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MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #03-98 Deadly Alliances: US Foreign Policy and Human Rights
January 21, 1998

Program description at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9803.html

Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. This week on Making Contact:

Isabel Galhos: The suffering going on in East Timor, the genocide going on in East Timor, is caused mostly by Western military support.

Jeff Cohen: An individual who has, for his whole career, been virtually a mouthpiece for the U.S. State Department is Ted Koppel.

Phillip Babich: Through arms deals, trade policies, diplomatic support, and military aid, the U.S. government props up many regimes, including some very repressive ones. On this program we look at how U.S. foreign policy and its coverage in the media, have affected human rights. I’m Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact.

In late December, 45 unarmed civilians, 14 of them children, were massacred in Chiapas, Mexico. Both the governor of Chiapas and the Mexican Interior Secretary resigned in the wake of the tragedy, which was blamed on pro-government paramilitary groups. Ted Lewis, program director for Global Exchange, was in Chiapas before the massacre, along with the Northern American delegation of human rights workers. Lewis told Making Contact’s Julie Light that Mexican President’s Ernesto Zedillo ignored warning signs leading up to the killings, and that the U.S. has played a role in efforts to suppress the Zapatista movement.

Ted Lewis: There had been, in the preceding six weeks, 30 deaths; over the past 18 months around 120 deaths, in those municipalities. Communities being held hostage. Five thousand refugees. Wasn’t this enough that people would pay attention? We asked that Zedillo specifically condemn the actions of paramilitaries, condemn any possible links between members of his party and the paramilitaries, and of course this was ignored until the massacre. And what we have are protestations at the top federal levels in Mexico of shock and horror, grief and anger, and the need to do something about this. But rather than having seen justice come down in Chiapas, there have been a number of arrests of people, but rather than seeing a clear focus on making a transparent judicial proceeding and going after those responsible, even if it goes to the top level of the government (which there is a great deal of paper evidence that it does) we see that the Mexican government once again focusing on trying to pressure the indigenous opposition. Instead of implementing peace accords, that they signed with the Zapatistas in 1996, and after a series of peace negotiations we see the government walking away from that and continuing to militarize and police-ize this conflict.

Julie Light: You said there was a paper trail leading all the way up to the top levels of government. If we’re looking at paramilitary groups, people described as armed thugs with ties to the local PRE, what’s the paper trail to the top?

Ted Lewis: Well, the Mexican news magazine El Proceso brought in a very interesting issue this last week, in which they have documents, government documents, report to have government documents that show that the Secretary of the Interior Chuayfette was involved in the policies which lead to the creation, and funding, and support for paramilitary activity in Chiapas, as a counterweight to the Zapatista armed uprising which had taken place in that area. So that this policy doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s actually a policy that’s very similar, in certain ways, to the support that the U.S. gave to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s to put down one revolutionary movement that threatens to undermine the stability of a whole region. In that case, all of Central America. In this case, all of Mexico. They create paramilitaries, the trail does lead to the top, at least in the opinion of very astute political observers in Mexico who produce El Proceso.

Julie Light: You make the comparison with the Contras. Of course, I lived in Nicaragua from ‘86 to ‘92. I was working as a journalist there. The direct impact of U.S. policy was very easy to feel. There were debates in the Congress on Contra aid, and it was very much felt in this country and in Central America. Here we hear about Mexico in relation to NAFTA and in relation to free trade. There’s a little bit of a ripple that’s made about human rights violations like the massacre in Acteal. But what is the U.S. role since it’s not quite as direct as in Central America in the ‘80s?

Ted Lewis: The U.S. role in Mexico is actually just as important as its role in Central America, and certainly in economic and political terms. The United States, by taking Mexico up as its NAFTA partner, the United States has entered into an economic, political, and security relationship with Mexico that is one of the most important economic, political and security relationships that the United States has. So when we see massacres happening in southern Mexico, they’re not as far away as Rwanda. This is not like massacres like this happening in Algeria. Those massacres, as horrifying as they are, are not taking place in a country that is the NAFTA partner to the United States.

We have a wide spectrum relationship with Mexico. We don’t have a relationship to Mexico like we did to Central America in terms of the United States directly sending millions of dollars of covert aid, or direct support to death squad militaries like the one in El Salvador, or ‘wink, wink’ support of Guatemala letting Israeli forces come in there and train their death squads and paramilitary forces. But we do have a responsibility because we train hundreds of Mexican military officers at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Those officers go back and are able to carry out their activities anywhere in Mexico. U.S. authorities will say that the training actually is good because they have courses on human rights and they train those officers to be better officers than they would be if they had just strictly Mexican military training. Well, the soldiers that carried out the massacre of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador, and in countless other massacres throughout Latin America were U.S. trained. In fact, some of the most brutal massacres in that period were carried out by those people, who felt that they had additional impunity, having that connection with the United States.

What the U.S. should do at this point is really cast a light on exactly what is our military and security relationship with Mexico. Is it really working to help resolve the drug war, or is it making Mexican institutions even more corrupt and impervious to change, the way we’ve perhaps done in Colombia, by unquestioned support of corrupt institutions? So the United States relationship to something like this massacre, while not direct, is very real, because we are supporting an institution, a 70-year old, very waterlogged political party, that is going down, but going down as a very strong institution that has the possibility to take out violence on huge numbers of people, especially in marginalized rural areas like Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero.

Julie Light: I’m speaking with Ted Lewis. He’s Mexico program director at the San Francisco based group Global Exchange. We’re talking about the massacre in late December in Oventique in Chiapas, a highland town of 45 unarmed people, indigenous people, including 14 children.

When you mentioned the drug war, how much in terms of U.S. policy, there’s certainly a lot of militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border on immigration, but also around the drug war. How much is the drug war dovetailing and tying into these paramilitary groups?

Ted Lewis: The search for drugs is often a pretext for sweeping through indigenous communities. Searches for marijuana crops have been used in Chiapas repeatedly as a reason for troops to move into Zapatista areas like Oventique and others. The same thing happens in Guerrero and Oaxaca, that the army maintains its ability, or bases its right to go into those communities on drug searches. So that’s happening. And the same federal institutions that are carrying out military and drug security policy in the north of the country, where it is most active are -- it’s the same institution that’s operating in the south of the country. So while you may, as the U.S. does, put prohibition on the use of certain types of helicopters, like the Vietnam-era Huey helicopters that were sent to Mexico for the drug war, about 73 or them, over the last, during the Clinton years, supposedly those helicopters are not to be used in southern Mexico. Well, so what? The same institution has those helicopters at their disposal, and you have cross-links, of course. It’s the same federal army.

Julie Light: What should the U.S. government be doing to pressure the Mexican government on human rights, and why should we as U.S. citizens care about what happens other than the shock and horror of what happens to 45 unarmed Indian peasants in a remote village in Chiapas?

Ted Lewis: I don’t think we’re going to see much action out of the Clinton administration on this issue. The very limited remarks that Clinton made about the massacre, basically protestations of horror, but in effect, the Clinton administration is not going to rock the boat on this issue. I think we need to ask our local Congress people, and I’d encourage listeners to get out and write a letter to -- visit, form a committee, better yet, to visit your Congressperson, bring in some of the people who’ve been active around fast track issues, around some of the other issues that have to do with Mexico. And go and talk to your Congressperson about the need to cut-off U.S. military aid to Mexico. We need to cut off the supply of weapons, the sharing of intelligence information, and very importantly, the training of Mexican military officers at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. It’s very important that people throughout the hemisphere and throughout the world put pressure on the Mexican government to live up to its word to sign -- to implement the agreements that it signed at San Andres Larrainzar in 1996. If it does that, possibilities for peace still exist in Mexico. If the government takes a hard line and refuses to live up to the accords it signed with the indigenous people, it’s not going to find peace there.

Phillip Babich: Ted Lewis of Global Exchange, speaking with Julie Light.

Sue Supriano: You’re listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. This program can now be heard on over 120 stations, in the United States, Canada, Haiti, and South Africa. And around the world on Radio for Peace International Short Wave. If you want to get in touch with any of the organizations you hear about on this program, please give us a call. It’s toll free, 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts, or if you have a comment or suggestions for future programs. That’s 800-529-5736.

Phillip Babich: The southeast Asian country of Indonesia serves as a vital link for U.S. trade and foreign policy in that region of the globe. But according to many human rights organizations, U.S. support for the country’s leader, General Suharto, has allowed the Indonesian military to terrorize the people of East Timor, an island that was invaded and forcibly annexed in 1975. Since then, more than 200,000 East Timorese have been killed, and thousands tortured and raped. Making Contact’s Rebecca Armstrong reports.

Rebecca Armstrong: Since 1975, the island country of East Timor has been occupied by the Indonesian military. According to human rights groups, about 30,000 Indonesian troops are stationed there today, supplied with sophisticated weaponry by the United States, Britain, and other western countries.

Isabel Galhos: The suffering that’s going on in East Timor, the genocide that’s going on in East Timor, is caused, mostly caused by Western military support.

Rebecca Armstrong: Isabel Galhos, an East Timorese activist, who has been living in exile in Canada since 1994.

Isabel Galhos: Military and diplomatic support, that they never said any word about it, that’s all support that has been given to Indonesia. This gives a lot of power to the Indonesian government to carry on the genocide in East Timor, and to put pressure on their own people, kill a lot of innocent Indonesian people in the country.

Rebecca Armstrong: During a visit to the United States last year, Galhos noted the heightened awareness of her people’s struggle, since the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to East Timorese activists Bishop Carlos Beto and Jose Ramos Horta.

Isabel Galhos: After the Nobel Peace Prize I went to the United States, my first trip into the United States with Ramos Horta. We went there and we traveled around, and it’s so easy to bring up the issue of East Timor. People are starting to be aware of the country of East Timor, and starting to find out what’s happening in East Timor.

Jose Ramos Horta: In May this year, I flew in to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the shareholders’ meeting of Phillips Petroleum.

Rebecca Armstrong: Jose Ramos Horta, co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize.

Jose Ramos Horta: As the plane touched down, I looked to the window to me left. I saw a giant sign, "Rockwell Corporation." My heart sank. Rockwell Corporation is manufacturer of the Bronco aircraft, counter-insurgency planes, widely used in Vietnam, used in East Timor. Sixteen of them supplied to Indonesia in 1976 and ‘77. In two of them, Bronco aircraft, August 7, 1977, dove into a village in East Timor. My sister, Maria Hortensia, 21-years-old, with 20 other kids, rocketed to death by Bronco aircraft.

Isabel Galhos: As long as the military occupy the country, there is no family that will feel safe or feel freedom or things like that in that country. So we all have the same kind of problem. And my family and others would like to take the sacrifice as long as other countries, Western governments, is still blind eye in support of military equipment to Indonesia. So this is all sacrifice our Timorese have to pay price to it.

Rebecca Armstrong: To help the Timorese people with their struggle, peace activists in other countries are calling on Western nations to end military support of the Indonesian dictatorship. Florentino Sarmento is with East Timorese Action for Development.

Florentino Sarmento: In the long run, it will be much more through contact, through education, and through more widely collective action not only from the United States but from the big countries like Japan, Germany, Great Britain and so on, together, to take collective action to stop violation of human rights.

Rebecca Armstrong: For Making Contact, I’m Rebecca Armstrong.

Phillip Babich: Often little attention is paid to the effects of the mass media’s coverage of foreign policy on human rights. To discuss the institutional relationships between corporate media and the U.S. State Department, I spoke with Jeff Cohen, executive director of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR.

Jeff Cohen: We’ve been tracking foreign policy and human rights coverage for about a dozen years. And the main thing that’s so unmistakable, it’s almost haunting, is the way that the U.S. media follows the lead of the U.S. government. Classic cases are like, Iraq. Throughout the 1980s, Sadam Hussein was an ally of the U.S. The U.S. was helping to give him funds and guns and weaponry to fight Iran. And obviously at that time, during the Reagan and Bush years, the Reagan and Bush administration, their State Department, was not talking about the human rights abuses of Sadam Hussein. They weren’t talking about it. The U.S. media didn’t talk about it.

During this time, when Sadam Hussein is in alliance with the United States government in many ways, Amnesty International releases a report showing that the Iraq security police are picking up kids, torturing them to get information about their parents. Now, that’s dramatic news. You shouldn’t have to go to the State Department if you’re a reporter at a mainstream daily or TV network, or NPR, to say, "Wow, that’s an amazing story. Let’s do some investigation and do some follow-up of the Amnesty International report on Iraq." But they didn’t. It got almost no coverage. And the irony is, when Sadam Hussein later invaded Kuwait, a couple of years later, and then he takes some hostages, he’s got some British hostages, and there’s the famous photo that went all over the world where Sadam Hussein is shown patting a blond kid, a British kid, on his head. And I can remember that vivid banner headline in the New York Post, which was "Sadam Hussein, Child Abuser."

Now here, because he patted a kid, obviously it was an outrageous violation of human rights to invade a country and then take hostages, of course, that’s all true. But the fact that when this guy was on our side, when Sadam Hussein was a U.S. ally and many foreign policy things happening in that region, an Amnesty International report that documented torture of kids, was not news. But when he patted the blond kid, ‘cause now he was an enemy because he invade Kuwait, and threatened, you know, the flow of oil, then all of a sudden the U.S. media opened up on this guy. But he’d always been a human rights abuser. It wasn’t something that just started with the invasion of Kuwait. But U.S. news coverage of Sadam Hussein as a human rights abuser began when Sadam Hussein took actions that put him out of favor with the U.S. government.

Phillip Babich: Maybe you can compare that situation to Manual Noriega’s portrayal in the U.S. media. He’s a School of the America’s graduate, dictator of Panama, and he fell out of favor with the U.S. government. How’d the media portray that?

Jeff Cohen: What was really interesting was Noriega, longtime paid by the CIA, had meetings with high level CIA, as you say, trained at the School of Americas, when he was playing the foreign policy role that the U.S. government had hoped for him, especially helping them in the illegal war against the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinista government, there’s almost no coverage. Obviously what happened was a falling out between Noriega and the U.S. government. And most experts now believe that a big part of the falling out was Noriega became unwilling to help the U.S., for whatever his reasons. Became unwilling to help the U.S. to do things against the Sandinistas that the U.S. wanted him to. Shortly thereafter, you started seeing articles about Noriega and drugs. Then you had, ultimately, a fever pitch was revved up, the U.S. government would turn up the rhetoric, and the U.S. media would follow suit and turn up their rhetoric about Noriega and drugs; Noriega and human rights abuse. Ultimately you have the weirdest drug bust in the history of the world, where the U.S. government goes and takes a sovereign leader of another country, kills perhaps a couple thousand of innocent civilians in making that bust, and brings him back to a jail in the United States. And it’s like a fever pitch of coverage in the U.S. media. Yet most of it false. You had the U.S. media going along with the lie that Noriega had somehow declared war against the U.S. We got the actual transcript of the speech. He had not declared war against the United States, but I heard Ted Koppel on "Nightline" defend that canard.

Phillip Babich: So how exactly does that work? Is it a matter of the State Department sending out press releases and holding press conferences, and the Washington press corps shows up and just prints whatever they say, or what exactly happens there?

Jeff Cohen: Well, in its most intense form, it’s not a news conference or news release alone that will generally get this dramatic sea change coverage that I’m describing. It requires a drumbeat. And they’ll start banging the drum, at the State Department or the White House, start defining who the main enemy in the world is. Defining -- this remains to us -- that the State Department and the White House, one of the world’s real hot-spots in the world that we have to pay close attention to, because Mr. Noriega’s unwilling to play by the rules of established order, and international human rights modes. And you know it gets to a fever pitch, and before you know it, the U.S. government, the U.S. media is off in a frenzy.

An individual who has, for his whole career, been virtually a mouthpiece for the U.S. State Department, is Ted Koppel, whose whole, what really gets his juices going, as everyone knows, and he’ll be the first to tell you, is foreign policy. His career began as the Hong Kong Bureau Chief for ABC News, where they covered and covered up, the U.S. role in Vietnam and Laos. He’s explicitly covered up, Ted Koppel, the CIA operations in Laos that he knew about. This is something my partner Norman Solomon has exposed, and we’ve had it in some of our articles in books. He went from there to hosting the show "Nightline," which grew out of the U.S. hostages being taken in Iran. And I should say that in the ‘70s, after Hong Kong Bureau Chief, he rose within ABC, and he became what is called the KKK Club, where it would be Bernard Kalb, Marvin Kalb, and Ted Koppel, who were big network correspondents, who had traveled the world with Henry Kissinger singing his praises as he went around the world wheeling and dealing. And Henry Kissinger, in the eyes of them at the time, was basically a foreign policy genius. And the human rights abuses, that were the direct results of Kissinger’s policies, weren’t exactly emphasized by Bernard Kalb, Marvin Kalb, or Ted Koppel.

That was in the mid-1970s. Then "Nightline" starts in 1979, 1980. And here’s a guy who basically defines his coverage by what is blowing hot out of the White House or the State Department. We did a survey of Ted Koppel’s programming for a 40-month period on "Nightline." And this was during a period in the mid- and late ‘80s, where the Reagan White House had one public relations goal in Central America: get all the U.S. media to focus on human rights violations in Nicaragua, and get little or no media coverage on human rights violations in El Salvador, which by every standard were far more severe. More violence, more incarcerations, more disappearances, more suppression of the press. The fact is, when you study Koppel, he did I think it was over 22 different programs focusing on the negatives of the government in Nicaragua: human rights abuses, problems between the government and the press, in Nicaragua meaning one newspaper that they were polarized with, and zero programs during a 40-month period on El Salvador. Now that’s pretty big success for the public relations operatives at the Regan the White House and the U.S. State Department. I don’t know how much closer you could become to a state broadcast outlet than that.

Phillip Babich: Bringing things up to date, then, what’s happening right now that’s shaping public perception of U.S. foreign policy in the media?

Jeff Cohen: I’d say one of the main things that critical consumers of the news have to be thinking about is all the cheerleading we get for certain countries. If you’re hearing about how countries are farsighted in welcoming the free market system, you should translate that into English, which is basically that these are countries that are doing very well for U.S.-based or other multinational corporations. And you shouldn’t in any way assume if a country is booming, that the vast majority of the people, that their economic lives are improving in any way. So what we’ve been hearing, the main abuse of U.S. media in covering human rights today, is to sort of subsume all issues within a country to, how open is that country to foreign investment and foreign multinationals. And you’ve seen that from Russia, where the condition of working people is abysmal. But that doesn’t get much coverage. You just hear whether Yeltsin is tilting toward the Democrats and free marketeers, meaning those who want to open the country to corporations who will come in and take the resources of the country, you know, that’s the big issue, not how do the masses of the people live in Russia. Same thing in Chile. You hear of the coverage of this great boom, the miracle of Chile, and then you have to read publications like NACLA’s Report on the Americas to find out the size of the country that’s living below poverty. So that the main thing that critical consumers should think about when they hear about economic booms in certain countries, because corporations are coming in and the government leaders are so farsighted to see that free markets hold the way to the future, what you should be thinking about are what are the human rights conditions for the average working person in that country, where most of the people are hungry now. And I included Russia in that category.

Phillip Babich: We’ve been speaking with Jeff Cohen, executive director of FAIR. Jeff, thanks for joining us on Making Contact.

That’s it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at U.S. foreign policy and human rights. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Global Exchange, and "Voice of the Voiceless," at CKUT radio in Montreal, Quebec, for recorded portions. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio.

If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same number for tapes and transcripts or if you’d like to make a comment on what you’ve just heard. Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We’re committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. Our producers are David Barsamian, Denise Graab, and myself. Our senior advisor is Norman Solomon and our executive director is Peggy Law. For Making Contact, I’m Phillip Babich.