The strange ways that governments talk
by Eric Jackson
Governments often lie. Usually it's to cover up some embarrassment,
sometimes it's a matter of compulsion, and often it's to conceal corruption
of individuals holding positions within the government. The evolving cover
stories about the US-Peruvian shootdown of a Baptist missionary plane over
Amazon are a case in point. The US government and the Peruvian Air Force are
blaming each other for the incident in mutually exclusive versions, Peruvian
civil aviation officials are being forced to change their stories so as to
conflict with the documentary evidence but support their evidence, and depending
on whom you want to believe, the surviving victims were held in custody and
"debriefed" either by Peruvian or American officials after the incident.
The US government has assigned a press hack to "assist" the wounded pilot
as he recovers in a hospital in the states.
Of course, there are lies and there are deceptions. Slick Willie
is infamous for parsing phrases so that he could argue about the meanings
of words like "is" and "sex." Richard Nixon was infamous for
his flat-out lies. In the Moscoso administration, the worst people around
her prefer the latter model and La Presidenta mostly plays dumb.
Most people aren't fooled for long in most circumstances. When
most people are fooled, it's usually because the press is the first to be
hoodwinked.
There are all sorts of ways to fend off the press, from Colombian
hit men to military jargon. Sometimes misdirection works.
For an example of the latter, there was last year's administrative
prosecutor law. It was a long document, with provisions that would have made
most Panamanian government documents secret — just the sort of thing
that a sticky-fingered politician would want. The press jumped on that, and
the politicians were forced to back off, albeit ever so slightly. But meanwhile,
while our attention was distracted by Alma Montenegro de Fletcher's outrageous
anti-press whizbang, another part of the law gave her a substantial pay raise
and nobody in the press noticed.
And then there is ideological conformity. For example, just
about every mainstream news medium described the recent Summit of the Americas
as a gathering of 34 democratically elected heads of state, and many pointed
out that all of the hemisphere has democracy except for Cuba.
Huh? In Paraguay, the followers of ex-dictator Stroessner's
faction — the stronistas — have lost every important election
that they have contested in recent years, but one of their own, Mr. González
Macchi, is the unelected president and the people who defeated him and his
faction are mostly in jail or on the run. In Antigua and Barbuda, Prime Minister
Lester Bird's family controls all broadcasting, the election machinery and
the police, who don't tolerate much opposition but tend to look the other
way when international gangsters launder their money in that offshore haven.
But now that everybody has been told that Paraguay and Antigua-Barbuda
are democracies, and that the Free Trade Area of the Americas will be for
democracies only, should we all be reassured? I'm not.
