Chapter 7: Reporting the Violence

Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources.9 Although the Guatemalan press has never given a complete picture of state violence, the nation’s newspapers played an important role in reporting the struggle between government and opposition in the early years of the armed conflict.

Figure 7.1. Number of killings and disappearances by three sources, by year, 1959-1995

For example, in March and April 1962, the attempt to bring down the Ydígoras government through mass protest actually played out in the press, with both the regime’s allies and critics taking out full-page announcements in the Prensa Libre and other dailies to state their positions. Groups associated with the business sector and the conservative Catholic Church used these campos pagados to defame the opposition as unpatriotic troublemakers in the pay of Moscow and Havana. This defamation divided the coalition opposing Ydígoras and helped keep his increasingly militarized regime in power. But compared to later years, the press in the 1960s was still a valuable source of information on political conflict in Guatemala.

By the mid-1960s, the Guatemalan State had established a campaign of extra-judicial violence by turning its death squads on the political opposition. Instead of a law enforcement approach to the armed insurgents, extra-legal terror became an important means of government self-defense through the end of 1996. One difficulty with reporting state violence, then, is that the State has consistently worked to maintain a posture of innocence.

Throughout the armed conflict, the government lied about the sources of violence. Méndez Montenegro’s civilian regime regularly blamed the terror on conflicts between left- and right-wing extremists (Aguilera Peralta 1980: 104-5). Between 1978 and 1980, police chief German Chupina Barahona feigned concern at the rise in terror while the Secret Anticommunist Army, which he controlled (Dunkerley 1988: 472), assassinated leaders of the popular movement (Siete Días en la USAC, various dates 1978-1980). Throughout the 1980s, soldiers in the countryside disguised themselves as rebel combatants to commit mass kidnappings and murders or to check the loyalty of villagers (Americas Watch 1989b: 24; CIIDH database testimonies). In the 1990s, violence of a clearly political nature was disguised to appear as acts of common crime (Amnesty International 1993).

For much of the period of counterinsurgency, the press did report on the repression of protests, the appearance of cadavers and evidence of other types of state violence, but often without attributing the violence to state forces. Despite the State’s denials of responsibility, testimonies and documentary sources provide ample evidence of official involvement in most of Guatemala’s recent political violence.

Figure 7.1 shows another problem of relying on the journalistic record to understand the history of state terror. When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence (Chapter 9).

Figure 7.2 presents the data on killings, by different source, for different presidential regimes. The print media reported fewer murders and disappearances during the Lucas García government than in the mid-1970s under Kjell Laugerud, a less-repressive regime but one in which the press openly covered the activities of the urban popular movement. Remarkably, there are even fewer reported government killings during the Ríos Montt regime, which other sources establish as the period of greatest state terror.

Figure 7.2. Number of killings and disappearances by regime and by data source, 1959-1995

In part, increasing state censorship explains the silence. The Lucas García government, as it liked to remind the public, never suspended the constitution, nor declared a state of siege, nor shut down the press. Still, threats against the press during the Lucas years contributed to the self-censorship of the press, as did the death squad murders of a number of journalists who dared report on the escalation of state violence. The business elite contributed to press intimidation by removing their advertising from papers that published denunciations of state terror (Aguilera 1983: 107).10

Under Ríos Montt, press censorship was simpler. He decreed that the press could not publish news "that may cause confusion or panic or aggravate the situation," effectively banning reporting on the political violence (Americas Watch 1984: 34). The General also preempted Sunday night television for a weekly live-broadcast of his moral diatribes against subversion and corruption.

When press reports of disappearances increased after the Mejía Víctores coup (reflecting a well-documented campaign of urban terror against rebel activists and the civilian opposition), then-Colonel Hector Gramajo Morales, commander of a Guatemala City military base implicated in the repression, blamed the coverage on media collaboration with subversive forces (ibid.: 19).

Journalists were not only the object of government defamation. They were also victims of its terror. The URNG claims that 49 "democratic" journalists were silenced during the 18 months ending in April 1982. For the entire period of armed conflict, the CIIDH database details the cases of 46 journalists murdered or disappeared, 14 of whom were killed in 1980 alone. Some journalists died at the hands of rebels who were disgruntled with press coverage or because they were alleged to be government spies. But the majority of killings appear to be the work of pro-government forces (Amnesty International 1980a: 43-52; Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca 1982: 4; Americas Watch 1984: 34-46).

Figure 7.3 presents month-by-month when press coverage of state terror fell in Guatemala. According to CIIDH data, the press stopped reporting the violence beginning in September 1980. Perhaps not coincidentally, the database lists seven murders of journalists in July and August of that year.

Figure 7.3. Killings and disappearances reported in the press, by month, July 1979 to December 1983

The apparent rise in Figure 7.3 for 1982 does not signify a return to significant press coverage of state violence. Throughout the 1980 to 1983 period newspapers documented only a fraction of the killings and disappearances committed by the State. The maximum monthly value on the graph is only 60 for a period when monthly extra-judicial murders regularly totaled in the thousands.

For the period of civilian government after 1986 newspaper reports are again the principal source for the CIIDH database. Press coverage by this time included human rights issues and judicial initiatives to deal with past state abuses. But after the May 1988 coup attempt by a hard-line faction of the military, press freedoms were again curtailed and critical outlets forced to close. Those that remained open limited their criticism to the civilian government, evidence of the continuing fear of alienating the military (Americas Watch 1987: 59; Barry 1989: 88).

A further cause for the silence of the press was the incapacity of urban-based journalists to know what was going on in the countryside, a topic we return to in Chapter 9.

9 Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers.

10 A ominously similar event occurred after the peace accords had been signed, in 1998, when President Alvaro Arzú Irigoyen pressured businesses to remove their advertising from media outlets most critical of his government, including the leading weekly magazine Crónica. By the end of the year, the magazine had been bought by investors tied to the ruling party.