
Torres Magazine expose on the covert oper-
ation that CIA Director Wiliam Cagey
was running not only on the press, but also
inside the U. S. government. The 1981
front-page news story about Libyan hit
teams? A total "fabrication" by Casey and
Company, Hersh reported. The "irrefut-
able evidence," cited by the president and
quoted by the press, that Libya was behind
the West German disco bombing? This evi-
dence, it turns out, was rejected by the
German investigative police as inconclu-
sive, and never even handed over to the
National Security Agency's own North
Africa experts for confirmation and inter-
pretation - instead, it was routed directly
to the White House. Nevertheless, on
April 14 the U. S. "retaliated" for the un-
proven or nonexistent Libyan complicity
in the disco attack by dropping 2,000-
pound bombs on Libyan "terrorist and
military installations."
To what purpose? As Hersh reveals, the
"primary goal" of the U. S. attack; svass te-
"assassinate Qadbafi and his family. " In
sum, a carefully crafted White House/
CIA/State Department campaign of disin-
formation and deceit was used to cover an
American initiative to unseat a Third
World regime. We therefore now know the
source of the hundreds of "authoritative"
reports we have been spoon-fed over the
last sit years about the "threat" of Libyan
terrorism: William Casey's diseased mind.
(For more on this subject see the Disinfor-
mationgate cover story.)
All this brings me to the tenor of cover-
age afforded Central America by the local
paper of record: the Los Angeles Times.
No observer with an IQ half his body
weight can doubt that the Reagan adminis-
tration has been employing precisely the
same sort of disinformation campaign used
in the case of Libya against its other foreign
policy obsessions: Nicaragua and El
Salvador. Inexplicably, however, the
Tenses, despite its aggressive and first-rate
pursuit of the Iraq;ate story, continues to
act as a simple State Department Xerox
machine on Central. America. A most tell-
ing example was the Tunes of three Sun-
days ago. Although virtually every day
there are new revelations of administration
lying and disinformation, the Torres' front-
page lead headline - a two-column banner
in most editions - warned: "More Cubans
May. Be in Nicaragua." Then again, they
may not be. Reporter Dan Shannon, in
being- allowed to revive and rattle the
Cuban Commie Bogeyman, could only cite
a single source: an "unnamed official" who
in turn was' quoting unspecified "State
Department reports." You cannot get any
more transparent. Why would the Torres so
A clarification is necessary here: The
Times' editorial-page position on Central
America has been excellent, probably the
very best in the country in a daily news-
paper. The unsigned editorials that appear
as the voce of the paper have been relent-
lessly critical of the administration's
hemispheric policies. Noteworthy too have
beeii some signed op-ed pieces by Tm-u
staffer Frank Del Omo. Also, the Sunday
Opinion section run by Art Seidcabaux
has, though with a more mixed record,
provided a number of insightful debunk
ings of Reagan's Central America policy.
The problem, however, is in the news
pages: in the day-to-day reporting - or
non-reporting - of events on the ground.
The defective coverage of Latin America is
a long-running characteristic of the Times.
So negligent was the paper in the early '70s
(aarrqqund the time of the coup in Chile) that,
W Angeles-area Latin America scholars
and professors organized a collective pro-
test against the paper's foreign news
department, to some effect. There can be
no question that the Torres has improved
and expanded its coverage in the last
decade, and, on the issue of Central Amer-
blithely allow itself to be used in such a bla- ica, even ran up a couple of notable excep
tant1 way to support the administration's ` tions of excellence in Laurie BeckWad's
latest push for aid to the contras? (Another ground-breaking series on the death
vote is imminent.) Why would its editors, squads (though even that was held up from
in t4 e current atmosphere, give front-page publication for months by queaty editors)
lead] space to a report not even mentioned and a 1985 series on the CIA's role in
in most other papers? To explore this ques- creating the contras. But in general, in no
non, one has to know first that the Torres other area of coverage in recent years has
has :a long history of consistently and un- the Torres been so consistently derelict or
questioningly using its pages to funnel owed a greater accounting to its readers for
propaganda and disinformation to its the disservice rendered them. '
readers on the subject of Central America. contilw8d
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The Times' coverage has been "marked
by a self-restraint in challenging the official
government version of events in Central
America," says Dr. Marjorie Bray of the
Cal State L.A. Latin American Studies
Center. "They go with the flow. At best
they nibble at the edges," she adds. Dr.
Blase Bonpane, director of the Santa
Monica-based Office of the Americas,
agrees: "I have been impressed by the edi-
torial stance of the Times, but their news
coverage is weak on Central America. They
have failed to show an understanding of the
hopes of the Nicaraguan people. They play
the game that El Salvador, that Guatemala,
that Honduras are democracies. This is un-
acceptable." From the Times' history of
Central America reporting, some ugly illus-
trative examples:
LIBYAN HIT SQUADS, NICA MIGS
AND CUBANS: The Cuba story of three
weeks ago was an exact replay of the
November 1984 Nicaraguan MiG Crisis, in
reality no crisis at all except in how it af-
fected the credibility of the U.S. press.
"Reagan Warns Against Any MiGs in
Nicaragua" was the headline that kicked
that campaign off, just two days. after
Nicaragua's first free elections in half a
century. The origin of the MiG-scare story
was literally a fourth-hand unconfirmed
source: "intelligence reports" (read: disin-
formation) broadcast by NBC and CBS,
then picked up by the Associated Press,
and then run by the Times. The next day of
the "crisis" the Times put its own Doyle
McManus on the story, bannered with a
two-inch-high bold headline screeching:
"U.S. Warns Soviets on Jets: Might Strike
Bases. " McManus, who has been doing
some penetrating reporting as of late on
Irangate, on that occasion failed to pro-
duce even one source for the "possibility"
(as he put it) that such jets even existed.
More accurate headlines for the above two
stories on the MiG scare would have been:
"Reagan Threatens Nicaragua Again" and
"Reagan Poised To Attack Nicaragua: No
Evidence Cited."
The MiG scare was generated by the
White House because Nicaragua dared to
have elections that further legitimized the
Sandinista government.
And why was the L.A. Tunes right there
nett to Reagan, Shultz and Abrams, kick-
ng and pummeling the Sandinistas? One
:an only conclude that the Tuxes had a pre-
onceived notion about the impossibility of
ree elections and was now out to prove it.
Brat the elections were to institutionalize a
le facto revolutionary regime, that they
vould lead to the creation of a national par-
iament (based largely on the U. S. Con-
ress and not on the model of the
"people's democracies"), that the new
elected assembly would write a constitu-
tion, that opposition parties not only were
permitted to run but received public fi-
nancing for their campaigns and were
given equal air time on Sandinista televi-
sion, and that, in general, Nicaragua had
gone as far as any revolutionary govern-
ment in history in moving quickly and
seriously toward democratic institutions,
was all turned on its head - either dis-
torted or for the most part ignored - by
the Times. On the impact of the vote on
Nicaragua's future, reporter William Long
editorialized in the news section on election
eve that the expected Sandinista victory
would give the government the "confi-
dence to radicalize. " Long made no effort
in his article to substantiate the sweeping
charge, and his editors let the statement go
unchallenged. And while the last two years
of history have proved Long dead wrong,
given Sandinista moderation on regional
peace talks, on the Miskito question and on
revised land-reform policies, very little on
the Sandinistas' shift has appeared in the
Times' news columns. (And since it cer-
tainly doesn't appear on TV, readers might
question whether these events took place
- I assure you they have.)
Long also listed every complaint lodged
by the right-wing coalition that boycotted
the election, a coalition that we later
learned - from the London Times - had
been paid to do so by the U. S. Embassy.
The same coalition that was led by the
mo ferater rturo"Cruz, who we have
now learned was receiving a $7,000 per .
month salary from one Lt. Col. Oliver
North. Long's election-preview piece also
found time to quote President Reagan
calling Nicaragua a "totalitarian dun-
geon." Long finished his "analysis" of the
Nica election by reminding us that Daniel
Ortega "lacks charismatic spark ... his
speeches drone ... and he seems ill-suited
for a political ruler." All these epithets
were repeated two days later in an election
follow-up and then, if you can believe it, 15
months later in a Long-written "profile"
of Ortega.
The Times Teport on the eleetion.?itself
was co-written by Long and - Wit-
Hams, but might as well have n co-
authored by Alexander Haig and Elliot
Abrams. Its lead sentence began: "Mus-
tered to the polls by Sandinista Self-
Defense Committees and Youth Brigades,
Nicaraguans voted Sunday ... " They
did so, readers were told, falsely, because
"rumors circulated [How's that for good
sourcing? ] ... that people who didn't vote
... would be punished." There was no
mention of a national assembly, of a consti-
tution, or of evidence, gathered by so many
other reporters. for so many other publica-
tions, that the Nicaraguan population by,
and large seemed eager to vale, and-to vote
two to one in favor of the Sandinistas.
BALLOTS AND BULLETS: Two years
before, when El Salvador staged demon-
stration elections in order to qualify for an
increase in U. S. aid, the Times was, by con-
trast, ecstatic. Its simplistic news frame:
Budding U.S.-supported democracy over-
comes communist guerrilla subversion and
holds remarkably "free" elections leading
to the promise of a better life for all. Com-
Pare Long and Williams' lead on the Nica
vote with the late Dial Torgerson's deliri-
ously joyous dispatch from San Salvador
on March 29, 1982, headlined "Salvadoran
Voters Jam Polls": "Defying guerrilla
warnings ... Salvadorans jammed polling
places as El Salvador struggled toward a le-
gally elected government. " Further on:
"Foreign experts said it was probably the
most honest election in . Salvadoran
history." Those "experts" are later identi-
fied as the official team of U.S.-chosen
observers on a State Department-paid
junket. Why not ask the Salvadorans in-
stead of the Americans what they thought
about the elections? Had Torgerson done
so he might have gotten the kind of
answers many other reporters did, includ-
ing me as I reported on the voting for The
Village Voice. ""Voting is an obligation.
What would happen to me if I showed up
at work and they checked my ID card and
found that I didn't vote?" an accountant
told me as he waited in line in Santa Tecla.
Or maybe he'd have gotten a response like
that of a 19-year-old student who told me,
"I'm here because I am afraid. There's a
lot of people here just like me." In none of
the limes'coverage of the Salvadoran elec-
tions was there any mention of the tele-
vised speech (not a rumor) by then-defense
minister General Guillermo Garcia warn-
ing Salvadorsibi that if they didn't vote they
would be considered subversives. This at a
time when 5OO "subversives" a month
were being murdered, many found with
their sliced-off genitals stuffed in their
mouths. Nor did the Tunes mention that all
voters had their ID cards stamped with in-
delible ink for future checking, which
would have revealed the primary, reason
that Salvadorans felt the "life-saving"
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need'to have votlt1.- -
While the Times didn't fail to mention
that the Nicaraguan vote took place with
some censorship imposed on the rightist
U. S.-financed paper La Prensa, it omitted
the fact that in El Salvador any remnant of
the opposition press had been dynamited,
bombed, and its editors killed or driven into
exile. While the Times reported "San-
dinista mobs" disrupting opposition elec-
tion rallies, it failed to report that the
Salvadoran vote took place at a time when
the opposition was completely outlawed
and when, in the previous 12 months, as
many as 10,000 real or suspected opposi-
tionists had been butchered by death
squads (which the Times itself would later
report were tied directly to the U.S.-
trained army). And while it refused to
report accurately the changes in the.system
that Nicaraguans were voting on, in the
case of El Salvador the Times gave ample
space to buttressing the massive propagan-
da effort undertaken by the administration
to "sell" the Salvadoran elections - and
the ghoulish regime they legitimized - to
the Congress and ultimately to the public
at large. Two days before the vote even
took place, the slavishly pro-administration
Robert Toth led his Times report with the
statement, "Top administration officials
said ... that the U.S. expects any [Salva-
doran] government elected on Sunday to
continue land reform and other reforms
already underway." Toth, of course,
didn't specify the nature of those reforms
because, as virtually the entire informed
world knows, they existed only in the
minds of the State Department.
A SONOVABITCH, BUT OURS: More
than two years after the first Salvadoran
vote, Times reporters were still singing the
marvels of U.S.-financed democracy. Dur-
ing the March 1984 Salvadoran presiden-
tial elections, the vote was again portrayed
as a democratic challenge to guerrilla vio-
lence. Here's a gem: William. Mon-
talbano, 48 hours before the vote, writes
that "the specter of, stepped-up. guerrilla
violence clouded last-minute preparations
for the elections." We then hear from a
"U. S: , official" , who congratulates the
democratic army of El Salvador for having
"done a damn good job" of preventing
guerrilla attacks. But, curiously, in the
32nd of this article's 36 paragraphs, we
read that the guerrillas announced they
were planning no attacks (and none took
place)! Why, then, the article in the first
place? Clearly it was only because Mon-
talbano, for whatever his and the Taney'
reasons, chose to reinforce the U. S. Em-
bassy's official line, even though that lint
was manufactured purely to set the "pro-
per"
atmosphere for reporting on' the,
"brave" U. S.-financed democrats about to
elect themselves to office.
Six months later, with Napoleon Duarte
already in office, Dan Williams was still
swooning over Washington's favorite
Salvadoran, describing Duarte as "the
Third Force personified ... He has a non-
radical approach ... and has suffered at
the hands of the right." Williams didn't
notice that "non-radical" Duarte presided
over the military-civilian junta during the
period in which 18,000 civilians were mur-
dered by security forces; nor that Duarte is
the man who decreed the state of siege
under which all civil liberties continue to
be suppressed; nor that at the time Wil-
liams wrote his piece Duarte was condon-
ing the underreported air war against
Salvadoran civilians, which caused thou-
sands bf castfa1 es and forced tens of thou-
sands to flee their homes. Rather than
being a man who has "suffered" at the
hands of the right, Duarte has perpetuated
the suffering of the Salvadoran people by
renting himself out as a democratic fig leaf
for one of the most retrograde, vicious
right-wing power elites in the hemisphere.
THEIR DISSIDENTS AND OURS: Let
a Nicaraguan contra leader visiting
Washington so much as sneeze and Times
reporters are all over the place measuring
wind velocity, decibel range and environ-
mental impact. But what kind of press
treatment is given to opponents of "friend-
ly" regimes like El Salvador's? "When it
comes to human-rights questions, when it
comes to representatives of Salvadoran
human-rights groups or church groups
coming through L.A., we get no coverage
from the Times," says Sara Stephens,
human-rights director for local refugee-
assistance center El Rescate.
In May 1986 El Rescate sent a team to El
Salvador to investigate the impact of U. S.
training on Salvadoran police methods and
practices. The team's research found, un-
surprisingly, that torture was a routine part
of both interrogation and imprisonment for
political detainees; that detainees are
denied legal aid as well as trials; and that
the American embassy has done little, if
anything, to ameliorate the situation.
When the El Rescate group returned to
L.A. they held a press conference to detail
their findings. The Times didn't come.
Nor, according to El Rescate, has any re-
porter from the Times bothered to make a
single follow-up call about the "human-
rights bulletins" sent out by El Rescate on
a regular - duringihe past year. "We
have gotten at1equate coverage on human-
interest stories, refugee stories, you know,
individual cases," says Stephens. "But on
human rights we stet no response."
In a similar vein, last fall the Marin In-
terfaith Task Force sent out a detailed
report called "Torture in El Salvador,"
which centered specifically on the torture
of imprisoned human-rights officials. The
Times news department ignored the report.
A copy was sent to the Opinion editor, Art
Seidenbaum, who, in rejecting publication
of the report's findings, told its authors,
"We really have ... no staff for making a
1,500-word article out of a large series of
reports." Given that Seidenbaum could
have asked a staff reporter, or a freelance
academic specialist, or even an intern, to
review the report, what he really meant
was he had no desire to print it.
"The biggest problem with the Times is
whenever anti-intervention activities take
place here in L.A., it is almost always con-
spicuously ignored," says Bobbi Murray,
who from 1984 to '86 coordinated Infor-
mation Central America, a task force of
local activists trying to "enhance the
media's understanding" of El Salvador
and Nicaragua. Murray complains that, for
example, Medical Aid for El Salvador's
1984 campaign to expose the use of incen-
diary explosives (napalm and white
phosphorus) by the Duarte-regime was all
but ignored by the Times. "In June 1984
Medical Aid held a press conference with
[actor] Mike Farrell to show the pictures
we had gotten of civilian burn victims and
to read firsthand testimony of white
phosphorus use. Our info made it onto
TV, but again, the Tuna reported noth-
ing." Two months later, Medical Aid sent
a delegation - including a staff and a Har-
vard medical specialist - to El Salvador to
more tidsely investigate napIa m use. In an,
interview with then-Medical Aid- director
Cristina Cortright, UPS. Ambassador
Thomas Pickering admitted for the first
time that, indeed, the Salvadoran Air
Force had "stockpiles" of napalm. This
story was broken prominently by Wayne
Biddle, reporting for The New York
Times.
Murray says she then called the L.A.
Times to point out the story and to show
that it even had a "local" angle in that the
revelation of napalm stocks was the result
of an investigation by a Los Angeles group.
"I explained all this to the Metro desk,"
says Murray, "but all I got was a snide re-
sponse. I was told, `We don't have our
man in El Salvador, Dan Williams, risking
his life so we can be breaking Salvador
stories here in L.A.' In other words, a
brick wall." A year and a half later, when
Cortright returned from another, trip to El
Salvador, she submitted an op-ed piece to
the Times recounting her witnessing of the
bombing of the civilian population. Op-e&
editor Bob Berger rejected the piece
without explanation.
~~,tinwal3
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SO WHAT?: Even if all the tanning
parlors in town withdrew their ads from
the L.A. Weekly and that space was turned
over to this column, there still wouldn't be
room to detail all of the sins of commission
and omission in the Times' coverage of
Central America. In future columns I will
review Contadora, the air war, the Miski-
tos and more. But some conclusions can be
drawn from the examples cited above: A
clear double standard is at play in the
Times' respective treatment of El Salvador
and Nicaragua. It is the same double stand-
ard with which the administration justified
its arms-to-Iran-for-hostages deal. Put
simply, it is this: Anybody - and I mean
this quite literally - anybody who deals
with us is a priori declared a "moderate."
Likewise, anyone uppity enough to chal-
lenge our world view is a radical, a subver-
sive, a creature lacking any consideration,
credibility or legitimacy. The Iranians
might be theocratic obscurantists and
killers, but the day they decide to cooper-
ate with us they will be in fact, they
already have been - transmogrified into
"moderates." The Salvadorans can bomb,
butcher, murder, rape, torture and starve
their people, but they don't vote against us
in the U.N., they respect private property
(as long as it is U. S.-owned), and they
gladly accept our dominance of the
hemisphere. They are also "moderates"!
Conversely, in the Times' eye, Salva-
doran guerrillas and Sandinistas both come
from that horrible murky swamp of human
spiritual degradation known as Marxism.
Nothing, therefore, but absolutely nothing
they do or don't do in the realm of political
policy will ever be able to compensate for
that original sin. That the demonification
of the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran guer-
rillas, along with the concurrent glorifica-
tion of the murderous Duarte regime, is
just one more administration disinforma-
tion campaign, one no less insidious than
the Casey-Shultz prevarications about
Libya, seems to have had no chastening ef-
fect on the Times. Perhaps it will take
another 10,000-word article by Seymour
Hersh (hopefully before and not after a
U. S. invasion of Central America) to force
the Times to see to what degree it is compli-
cit with official deceit and to begin to do
justice by its readers on the crucially im-
portant subject of Central America. ^
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