CHIAPAS Part 1: MISSING THE STORY
- The US press and its coverage of Jan. 1994
CHIAPAS Part II: THE OTHER WAR IN MEXICO
- The Mexican press
AN UNLIKELY ENTRY IN THE MEDIA DERBY
- One independant that got the story
By John Ross*
Despite the combined efforts of its Mexico correspondents, Tim Golden and Anthony DePalma, the New York Times missed the story of the Zapatista uprising in the southern state of Chiapas by a mile. When the revolution finally came due this past January 1, the dynamic duo was laying low, no doubt sleeping off the North American Free Trade Agreement's New Year's soirees, never dreaming of armed revolution in the south. Indeed, the first notice of this long-anticipated insurrection carried by the Times came in a January 2 AP dispatch: "Rebel Attacks Hit 4 Towns in Mexico."
If the Times had been tracking the road signs to the Zapatista rebellion instead of swallowing whole Salinas administration's handouts denying the resurgence of a guerrilla movement in Mexico, they might have beaten me to the punch on this one. As it is, a routine reading of the opposition Mexican weekly Proceso and serendipitous contacts on the ground in San Cristobal de las Casas helped me to scoop the 43rd Street gang with a front-page barnburner, "Resurgence of Mexican Guerrillas Reported In Southern Jungle," published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a small, local weekly in Boonville, California, on October 13, 1993.
Smoke from the Zapatista uprising was first detected in late March 1993 when two Mexican army officers were executed in the Chiapas highlands, near San Cristobal. The army, enraged by the killings, sent 4,000 troops to scour the region for guerrillas. A firefight with the then unnamed Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took place in the municipality of Ocosingo on May 20 and resulted in four army losses. Two days later, the military discovered a Zapatista training camp in the surrounding jungle--complete with a scale model of the Ocosingo town hall, which was later captured and burned by the rebels. State judicial authorities conducted an investigation at the end of May. The then governor of Chiapas signed off on the results and sent them on to then Secretary of the Interior Patrocinio Gonzalez, where the trail died--the document apparently buried because it would have been unwise to make public the resurgence of a guerrilla movement in southern Mexico at a moment when NAFTA was hanging in the balance. Nonetheless, Proceso, which obtained a copy of the judicial report, published at least four takes on this issue between March and August 1993, each easily available at any Mexico City newsstand. Anyone in the San Cristobal human rights community could have confirmed the reports of guerrilla resurgence. Golden and DePalma never asked.
"We blew it--we read the reports in Proceso but no one ever came down here," one longtime correspondent for a major U.S. daily told me in San Cristobal in early January. One reason for the omission: The late May firefight between the military and the guerrillas coincided with the May 24 as-yet-unsolved assassination of Guadalajara Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas. "We went to Guadalajara--it was a bigger story. Now we're trying to catch up," my informant explained.
Golden tried to catch up quickly. On January 5, Golden, a Miami Herald correspondent during some of the most murderous days of the Salvadoran war, was in Ocosingo. The Times reporter arrived only hours after seven reputed Zapatistas had been summarily executed, presumably by the military, in the patio of the public market. The details at the bottom of Golden's January 6 dispatch contributed to the mobilization of U.S. and Canadian human rights teams which, by virtue of their long, losing battle against NAFTA, had been poised to expose abuses by the Salinas government in Chiapas. In response to the Times and other unfavorable international coverage, the army promptly closed down all access in and out of San Cristobal to prevent reporters from investigating reports of military atrocities in the region. The ban, combined with several incidents in which journalists were deliberately targeted by the military, did not improve the press's humor. It is thought by many observers, including the Zapatistas, that the international press was a determining factor in the government's surprise January 13 ceasefire order.
Golden's seasoning in El Salvador has trained him to look for a red in every hut, and he had a hard time understanding the non- Marxist Zapatistas. A January 4 backgrounder baited Zapatista irregulars outside of Altamirano for declaring that they wanted "to build socialism." On the 5th, Golden called the Zapatistas he was interviewing "halting, inarticulate." By the 23rd, he seemed weary of their "bluster." The Zapatista complaint "is the timeless one of poor Indians against `the rich,' the new world they envision being one where things would simply be better" (January 4).
Having gotten to the story late in the game, Golden was in a hurry to affix blame. A January 9 Sunday takeout reiterated Army and Interior Department claims that San Cristobal liberationist Bishop Samuel Ruiz had incited the rebellion ("Allies of Priest Accused of Role," p. A1). When I met with Father Pablo Romo, Ruiz's point man on human rights, in San Cristobal one week later, the priest was livid: "Is the New York Times trying to get Don Samuel killed?" he asked indignantly.
The Times is a lifetime subscriber to the Big Man Theory of history. Although Golden and newcomer DePalma paid lip service to the momentum of social forces that had driven the rebellion, both measured the importance of events by the key players. How the uprising might affect the political fortunes of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta (recently assassinated), was one constant theme of Times reporting in January and February. Golden and DePalma focused three times on government peacemaker and possible presidential candidate Manuel Camacho Solis during this period. The ski- masked, non-Indian rebel leader, who calls himself Subcomandante Marcos, also received generous amounts of ink.
Golden went hunting for the mysterious Marcos early. On January 10, he was down in the jungle looking for someone who might lead him to the guerrilla chieftain, according to a reporter who accompanied him on the foray. Perhaps smitten by Herbert Matthews's Times scoop interview with the reportedly deceased Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra in 1956, Golden took to hanging out in San Cristobal cafes known to be rebel note-drops. In mid-February, the Times ace finally made contact, but was crestfallen to hear he would have to share time with two Mexican reporters (Vincent Lenero of Proceso and El Financiero's Oscar Hinojosa). Golden's hasty departure for the jungle February 16 nearly queered the deal for the trio: La Jornada (which had obtained the only other interview with Marcos two weeks earlier, February 5-8) noted that the New York Times correspondent had set off for Zapatista-held territory. The rebels were not happy about the security breach.
Golden's interview with Marcos, the first to appear in the U.S. press, ran in articles February 20 (p. A3) and 21 (p. A8) as curtain-raisers to the peace talks that were about to begin in San Cristobal. They varied little from the accounts published the same day by Proceso and El Financiero.
The peace talks must have frustrated Golden as they did much of the media. There was no news most of the day, and the evening press conferences were conducted en masse with 280-odd accredited "communicators." The EZLN cleverly manipulated the media circus to broadcast its message to the national and international press and there were no exclusives for the Times. Golden turned to analysis instead, rewarding Salinas and Camacho for their sensible handling of this first post-Cold War uprising of the poor.
Not content with having two star reporters on the story, the Times flew in Alan Riding from Paris to rake over his old stomping ground. Riding was stationed in Mexico through 1984, an eight-year tour he capped by producing "Distant Neighbors," the devastating x-ray of the Mexican power structure and the long- ruling (65 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) it manages. Not constrained by the present Times representatives' unabashed worship of President Salinas's neo-liberal "triumphs," Riding wrote a scathing note in the Week in Review section February 27 that cited, in part, the people's "belief that the rebellion can make a difference.... I can't remember seeing the PRI quite so trapped..." (p. E5).
Golden and DePalma produced about 40 dispatches relating to the rebellion between January 3 and the announcement of a provisional peace accord March 2. They covered many aspects of the conflict, ranging from the crash of the international coffee market to the political fallout in this August's presidential elections--but the one story they should have gotten, the one story that should have concerned the U.S. press the most, was never reported: What did the White House know about the coming rebellion and when did it know it? The Clinton administration had at least four access routes to foreknowledge of the guerrilla uprising--shared resources with Mexican military intelligence; independent U.S. military intelligence via the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's air and ground surveillance of the region, which has become prime drug smuggling country; high-level diplomatic interchanges; and CIA evaluations of the Zapatista capacity. State Department assertions that the U.S. did not have a clue about the uprising are not credible. If I knew, the White House knew.
Conversations with key U.S. Embassy officials in San Cristobal in January lead me to the conviction that the Clinton administration deliberately concealed its knowledge of the Zapatista insurrection in order not to jeopardize NAFTA's chances before Congress. The Times has not reported that story. Read all about it in my forthcoming Chiapas--Uprising at the Roots (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, coming this fall).
*John Ross is a freelance writer who has been covering Latin America for 30 years. He is preparing a book on the Chiapas uprising.
By John Ross
In the photo, the Indian child squats in a cleared square of Lacondon Jungle next to a barbed wire fence that encloses a circular television satellite dish. This incongruous juxtaposition was displayed on the front page of the national daily, La Jornada, February 1 and graphically illustrates the subtext of a war that has featured five days of fighting and more than two months of talking to national and international media. The war of words between the Mexican government and the EZLN that began New Year's Day with the rebels' armed takeover of seven Chiapas municipalities has underscored the sharp differences between how electronic and print media here approach such watershed events.
For the vast majority of Mexicans, television is the prime news source--13 million Mexican homes now are equipped with one or more TV sets. Despite the recent privatizations of government channels, the Televisa Corporation, a vast communication conglomerate owned by Emilio Azcarraga, one of the five richest men in Latin America, continues to dominate television news with a captive audience of 90 percent of the viewing public. Televisa owns four of the five national networks, one of the two cable outlets, and hundreds of local stations and repeater facilities throughout the nation; in most provincial cities, Televisa news is the only coverage available. A strong supporter of the PRI, Azcarraga last year reportedly offered to double the $25 million donation the PRI had urged leading Mexican industrialists to contribute to the party's 1994 presidential election campaign.
>From the inception of the Zapatista rebellion, Televisa's most watched newscast, 24 Hours, produced by Jacobo Zabludowsky and his son Abraham, has delivered a version of the conflict that lionizes President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the Mexican military while condemning the Zapatistas, who are never referred to by name. Zabludowsky and son continue to deny that the rebellion has deep Indian roots, and they have often fingered San Cristobal de las Casas' liberation Bishop Samuel Ruiz and his priests as instigators of the uprising. Despite documented evidence of human rights atrocities committed by the military, 24 Hours and other Televisa news broadcasts, have limited visuals of army activities in Chiapas to footage showing food distribution and social tasks. Televisa has also been accused of unauthorized use of exclusive interviews with EZLN representatives and their urther demonize the Zapatistas. One recent case in point is the February 16 release of Castellanos, a former Chiapas governor, in Guadalupe Tepeyac, an EZLN stronghold in the Lacondon Jungle. Castellanos was released to government negotiator Manuel Camacho Solis and Bishop Ruiz before a partisan crowd of 600 EZLN supporters who chanted their approval of the Zapatistas. Televisa cut the sound whenever the onlookers cheered the rebels' cause.
Televisa's slanted coverage of the EZLN uprising has generated protests from what is called the civil society here. On January 25, thousands of vocal critics, representing 150 activist organizations, blockaded doors at the communication conglomerate's downtown offices and decorated the faade of the block-long building with expressions of support for the EZLN. Ironically, that evening, 24 Hours broadcast perhaps the most balanced news presentation ever produced by Televisa, spotlighting a lengthy segment in which President Salinas was verbally challenged by angry Chiapas farmers. The lesson, social critic Carlos Monsivais told me, is that only mobilization by the civil society can bring about credible coverage on Televisa. Monsivais has described Televisa's news programs as "a black hole" and its reporters as "professionals of the lie" (La Jornada, February 15, p. 8).
Another prominent critic of Televisa coverage is the EZLN's media-savvy spokesperson, "Subcomandante Marcos," who personally disinvited the communications giant from covering the peace negotiations that began February 21 between the Zapatistas and the government. "Televisa doesn't need to be present," Marcos wrote to the four print outlets in a letter dated February 3, "because their reporters just make the news up" (La Jornada, February 14, p. 8). Televisa's appearance as part of a pool broadcast team in Guadalupe Tepeyac, an event attended by 300 reporters, nearly derailed the release of Gen. Castellanos.
But if electronic media distortions of events in Chiapas have been blatant, print communicators have been on top of the story. La Jornada has rotated a dozen reporters into the war zone, most days dedicating the first 15 pages of its national news section to details of the conflict. The decade-old "pluralistic" daily's photos, background stories, and exclusive interviews with Marcos and members of the EZLN's General Command have put a human face on the struggle and, in the process, doubled daily circulation to an unprecedented 170,000; during the first five days of the uprising, readers lined up at newsstands around the country to buy the paper.
"Television, with its self-censorship, has lost ground to print as never before," wrote La Jornada special correspondent Herman Bellinghausen, expressing cautious optimism that the coverage is reviving the print media after many watchers had given it up for dead (February 7, p. 13).
Early on in the rebellion, showing an astute understanding of media dynamics, the EZLN selected four print outlets--La Jornada, El Financiero, Proceso magazine, and the tiny San Cristobal de las Casas daily, El Tiempo (see sidebar)--as recipients of its frequent communiques--letters that were generally delivered to San Cristobal by reporters who had penetrated Zapatista territory in pursuit of interviews. In a February 11 letter explaining why these four outlets had been chosen, Marcos apologized for the fact that the January 1 uprising had begun on a Saturday, hours after Proceso's weekly deadline (La Jornada, February 14).
"What has changed the way society looks at us has been the written press," Marcos told Proceso from his mountain hideout several days before the peace talks began (February 21). "It wasn't the government or our arms or Don Samuel or Camacho--it was the written press that kept looking and made people think that something was happening...."
Despite the biased Televisa coverage and equally loaded accounts delivered by Televisa Azteca, the new concessionaire on privatized government channels, not all televison coverage has been a "black hole." An independently produced two-part series, featuring an in-depth interview with Marcos, was shown during primetime on February 6 and 7 by Multivision, a cable outlet. Although Multivision has only a half-million subscribers, mostly in Mexico City, the airing "raised the possibility that television can contribute to the democratization of our country," wrote human rights advocate Dr. Sergio Aguayao in the February 9 La Jornada. Also breaking the video barrier: the combative Channel 6 de Julio, whose pro-EZLN documentary, The War in Chiapas, drew 5,000 viewers to a Mexico City cultural center in late January.
Such breakthroughs in reporting have not gone unchallenged. In a veiled warning delivered on the military's "Day of Loyalty," Secretary of Defense Antonio Reviello cautioned against media "glorification" of the perpetrators of "violence" (February 9). La Jornada has been the target of threatened violence by the "Mexican Anti-Communist Front," and its reporters in Chiapas have received telephoned death threats and have been physically assaulted by persons who describe themselves as the sons of local cattle ranchers. The Mexico City offices of Channel 6 de Julio have been repeatedly broken into by unknown persons.
By John Ross
El Tiempo, the 12-page daily of the colonial city of San Cristobal de las Casas, is probably the most unlikely entry in the media derby that has been chasing the EZLN uprising to banner headlines and surging circulation. A family-run local newspaper that is still produced on two 19th-century linotype machines by Amado Avendano and his wife Concepcion Villafuertes (Dona Conchis), El Tiempo broke the story of the New Year's rebellion, obtained the first interview with Subcomandante Marcos, and has been the initial recipient of all Zapatista communiques. Like major Mexican papers, which have upped their page counts and sold increased advertising space as a result of the rebellion's news focus, El Tiempo has also doubled its daily output--from 800 to 1,600 copies a day.
"We were celebrating a quiet New Year's eve when a neighbor knocked on our door to tell us that armed men were entering San Cristobal," Dona Conchis recently told this reporter. With only one phoneline attached to a fax machine, the Avendanos immediately notified Mexico City dailies of the uprising and inadvertently passed the word on to the army when Amado called the 31st Military Zone headquarters for comment. Since the first days of the rebellion, El Tiempo's offices have been awash with progressive reporters, both national and international. While the representatives of the press interview local indigenas who have been manhandled by the military, El Tiempo prides itself as being "in service to the indigenous communities." Dona Conchis and her two daughters are often engaged in both feeding and caring for their large family and writing editorials for tomorrow morning's edition in the living area adjacent to the press room.
In a February 11 communique explaining why the EZLN had chosen El Tiempo to receive its letters first, Marcos saluted the Avendanos' commitment to publishing the truth and wrote that the decision was not an easy one, Marcos explained, because, as a small local newspaper, "El Tiempo had the most to lose" from any political backlash against the EZLN.
"The government has denied us advertising since the time when Absalon Castellanos was governor. We have no assets. All we have to lose by publishing the truth is our skins," laughs Dona Conchis.
LOOT: Zapatistas in Chiapas" ---------- */ The following articles are reprinted without permission from the May 19944 issue of LIES OF OUR TIMES, a monthly magazine of media criticism and analysis. Subscriptions: $28/year (U.S.), $36/year (Canada and Mexico), $40/year (all other countries), from LOOT, 145 W. 4th St., New York, NY 10012; 212-254-1061. Copyright 1994 by Sheridan Square Press, Inc., and the Institute for Media Analysis, Inc.