US Americanism : RCTV's Nicaraguan connection

by toni solo

Last week the Nicaraguan National Assembly approved a resolution condemning the Venezuelan government's decision not to renew the broadcasting concession of the RCTV media company. Such blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country is to be expected from Nicaragua's right wing political parties. Less expected was support for the vote from the centre-left Movimiento Renovador Sandinista. Normally vociferous publicity-seeking MRS deputy Monica Baltodano kept a low profile for her decision to abstain from the vote. No wonder, since Baltodano has consistently and loudly projected herself as representing authentic left-wing politics in Nicaragua. The fact is that the anti-FSLN centre and centre-left in Nicaragua decided to collaborate with the right-wing political parties at least as long ago as June 2006 and have carried on doing so ever since.

It is in that context that the recent local media hullabaloo about corrupt property dealings needs to be seen. In the same week as the National Assembly voted on the RCTV issue, the MRS-friendly media businessman Carlos Fernando Chamorro ran a half-baked exposé on crooked land deals along coastal areas of the southern Pacific department of Rivas. The programme targeted a minor FSLN government official, Gerardo Miranda, a consul for Nicaragua in Costa Rica and former FSLN deputy in the National Assembly. Miranda was supposedly secretly recorded discussing the amount of a bribe with  local businessman Armel Gonzalez to facilitate court cases involving a dispute affecting Gonzalez's business partners.

Chamorro, a media empresario and member of one of Nicaragua's elite families, ran the exposé in his weekly Esta Semana programme. The programme started a media frenzy because it tried directly to implicate the FSLN government in the case. It did so by arguing that Miranda is alleged to have held meetings in the FSLN's party headquarters in Managua in relation to the land deals. The FSLN's media, principally Canal 4's Multinoticias news programme responded by pointing out the skewed content of the Esta Semana exposé, the unsavoury record of Armel Gonzalez, his relation to the family of former president Enrique Bolaños and doubts about Chamorro's own role in the affair.

The politicization of the Gonzalez-Miranda case has been blatant from the start. Chamorro seems to have deliberately decided to run the exposé immediately at the end of a week in which he used his weekday programme to accuse the Venezuelan government of arbitrary political censorship over the RCTV case. In that week prior to the Gonzalez- Miranda exposé, Chamorro's nightly Esta Noche programme carried a friendly interview with two representatives from the Sociedad Inter-Americana de Prensa, the TV and Press media bosses' organization, whom Chamorro allowed a free run to voice their trademark  anti-Chavez propaganda.

In a subsequent programme, Chamorro interviewed Venezuela's ambassador to Nicaragua on the RCTV issue, attempting without success to get the ambassador to admit a political motive for the non-renewal of the RCTV concession. At the end of that programme Chamorro added a face to camera editorial comment insisting, despite the ambassador's clearly contrary explanation, on his own interpretation of the RCTV issue as an arbitrary, discretional measure by President Chavez rather than a legitimate decision of State to uphold its rights against gross abuses by an irresponsible big-business media company.

Subsequent to the airing of the Gonzalez-Miranda exposé, the Nicaraguan Public Prosecutor's office asked Chamorro to assist an investigation into the case by facilitating for them a copy of the original recording on which the exposé turned. Chamorro refused to do this arguing that the programme itself provided sufficient evidence and that a recording of the programme was available for analysis by the Public Prosecutor's office. The refusal to hand over a copy of the original recording leaves the Esta Semana programme team open to legitimate suspicions that the original bugged recording may have been edited to make Miranda look bad, something easily done with digital technology.

Chamorro's exposé is also open to question because it failed to give adequate coverage of the views of members of the rural cooperatives who claim that Gonzalez and other individuals, relatives of former President Bolaños, have acted dishonestly for years fixing land deals to exploit the chaotic legal status of property transactions that prevails in much of Nicaragua. By contrast the programme gave plenty of air time to foreign investors who claim to have been intimidated and harrassed by corrupt politicians and legal officials during the period since 1999. But that in itself raises the question of why Chamorro's programme should cover the extremely convoluted land issue in Nicaragua at this particular juncture in such a way as to prioritise the viewpoint of suspect individuals like Armel Gonzalez, along with that of his business partners, while marginalizing the perspective of local rural workers and their families.

A disingenuous political agenda drives Chamorro's television programmes and other media - like the national daily El Nuevo Diario, the web site Confidencial or the monthly intellectual review Envío - that represent the economic and political interests of Nicaragua's centre and centre-left professional and managerial classes. The FSLN's Multinoticias news programme interviewed three rural cooperative members who all said they had asked Chamorro previously to cover the coastal properties issue in Rivas and he refused to do so. Now Chamorro has given a platform to a businessman of questionable reputation and to that individual's foreign partners. Nor is it clear what relationship Carlos Fernando Chamorro himself has to the conflict he has chosen to publicise. It is quite possible subsequent events will reveal Chamorro may have had potential conflicts of interest.

The Nicaraguan government has responded to the Esta Semana exposé by asking the Public Prosecutor to investigate the claims made in the programme. But that has not been sufficient to stem a grotesque campaign of manipulation by the FSLN's opponents. These, led by Chamorro and leading members of the MRS, are claiming that the Gonzalez-Miranda case represents an acid test of media freedom in Nicaragua. They allege that attempts are being made to intimidate journalists like Chamorro so as to keep the lid on rampant official corruption. The obvious question is why these self-styled champions of free speech kept relatively quiet about corruption in Nicaragua's legal procedures for property transactions throughout the previous Bolaños administration.

Even routine transactions in government offices like the Public Registry have been bedevilled by graft and corruption all through the previous decade and right up to the present. Officials would deliberately delay simple registration procedures in order to be able to pressure clients into paying extra - a bribe - to get their transactions registered promptly. Extraordinary legal entanglements over property involving all kinds of illegality have long been routine in Nicaragua and have been so under every one of the previous three Liberal Party dominated governments. But Chamorro's Esta Semana programme gave neither that national context nor the specific local context affecting the coastal areas of Rivas under scrutiny. Such lack of professionalism is as typical of Nicaraguan media as their representatives' frequent and preposterous claims to offer objective, impartial reporting and fair comment.

The Gonzalez-Miranda case is another example of the  transition of the Nicaraguan media from persistent attacks on the FSLN through last year's election campaign to a clear strategy of attrition now that the FSLN is in government.  The opposition have floundered for months trying to find issues they can exploit to damage the FSLN-led coalition. The government's initiatives in the economy, on health and education, on energy, infrastructure, pensions, tourism and other key areas of the country's affairs have been decisive and coherent. The RCTV case in Venezuela awoke the opposition in Nicaragua to a social issue - free speech - they can manipulate and exploit to their heart's content.

The Gonzalez-Miranda affair signals what will be a bitter, permanent campaign by the country's right and centre dominated media to exploit every opportunity to discredit the government, however loosely related any given case may be to the government itself. This follows precedents already set by local allies of the United States in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico - anywhere that popular political alternatives emerge to the neo-liberal policies promoted by the United States government and its allies. In all these countries, elite-aligned media who support US corporate imperialism promote insidious US State Department-style Americanism.

They implicitly favour US and US-aligned interpretations and analyses of their country's current affairs. They mix the very worst yellow journalism with more subtle perception management, manipulating concepts like "free speech" and "civil society" so as to project themselves as vulnerable victims striving heroically to defend democracy. In fact they are working feverishly to defend entrenched vested interests of the local elite. Nicaragua has become a decisive arena of conflict between slavish local proponents of US government Americanism and the FSLN-led coalition government working for a prosperous, autonomous, democratic country free of imperialist domination.