Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy Of The Mass Media

most important cases of the latter are GE, owning RCA, which owns the NBC network, and Westinghouse, which owns major television-broadcasting stations, a cable network, and a radiostation network.

In a television interview on March 14, 1985, Mejía Víctores said that GAM was “being used by subversion, because if they have problems, solutions are being found, and they have been given every advantage to [solve these problems].”106 A spate of newspaper headlines followed, stressing government warnings and allegations that GAM was being manipulated by subversives. In mid-March, General Mejía Víctores was asked on television what action the government would take against GAM. He replied, “You’ll know it when you see it.”107
On March 30, 1985, GAM leader Héctor Gómez Calito was seized, tortured, and murdered. (The six policemen who had come for him were themselves assassinated shortly after his death.)108 He had been burned with a blowtorch, on the stomach and elsewhere, and beaten on the face so severely that his lips were swollen and his teeth were broken; his tongue had been cut out. Then, on April 4, another leader of GAM, María Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, her twenty-one-year-old brother, and her two-year-old son were picked up, tortured, and murdered. Her breasts had bite marks and her underclothing was bloody; her two-year-old son had had his fingernails pulled out.

It is evident that we have here a consistent pattern that may be formulated into a quasilaw: in the case of a terrorist state with which the administration wants “constructive engagement,” things are always OK and improving; but when that regime is ousted, its record deteriorates ex post facto and looks most unfavorable compared with the humanistic and sensitive one now in power! This droll pattern of identical apologetics for each successor terrorist, and ex post denigration of the one ousted, is an Orwellian process that the Western press associates with totalitarian states, but it happens here.