From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: Mass Graves, real and invented
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 17:00:05 GMT

Mass Graves, real and invented

From Grey City Journal, Chicago, October 26, 1990, by
Michael Rosenfeld

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Mass grave found in Chile & Sandinista "mass grave" invented in Nicaragua
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This summer there were a number of important archeological finds in
Chile. In the north of the country, where the dryness and the sea salt
can preserve things that would decay anywhere else, graves were
found. A survivor of general Pinochet's secret death camps had lead
reporters to the place, and to everyone's astonishment, the corpses
were still there. The killings had taken place inn the middle
seventies. All over Latin America this was front page news. Even in
Guatemala, where the newspapers are extremely sensitive about
publishing anything that could indicate that human rights are
not universally worshiped, these Chilean graves were front page news.

Sectors of Chilean society that had always been silent on the subject
of Pinochet and the bloody coup of 1973 began to speak out. Carlos
Oviedo, the Archbishop of Santiago demanded that the army b e called
to account for its crimes. In a country where the elected president
(Aylwin) was struggling to have some political control against the
army (still headed by Pinochet), the tides began to change. As
happened in argentina in the early eighties when the full scope of the
horrors of the military rule became known to the people, the army
lost any popular support that it may have had. These army officials
began to say that what had really happened in Chile was no the
massacre of innocents, but a civil war. They invented a supposed "Zeta
Plan" that showed that the bodies buried in the mass graves were
really people that had to be killed because they were planning to
assassinate army leaders. no evidence of this was supplied, and no one
believed it. School teachers, students, artists, housewives, and other
ordinary people met their end in Pisagua and other camps. If it was a
civil war in Chile, only one side had guns.

This was of course an interesting story, and it did in fact receive
coverage from such well known newspapers as the Chicago Tribune, and
the New York Times. But it was hardly front page news. At this point
something truly interest occurred, and it shed a great deal of light
on how news is reported and created in this country. Pinochet, you
see, was for most of his career (especially in the early seventies
when all those people were killed) one of the United States closets
allied. He was our man in Chile. Our armed forces helped bring him to
power and overthrow Allende, whose worst crime was probably that he
thought the Chilean people deserved to gain more from the natural
richness of their own country. When newspapers run stories about
Pinochet murdering school children, and then also to mention that he
was our ally it is what we may call "bad press" for the United States.
Someone (probably the Peubla Institute, which is a CIA funded Latin
America monitoring group) had the idea that to diffuse the issue, a
parallel story about graves in Nicaragua, victims of the Sandinistas
(you remember the Sandinistas? they were the undemocratic
totalitarians who held Central America's only real elections in 1984,
and then did it again in 1990) needed to be written.

And so a very strange hoax was perpetrated on newspaper reader across
our fine and free thinking land. The Mokoro'n massacre story was
created.

Here's how it happened: the human rights division of the contras (yes,
they have a human rights division), the ANPDH (the Nicaraguan
Association for Human Rights) found an unmarked grave site near the
northern town of Mokoro'n in Nicaragua. The news was first covered on
June 18 in the Sandinista newspaper Barricada. Some weeks later a
forensic doctor hired by ANPDH asserted that the eight people buried in
Mokoro'n had had their throats cut by the Sandinista army, and
furthermore he had identified the eight people. The relative of these
eight people were brought to the gravesite and allowed to weep on
national television. Members of the UNO party, the current government
of Nicaragua, made sweeping accusation about Sandinista abuses. The
story was picked up as news by the New York Times (Sandinistas Accused
as Burial Site are Unearthed - August 5 page 22). The Wall Street
Journal went even further: "Uncovering the Awful Truth of Nicaragua's
Killing Fields" (August 24 page 11). The Wall Street Journal article,
by the way, was written by Nina Shea of the Puebla Institute. The
Chicago Tribune printed Mona Charen's (Reagan's old "Central American
expert") opinion on the matter on August 13.

Then the story began to unravel. One of the supposed victims of
Sandinista murderers (Manuel de Jesu's Duarte Sovalbarro) turned up
alive and well, living with other demobilized contras. Another
supposed victim (Juan Chavarri'a Arteta) had been killed in combat
while fighting in the contra army, and had been buried by his brother
in a marked grave in a different part of the country. UNO government
officials began to publicly retract their accusations. To make a
complicated story short, the Organization of American States hired
some professional doctors to study the Mokoro'n graves, and they
determined that the story had been a complete hoax. The people buried
there had probably been buried by the Contras, but in any case the
identities of the people could not be determined.

The creation of news becomes real as if it were the truth. The New
York Times and the Wall Street Journal have yet to print any
retraction of their stories. The Chicago Tribune has agreed to print
a letter of rebuttal, which may go to press this week. What is
disturbing about this is how many people think the New York Times is a
liberal newspaper (no one has that misconception about the Trib or the
Journal). The fact that these papers would rely for a story on the
Puebla Institute which quo;s the contras on human rights, is hard to
believe. Hard to believe, but true.

*** *** ***

Michael Rosenfeld is a member of CAUSE, the student group that focuses
on Latin America. CAUSE is sponsoring Nicaraguan poet Ernesto
Cardenal to speak at the U of C Friday, Nov. 2. The talk will be at
6:30 in Kent 107; reception at 5:30 in Cobb 302. CAUSE meets in Cobb
301 or 101, Tues. nights, 7pm