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Mission Journal | A Look Back
The First Trip
During a 1982 mission to Central America, a delegation found turmoil within
and all around.
By Michael Massing
To this day, when I think back to CPJ’s first mission,
to Central America in March 1982, I feel slightly
queasy. It’s not so much because of the turbulence
we found on the ground—the state of emergency in
Nicaragua, the killings of four Dutch journalists in El Salvador,
the rampant activities of the death squads in
Guatemala. No, it was the tension within our delegation
that I most vividly recall.
At the time, Central America was the most dangerous
place in the world to be a journalist, and, although CPJ was
barely a year old, we felt we had to do something dramatic
to publicize the risks there. I was working full-time as an
editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, but since CPJ had
but one part-time staff member it fell to me to handle the
preparations. Arranging meetings and accommodations in
the three countries was taxing in that era before e-mail, but
Michael Massing is co-founder of CPJ and a current board
member. A contributor to numerous publications, he is the
author of Now They Tell Us (New York Review Books, 2004), a
collection of articles about press coverage of the war in Iraq.
choosing members of the delegation proved to be the real
challenge. Our first recruit was Gloria Emerson, a former
correspondent for The New York Times and author of Winners
and Losers, a book about U.S. involvement in Vietnam;
Emerson had been in frequent touch with CPJ about Central
America and badly wanted to go. At her urging, we also
invited Jonathan Larsen, a senior editor at Life magazine
who had covered Vietnam for Time; he, too, signed on. Also
agreeing to participate were Randolph Ryan, an editorial
writer at The Boston Globe, and George Watson, a vice president
of ABC News.
At five people, the delegation was already quite large,
but there was a sense that we needed one more person,
someone who might help us gain the ear of the U.S. government.
The Reagan administration had declared Central
America the prime battleground in the struggle against
Soviet expansionism and, under the direction of Assistant
Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, was seeking to isolate the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, prop up the government of José
Napoléon Duarte Fuentes in El Salvador, and shield the
CPJ
Anne Nelson, left,
CPJ’s mission
coordinator, and
Jonathan Larsen, a
senior editor at Life
magazine, at the
human rights office
of the Salvadoran
archbishop.
Guatemalan junta from criticism. We hoped that our mission,
by highlighting the dangers that journalists in all
three countries faced, could prod Washington into using its
influence on their behalf. To accomplish that, though, we
felt we needed to show that we weren’t just a bunch of
knee-jerk liberals. And so, after many phone calls and consultations,
we invited Allen Weinstein to join us.
Weinstein was executive editor of The Washington Quarterly,
published by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies at Georgetown University. Aside from a year
as a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post,
he had spent most of his career in academia. He was best
known for his book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, in
which he had sought to prove that Alger Hiss was a Soviet
spy, and which had stirred much controversy. Weinstein
had close ties to the administration, and, by adding him, we
hoped to get its attention. He was eager to go but insisted
on bringing his wife, a Washington lawyer who spoke Spanish
and whose political views were, if anything, even more
stalwart. We felt we had no choice but to go along, and so
she joined the delegation as an unofficial member.
The squabbling began from the moment we landed in
Managua. The political divisions over U.S. policy in the
region were so sharp that they kept intruding on our internal
discussions. Nonetheless, we had a series of remarkable and
revealing meetings. On a visit to the offices of La Prensa,
the newspaper that had helped bring down the dictator
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, we got a firsthand look at the
arbitrariness of the prior censorship that the Sandinistas
had imposed on the press. We arrived as that day’s edition
was being prepared, and the editor, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro
Jr.—son of the legendary publisher who had been assassinated
by Somoza’s thugs in 1978—informed us that the
editorial page had already been sent to the government
three times for inspection. The censors ended up banning
an article analyzing the mistrust between the superpowers,
a photo of children playing in the charred remains of a bus
destroyed by guerrillas in El Salvador, and a letter to the editor
about protecting the country’s wildlife. Across town, in
the offices of Barricada, the official organ of the Sandinista
Front, Pedro’s brother, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, defended
the government’s clampdown on the paper that his family
had so long owned, arguing that it used language that lent
legitimacy to counterrevolutionary groups. Thus had the
revolution split Nicaragua’s leading journalistic family.
We arrived in El Salvador on the eve of a national election
that the Reagan administration was touting as an important
step on the road to democracy, and more than 700 journalists
had come to cover it. I have a vivid memory of Tom
Brokaw broadcasting from outside a polling place in San Salvador.
Yet the working conditions for journalists—both local
and international—remained precarious. Twenty-two journalists
(not including the four Dutchmen) had been killed in
circumstances other than combat, and many more had been
AP
wounded, threatened, or assaulted. Everywhere journalists
went, they were greeted by chants of Di la verdad—tell the
truth. Shortly before our arrival, the right-wing Arena party
had broadcast a campaign ad criticizing New York Times
reporter Warren Hoge by name. (In a meeting in his room at
the Camino Real Hotel, Hoge expressed unconcern.) We met
with two of the men thought to be most responsible for the
attacks on journalists—Arena leader Roberto d’Aubuisson,
who was widely believed to be linked to the death squads,
and Gen. José Guillermo García, the director of the national
police. Both promised that after the election they would
issue statements calling for the rights of journalists to be
respected. (Neither did.) The depth of the animosity toward
the press became clear to us at a tense meeting with the
country’s leading business group. One wealthy industrialist
denounced The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time,
and Newsweek for the harm they had done El Salvador’s
image. We pointed out that it was not journalists who had
caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Salvadorans. Over
cocktails at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton,
we shared our concerns about the dangers journalists faced.
He cavalierly brushed them aside. The Salvadoran press was
“incredibly free,” he declared. As for the dead Dutchmen, he
said gruffly, “War correspondents run risks. They ran a risk.
It’s a rough country.”
In El Salvador, Arena leader Roberto d’Aubuisson and police
head Gen. José Guillermo García promised to publicly support
the rights of journalists. Neither did.
AP/Kathy Willens
While we were in El Salvador, we learned that the government
of Fernando Romeo Lucas García in Guatemala had
been overthrown in a coup. But the capital, Guatemala City,
seemed calm, so we continued there. The coup had brought
to power another general, Efrain Rios Montt, but the regime
he replaced had been so savage that journalists were allowing
themselves a moment of optimism. At the offices of
Diario El Gráfico, one of the country’s two main papers, a top
editor told us how under Lucas García he had feared attack
from both right-wing death squads and leftist guerrillas. “We
were the ham of the sandwich,” he said. With a new government
in place, he was feeling somewhat more relaxed. For
the first time in four years, the paper’s editor was signing
his name to editorials. He ended the meeting on a note of
74 Fall | Winter 2006
Dangerous Assignments
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