Got Blood?

On Saturday NPR returned to the scene of the crimes of El Salvador's 1980s bloodbath - a US-nurtured extreme-right orgy of torture and murder against organized labor, the poor, church leaders, and leftists (and their families, friends, associates, or potential associates).

There were a few problems with the report. Jason Beaubien's reporting isn't great; he does a little plastic surgery on history, claiming "The Reagan administration jumped into the Cold War conflict spending billions of dollars to fight the Marxist guerrillas while Cuba and other communist states backed the FMLN." That's a rather tidy and truncated version of the long history of US support for the murderous right in El Salvador - gathering steam and corpses especially in the 1960s. It also ignores the historical record of who killed most of those 75,000 plus civilians in the "Cold War conflict." But the really nasty propaganda is front loaded by Lianne Hansen in introducing the report:

"The FMLN is a coalition of left wing groups, but it's dominated by the communist party. One of the biggest questions after the FMLN victory is how far to the left the President Elect Mauricio Funes will move El Salvador."

Dominated by the communist party? That's a stunning assertion. Dominated by revolutionaries and former guerrillas - okay. But the communist party? In all the articles I found, the communist party is mentioned as important, but not dominant. In the report Jason Beaubien comments that "El Salvador appears at times to be stuck in the Cold War." (Psst, Jason, I think El Salvador's not the only one!)

Finally for Hansen to claim that "one of the biggest questions...is how far to the left...blah, blah, blah" is quite telling. No surprise, but that seems to be the big question keeping some Foxes awake at night. That's definitely the question of the profiteers and oligarchs who have exploited El Salvador mercilessly, but it's not the question troubling the Catholic Church in El Salvador or the progressive movement in the United States.

Blood & Gold

BLOOD

Yesterday on ATC Jason Beaubien's piece on El Salvador's coming election features the usual erasure and distortion of history. Block introduces the feature with this winner:

"In the 1980s, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front drew the U.S. into a bloody Cold War conflict in Central America."

And were the Serbs "drawn in" to the bloody war in Bosnia or Kosovo? Were the Janjaweed "drawn in" to the conflict in Darfur, etc?

From Beubien we get the usual blather about El Salvador being a "front" in Reagan's "battle against the spread of communism in the Americas." Oh, and by the way, "more than 70,000 people died in the war, " though he fails to mention that the vast majority were atrocities against civilians carried out by the US backed government.

GOLD

This morning Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is on for a reprise of her previous cover-up of civilian deaths in Iraq (remember the "Gold Standard"?). There's no mea culpa in this morning's report. More of the same about how unknowable the death count in Iraq is and how "controversial" the Lancet report was - although it's a bit better than her previous report in that it conveys how completely death and violence have touched virtually everyone in Iraq.

I did go ahead and drop a comment on the NPR site beneath the story. I'd recommend occasionally reading listeners' comments - as they are often quite pointed and astute.

Salvador Amnesia Again

I won't waste much space here. NPR returns to El Salvador and gangs AGAIN this month and once again finds no need to even touch on the history of the US' savaging of El Salvador. I posted on this before and have almost nothing new to add. Mandalit del Barco ought to be ashamed.

Crimes Against Memory

Imagine doing a news report about crime in South Africa without backgrounding it with the effects that apartheid had on civil society, infrastructure and economic justice. That would be pretty stupid. And yet this morning NPR reports on the problems of gang violence in El Salvador without once mentioning the savaging of El Salvador's social and political networks through the US directed state terror in the Salvadoran Civil War of the 1980s.

It's typical of NPR to utterly decontextualize historical events - as if attempting to scrub the memories of its listeners, to remove history from the record. It was painfully ironic to recall that one of the last widely publicized atrocities of the US trained and funded Salvadoran forces was the assassination of six Jesuits and two lay people in November of 1989. In that crime the perpetrators made a point of removing the brains of several of the victims; it was a brutal and powerful message to those who were determined to remember the crimes of that war.

Crocodile Tears

It's good that NPR reports on the death of a key witness/survivor of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador - and NPR deserves praise for inviting Ray Bonner, the reporter who broke the story, on to talk about El Mozote. Yet there is an illuminating interchange in the interview that highlights how locked into the pro-US government worldview NPR is (and how devoid of journalistic integrity Scott Simon is).

Bonner has been talking about the details of the massacre of over 700 civilians by the Salvadoran military when Simon comments "You reported this story and she came forward and spoke to you and Alma and Susan Meiselas at a time when the Salvadoran government denied that, (hesitation) that that had happened, (hesitation) uh-"

Bonner interrupts, "Not only the Salvadoran government but the US government. To which Simon responds, "Yeah."

Yeah? So much for the touchy-feely Simon. That significant bit of history gets a "yeah" and no more, but that is the story. That and the complicity in the campaign against the story by most of the US media, including heavyweights such as the Wall Street Journal and Time.

This is not just nitpicking over keeping some sordid footnote to history from disappearing down the memory hole. This story is timely and relevant for three reasons not even mentioned in today's NPR story: 1) The killers in Mozote were trained and supported by the US government, 2) the key actors in covering up the Mozote massacre are major players in the Bush Administration, and 3) the "counterinsurgency through death squad" model practiced in El Salvador is frequently championed by featured experts on NPR.