Why Am I Not Surprised?

When I turned on the radio, I was surprised to hear the authoritative voice of a woman I thought to be a news anchor introducing a scientist, a qualified individual I was led to believe, who declared that fears of global warming were unfounded and assured listeners that such phenomena were merely part of the Earth’s natural cycle. When the clip ended I learned that I had just been listening to a VNR.

In November of this year, Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price released a report for the Center for Media and Democracy entitled “Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs.” This is a follow-up report to their original finding that 46 television stations in 22 American states were airing video news releases, fake news reports provided by PR firms, without disclosing their nature, source, or sponsorship. This information is shown on VNRs before the main content, but television stations frequently edit it out. News anchors introduce the subject and speakers of VNRs then seamlessly cut to the story. The viewer is left to think that this is a news item like any other and will view it with the same confidence in its veracity and impartiality.

The truth is that the information given in VNRs can be misleading or even wrong, and they are anything but impartial, being funded by and scripted for corporate and government clients. Included in the report are 33 VNRs with sponsors such as General Mills, GlaxoSmithKline, and General Motors. Take the VNR that I heard on the radio, for example. It was entitled “Global Warming and Hurricanes: All Hot Air?” and was released in June 2006 by the broadcast PR firm Medialink Worldwide. They declined to mention that their client was a website published by Tech Central Station, which was at the time a project of the Republican lobbying and PR firm DCI Group. Exxon Mobil is a DCI Group client and has made generous donations to Tech Central Science Foundation for its support on the issue of climate change. The VNR speakers were two scientists who, in contradiction to the scientific community at large, purport that global warming is a “hoax” and have profitable relations with corporations which seek to propagate and legitimize this opinion.

This doesn’t relate to rights exactly (though a few corporations named in the report complained that it was an affront to their freedom of speech) but I think that it exposes an important issue. Farsetta and Price aren’t calling for the censorship or banning of VNRs, only that their use be clearly and fully disclosed so that viewers can make a critical assessment of their content. I want to say that we have the right to know the truth, but I don’t think that the charter actually covers that one, so we’ll have to leave it up to journalistic integrity.

Read the report summary and highlights and watch VNRs:
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews2/execsummary

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A Dangerous Symmetry

The themes of circularity and continuity in the Ixil Triangle reading provide a good topic for discussion. They first appear when the author describes how the Spaniards, after vanquishing the Quichés and the Ixils, “took over the existing structure of subjugation and tribute already laid out”(63) by the elites of the indigenous peoples themselves. Before the Spaniards set foot on the continent, it was already immersed in a history of conflict, there were the oppressed and indebted and those who reaped the benefits of these conditions. Were the Spaniards merely inserted into a dominant role destined to be played by various actors over centuries of Guatemalan history? Their brutality and greed, therefore, were to be expected of a dominant actor. Their subjugation of non-dominant actors was only unusual because its destructiveness was intensified by their guns, bacteria, and horses. Otherwise history continued as usual, an endless contest between winners and losers. The author seems to suggest this interpretation. The “recurring cycles” and “remarkable symmetry” which he observes in Guatemalan history give the impression of order and inevitability.

Multiple instances of history repeating itself under different guises are cited within the reading. For example, the civilian patrols made in the 1980s to seek out subversion were said to echo the militias formed to protect colonial Spanish landowners, each fighting its own specter of threat, and the model villages maintained by the army in the Mayan highlands, also in the 1980s, reflect the strategy of the colonial Spaniards to fracture indigenous communities to facilitate their control and exploitation. Each individual element may pass away but the author appears to be illustrating that same roles run throughout history. There is always an oppressor and an oppressed who engage in essentially the same actions across time. This is where the notion of history as a permanent confrontation emerges; these roles involve asserting dominance, quashing threat, overthrowing old regimes with new ones. As the captain from the Guatemalan army unequivocally states, “the war against subversion is total, permanent, and universal”(82).

The historical perspectives discussed above are extremely problematic because they rob certain groups of agency and deny the possibility of change, as well as set up the framework for excusing historical wrongs and perpetrating new ones. If a human nature is posited which inherently creates social differentiation and seeks dominance over others, there is always an acceptable other and underdog. Even though power changed hands over the centuries of Guatemalan history and the perceived threat to the established order changed, a state of victimizers and victims endured, with the indigenous communities as the perpetual victim. This perspective of history is clearly one that will perpetuate violence in all of its manifestations because it necessitates conflict and naturalizes the aggression and prejudice of a dominant group over a non-dominant group which they have posited as inferior and/or threatening.

Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.

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Bitter Crop

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

If you imagine South America instead of the American South, where Abel Meeropol wrote this poem in 1939 after seeing a photograph of the lynching of two black youths, it could be describing the plantations of the same era in Guatemala. The impoverished workers endured terrible abuses at the hands of landowners, where it was not uncommon for the bodies of those who dissented to be burned or hung from trees, a bitter crop amongst those which they laboured to harvest.

Poem found on this page:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=66&ItemID=11517

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Psychological Warfare

What struck me in “Bitter Fruit” was how greatly psychological warfare contributed to the triumph of Operation Success. It started out with the United States Information Agency writing articles and pamphlets on the CIA version of the Guatemalan political situation and distributing them by the thousands throughout Latin America. The CIA then took this “disinformation” campaign even further with a radio station that broadcast propaganda for the Castillo Armas Liberation movement and news bulletins that fabricated, edited, and inflated the truth. Rumours were circulated and gained legitimacy in the international press largely because it was barred from reporting anything else.

The main objective of the radio station was to create the impression that the country was in a state of turmoil. As Schlesinger and Kinzer recount, “Fabricated reports of large troop movements, fearsome battles, major Guatemalan defeats and growing rebel strength frightened an already confused and disheartened populace”(185). Rumours flew in both Guatemala and the United States about the burgeoning army of Castillo Armas, said to be composed of thousands, when in reality he “never had more than 400 men under his command”(185).

What effect did this have on Operation Success? The lie about massive groups of heavily armed rebels advancing through the countryside thoroughly demoralized the Arbenz forces – even the President suspected that this lie was true, having no trustworthy source of information. American attacks were threatening to choke the nation off from foreign markets, the military could not be relied on, the majority of the population, their lives disrupted by fear and uncertainty, felt that it was time for him to go – Arbenz came to realize that the forces against him were unrelenting so he decided to relinquish the presidency. The effect of pervasive psychological warfare in undermining the Arbenz government to the point of its collapse cannot be underestimated.

When Guatemala celebrated the new junta coming into power, hundreds of firecrackers distributed by the CIA festively exploded into the night. Those guys think of everything.

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Borrar

Central to the chapter “A Lexicon of Terror” is the insidious use of language during the Dirty War to erase the individual. Feitowitz explores this on a scale that begins at rhetoric directed to the entire nation and ends at psychologically intrusive language which undermined torture victims.

Below is how I observed her narrowing the scope of the chapter from the erasure of the individual within the nation to the erasure of the self within the body.

1) Defining the nation without individuals
As Feitowitz says, references to “el ser nacional” were repeatedly made throughout the regime. This expression implies the dissolving of discrete citizens with personal agendas into a body with an indivisible essence and single purpose. The Process terminated all platforms of independent political activity and the need for “subordination” to authority was constantly reinforced. In the metaphor of nation as body, the junta was the grey matter, and the citizens undifferentiated body cells, except for the tumors of resistance which necessitated quick and efficient destruction. Any person who did not agree with the junta was committing an act of self-mutilation on the collective body – was morally and spiritually sick – insane. Independent thought could be construed as a private war against Argentina.

2) Controlling the identity of the disappeared
Erasure of individuals also occurred when the disappeared were unidentified, slandered, or completely denied existence in public address and the media. As Feitowitz says, the names of “subversives” were almost never given in newspapers. They were commonly portrayed as demons and criminals – it was even suggested that they were selfish sons and daughters who had run off to pursue their own interests at the expense of their families. The official attitude of the junta, especially when confronted with the questions of foreign governments and journalists, was to completely deny the existence of political prisoners.

3) Manipulating public awareness and familial trust
Pervasive doublespeak confused public knowledge about what was happening on a national as well as interpersonal level. “They had so may ways,” as José Bendersky said, “of erasing people, of trying to make you doubt the truth of your own life.” As Feitowitz describes, all mediums of spoken and written word were employed in fabricating a entirely false version of reality, assaulting Argentine eyes and ears on a daily basis. The media planted seeds of doubt and suspicion amongst family members – and tried to shake mothers’ confidence in their ability to raise children.

4) Physical and psychological annihilation of victims
The term “desaparecido” not only negates that individual (we don’t know their location, living or dead, if leaving was their own choice) but also the person who was responsible for this (as if that individual was not kidnapped or killed but vanished through some fault of their own). The physical bodies of victims were nothing but refuse – dumped at sea, burned, and piled into mass graves marked with “no name” – and the torturers tirelessly attempted to erase their sense of self – with hoods for sensory isolation, replacement of names with numbers, and extreme physical pain. Repeated constantly were the words “You don’t exist.”

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Gap Between Death and Discourse

An entirely uninteresting conversation:

I raised the topic of Pinochet’s recent house arrest with my boyfriend on Monday evening. Courtesy of the BBC, I told him that although Pinochet has legal immunity, he can be tried on a case-by-case basis. The crimes that warrant his arrest are 36 kidnappings, one murder, and 23 cases of torture. It’s frustrating, I began, that a man known for his policy of brutal repression, responsible for the murder and disappearance of more than 3000 people, can only be found guilty after an infinitely extended process, one at a time. He scoffed at this, well what do you want, that Pinochet be charged on one big account of injustice in general?

And its relevance to the course:

The exacting nature of law and its lengthy processes wasn’t my point. It was about the gap between abuse and death and the discourse that puts it in a rational context. I was thinking about the pain of those who suffer without recompense, waiting for papers to go through and details to be established. When a perpetrator stands in court, the evidence of culpability debated at length, they must think, what stands in the way of his prosecution when what we endured was so clearly under his jurisdiction? Society would go to hell without formalities and procedure, true, but cases like these are still frustrating.

How do you translate the messy human aspects of crime into the agents of legal concepts? It feels obscene and ridiculous to read a detailed account of torture and say yes, the human rights of this person are being abused, to speak in this way about something that negates language. But you need a framework. I guess that’s the point of this course – to study human rights discourse, then witness its abuse in various documents and sometimes visceral accounts, and try to reconcile the two. Pinochet will be going in and out of courts until he deteriorates.

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100066.stm

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Infestation

I’m being dragged under a landslide of work and these blogs just aren’t getting done. A reflection on “The Madwomen at the Plaza de Mayo” – old I know – I hope to get caught up by the end of the week.

A large crowd of grieving mothers was a frighteningly visible statement, from the point of view of the junta, that Argentina was deeply troubled in its domestic spaces, not just in isolated pockets of “subversive” activity. Various examples can be found in the article of how the junta attempted to negate this threat by sweeping the mothers into their metaphor of the nation as a sick body.

The mothers were called “las locas” by the military officials – they were supposedly driven mad by their errant children – in an attempt to deny their legitimacy. Not only were they portrayed as agents of mental illness in society, but were handled by the police in a manner that suggested that they were contagious. A fence was erected around their protest at the Plaza as if to shield the bustle of healthy, normal human traffic that might accidentally brush by or intermingle with their grief and dissent.

They were told that the government was planning to “cleanse the country very thoroughly of disturbing elements before the first tourist sets foot in Argentina” for the World Cup. Words such as “cleanse” made these women out to be grime on the face of an Argentina emerging out of sickness and wanting to make itself presentable to the world again. The authors liken themselves and other mothers to “the horrible worm that has wriggled out of a shining Argentina” – they were aware that as their movement became visible to the public eye so did the rotten foundations of the new Argentina of President Videla.

With the mothers being grouped with other social actors accused of infesting and sickening the body of the nation, it is ironic that their only supporters, at the time the article was written, were doctors.

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Double Standard in Peru

Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru, and his partner Elena Iparraguirre, were found this week to be guilty of terrorism and have been given life imprisonment. The objective of the Shining Path, inspired by Chairman Mao, is to overthrow the Peruvian state. An estimated total of 70,000 people died in the terrorism and counter-terrorism campaigns that it is responsible for initiating. Its most brutal acts involved killings conducted in rural villages to make the severity of its cause known to the government.

In June ex-army officer Ollanta Humala very nearly became the president of Peru but lost to career politician Alan Garcia. Controversy surrounds his involvement in the counter-terrorism campaign against the Shining Path; he is accused of forced disappearance, torture and murder based on testimonies from families of the victims. He was expelled from the army in 2000 after his revolt against President Fujimori failed and rallied Peru’s poor for his support for the 2006 elections.

In terms of the quantity of human rights abuses committed by these two men, Abimael Guzman is clearly in a different league than Ollanta Humala. Guzman embodies the cause of acute suffering for tens of thousands of people. But from a governmental perspective, the gravest damages he inflicted were upon the legitimacy of the state. One of the defining characteristics of a state is that it has a monopoly on coercive power. In order to maintain its sovereignty the state cannot allow any faction within it to claim that its own use of violence is legitimate. These two cases, though very different in the scale of crimes committed, serve to illustrate how human rights abuses that occur during an operation in defense of the state, even though those who commit them represent law and order, can more easily be swept under the rug than human rights abuses committed in a civilian project to undermine the state.

Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6048144.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4800691.stm

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Article Review

“Five Lessons Bush Learned from Argentina’s Dirty War and Five Lessons for the Rest of Us”

The comparison drawn by Renate Lunn, in her article entitled “Five Lessons Bush Learned from Argentina’s Dirty War and Five Lessons for the Rest of Us”, is one that would surprise the majority of United States citizens. She systematically describes how the dictatorship responsible for the Dirty War of 1976-1983 in Argentina and the government orchestrating the “War on Terror” in the US today are strikingly similar in their tactics and goals. Lunn argues that just as military and political figures in US and Latin America have shared practices of quelling dissent and amassing power, so too should the people of the Americas pool their experiences and tactics for the resistance of state sponsored repression. The significance of this article is that it not only draws the US into a shared history with repressive Latin American regimes, but a shared set of specific strategies and practices.

Lunn begins by summarizing US policies and practices which perpetuated state repression in Latin America. Fearing the spread of Communism in what it considered its backyard, the US government actively supported Latin American regimes committed to the eradication of leftist organizations. In many cases, this was done through the instruction and indoctrination of Latin American military personnel in the School of the Americas. Furthermore, the US often turned a blind eye to the actions of these regimes, and severe human rights abuses were not condemned or punished.

Lunn then turns the tables, asserting that dictatorial practices in Latin America, specifically in the Dirty War, are now being replicated by the US for the repression of its own populace. The students of the School of the Americas are now the teachers of the US government. This idea, that President Bush has “learned” his policies and practices from the Dirty War in Argentina, is inaccurate if taken literally but it serves the purpose of equating him morally and logically to Dirty War leaders. President Bush is at the forefront of a government that has no need to study or mimic to engage in repression, having an abundant history of connections with repressive governments and entrenched apparatuses for its own forms of dirty war.

Five points of similarity between the Dirty War and the “War on Terror” are discussed in turn with evidence of how each was manifested in the two countries. The first two points concern tactics used by both the Bush administration and the Argentine dictatorship to create an environment for total governmental control: 1) “wage a vast war against an undefined enemy” and 2) “create a culture of fear” (Lunn). The remaining three points describe their common objectives to: 3) “consolidate state power” 4) “suppress dissent” and 5) “mobilize economic resources to the benefit of the elite” (Lunn). The similarities are accurate and are sufficiently substantiated for an article of moderate length. It must be said, however, that part of the accuracy of these points can be attributed to the fact that they are very general and therefore can be interpreted according to the unique circumstances of each country.

At certain points I found that the comparisons that Lunn makes could be elaborated upon. For instance, she discusses how in Argentina during the Dirty War and in the US today, the claim of numerous sources of potential danger and the lack of a precise definition of the enemy justify “the need for heightened security” (Lunn). She might have expanded this idea by saying that this heightened security, justified by a vaguely defined enemy, not only justifies the suppression of dissent but the use of excessive severity when doing so. In Argentina, a civilian who was deemed to be “subversive” could be abducted by military personnel in broad daylight, and today a person can be detained indefinitely by the US government who is no more than suspected of engaging in terrorist activity. Tens of thousands of people in Argentina and hundreds of thousands of people in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan have been killed in the name of Argentine and US security respectively and this has been presented by governments and the media to the public as legitimate and necessary.

Also, Lunn could have taken her comparison of “creating a culture of fear” further by discussing the creation of a culture of ignorance and distraction. Not only have the authorities of both countries made concerted efforts to, as Lunn describes, instill fear in the public, but also to keep them in the dark and draw their attention away from government activity. A widespread lack of awareness of the nature and extent of human rights abuses condoned and practiced by the Argentine dictatorship and current US government promotes fear in potential victims (who do not know what will become of them if they are deemed a threat) and complacency in those who do not consider themselves likely be singled out (fostering the impression that those who are must deserve it in some way). Another tactic employed by both countries, where the media and government are so closely tied, is to distract the people with sensational stories and prominent debate over relatively minor issues. The day after the 1976 military coup in Argentina, for example, the front page of the Argentine daily newspaper Clarín reported this event alongside the announcement that Argentina had triumphed over Poland in football (Beasley-Murray). Recently the US media was dominated by the Mark Foley scandal, showing that lewd instant messages have more power to make Republicans sweat from public disapproval than the costly and disastrous war in Iraq (Beinhart). Sex and sport have always been good antidotes for harsh political realities.

As Lunn concedes, the similarity between these two events has its limitations. However, the purpose of holding them side by side is not to see a mirror image but to examine them in the same context. By constantly switching back and forth between the Dirty War and the “War on Terror” throughout the article, and using the same terms to describe them, Lunn aims to bind them tightly together in an alarming association. US citizens need to realize that the “War on Terror” is not just a war being fought on foreign lands against peoples who are construed as incomprehensible and dangerous, but just like in Argentina, it is a war waged by the state against its own citizens in the form of reducing and denying human rights, creating a state of fear and misinformation, and cutting social funding to finance war expenditures.

At the end of the article, Lunn describes five strategies that Argentineans developed in resistance to the Dirty War, and afterward, to expose and record abuses and prevent them from happening again. The strategies, such as publicizing factual accounts of the forced disappearances and building alliances with activists abroad, work together to create a politically and historically aware public within a network of local and international communication. Lunn describes President Bush as a pupil of Argentine history and she appeals to US citizens to do the same. These strategies are just as applicable to Americans who want to resist and expose the abuses of the “War on Terror” as to Argentineans who during and after the Dirty War created an informed public consciousness about it. The importance of proposing a contemporary American usage of these strategies is that it pulls the histories of both countries together into an ongoing pan-American struggle against repressive regimes.

The very fact that Lunn makes this systematic and direct comparison between the Dirty War, a universally condemned example of atrocious human rights abuses committed by a state against its populace, and the “War on Terror” of the Bush administration, makes this article highly significant in contemporary human rights discourses in the United States. Lunn is among those working to raise US public awareness that the “War on Terror” is a war not just on “them” but on “us” as well. She maintains throughout the article a tension between citizen and state, especially when describing the abuses of the latter, which gives the reader even more of a reason to take her lessons from Argentina to heart. It is by presenting these lessons that Lunn reveals her stance that citizens, rather than the institutions that govern them, are the starting point for an analysis of a better world, and that ignorance and isolation within a populace are more dangerous than institutional corruption.

Works Cited:
Beasley-Murray, Jon. Posthegemony. 24 March 2006. 15 October 2006. http://posthegemony.blogspot.com/2006/03/normality.html.
Beinhart, Larry. "Let's Face It, Penises Dominate American Politics." AlterNet. 7 October 2006. 15 October 2006. http://www.alternet.org/story/42670.
Lunn, Renate. "Five Lessons Bush Learned from Argentina’s Dirty War and Five Lessons for the Rest of Us." ZNet. 8 December 2005. 15 October 2006. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=42&ItemID=9288.

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