The Fanonite

Britain’s state propaganda organ BBC continues the government’s campaign against Venezuela. “Chavez ’stifles Venezuelan media‘”, it writes. In a country where press is gagged with legal injunctions for revealing government secrets (e.g., the UK gag over the minutes of the meeting where Bush-Blair discussed bombing Al Jazeera), it takes more than mere chutzpah to attack another government’s media practices. It takes willful blindness, for instance, when the CIA links of Inter-American Press Service, the organization criticizing Venezuela for its alleged stifling of the media, are overlooked.

IAPA has long served as a useful tool when any Latin American country undergoes democratic or revolutionary change. The scholar Fred Landis describes how newspapers in the target country become propaganda instruments manipulated by the CIA and its affiliated organs:

IAPA stands ready, with all its hundreds of cooperating member newspapers, to scream “Marxist Threat to Free Press” if any attempt is made by the target government to restrict the flow of hostile propaganda. In 1969 the CIA had five agents working as media executives at El Mercurio, all of whom in subsequent years were elevated to the Board of Directors of IAPA. The owner of El Mercurio was made head of the Freedom of the Press committee, and later President. IAPA bylaws permitted only working owners to be members, so the bylaws were changed to accommodate him. Then many of the CIA operatives at Copley News Service were made members of the Board of Directors of IAPA. Immediately before the campaign to oust socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley, Jamaica Daily Gleaner publisher Oliver Clarke was added to the Executive Committee; he has now been promoted to Treasurer. At the last annual convention in San Diego, IAPA elevated Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, Jr., to its Board of Directors. At that time he was not an editor or publisher of La Prensa, but the CIA needed him because he had the same name as his martyred father. After his elevation he was belatedly made Assistant Director of La Prensa, and when he was recently added to the IAPA Executive Committee, La Prensa began carrying the IAPA membership credential in its masthead. At the last IAPA meeting in Rio de Janeiro in October, speeches, including those by Vice-President Bush, were dominated by alarmist references to the situation of the press in Nicaragua.

Obviously the owner of a conservative newspaper in Latin America does not need CIA money to be against a socialist government. The assistance provided by the CIA is primarily technical, not financial. Without CIA help, the local newspaper’s opposition would be openly stated on the editorial page in language reflecting the ideology of the local conservative elite. That would be ideological warfare, not psychological warfare. But the CIA is not concerned, in these operations, with local ideology; it is concentrating on the use of its bag of technological dirty tricks. One of these tricks is disinformation.

Fred Landis, CIA Media Operations in Chile, Jamaica, and Nicaragua, Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 16, March 1982, pp. 34 — 35.