Study: Leading paper colluded with Chilean dictatorship

The coverage of human rights violations cases by the powerful conservative Chilean newspaper El Mercurio during the country's 17-year dictatorship was the focus of a meticulous study by five young reporters. The book presented on May 18 "provides numerous concrete examples of the collusion between El Mercurio and the dictatorship, information that is a disgrace to the journalistic profession," Juan Pablo Cárdenas, winner of the 2005 national journalism prize and founder of the now defunct magazine Revista Análisis, told IPS. Cárdenas was among those interviewed for the book "Agustín's Newspaper; Five Case Studies on El Mercurio and Human Rights (1973-1990)", published by the University of Chile Institute of Communication and Image (ICEI) and the LOM publishing house. In 2006 and early 2007, six ICEI journalism graduates were called together by filmmaker Ignacio Agüero, producer and journalist Fernando Villagrán and the heads of the ICEI to carry out a study on a specific issue: how El Mercurio reported on the human rights violations committed by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The research process was filmed by Agüero and Villagrán and turned into an 80-minute award-winning documentary, "Agustín's Newspaper", which until recently was showing in movie theatres in Chile, and was also received well in Buenos Aires, where it premiered in October. The second part of the project was the publication of the 378-page book of the same name, whose seven chapters analyse cases like the torture and assassination of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria; "Operation Colombo", a disinformation ploy mounted by the regime's secret police to cover up the forced disappearance and murder of 119 leftists; and the differences in El Mercurio's coverage in the 1970s and the 1980s. "As young people who did not experience the coup d'etat, we weren't biased" against the country's most influential newspaper, Paulette Dougnac, one of the authors of the study along with Elizabeth Harries, Claudio Salinas, Hans Stange and María José Vilches, told IPS. But all of the young reporters assume that they will never be able to find work with the Empresa Periodística El Mercurio S.A.P, which owns El Mercurio de Valparaíso (founded in 1827), El Mercurio de Santiago, La Segunda, Las Últimas Noticias and 21 regional daily newspapers, as well as the FM Digital network of radio stations. "We saw that the underlying situation was much more complex than what you would expect; there are so many nuances," said Dougnac. "On one hand there was the self-censorship of the newspaper and on the other, the self-censorship of the journalists. And on top of that, the censorship by the government." The study was a collective, cooperative endeavour, said the book's editor, Claudia Lagos, a methodology that made it possible to produce more than 100 interviews and to generate information like a complete list of the newspaper's correspondents, stringers, photographers, editors and editorial chiefs between 1973 and 1990. "These nearly 400 pages that we are presenting today are not only marked by rigorous, meticulous investigation by its authors, but also reflect the darkest pages in the history of Chilean journalism, which systematically violated each and every one of the precepts that make ethical journalism the essence of our profession," ICEI director Faride Zerán said at the launch of the book. The book "is not a witch hunt," but an effort to understand the dynamics of how things worked back then, said Chilean journalist Cristóbal Peña with the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIPER), who was invited to comment on the publication. "The lack of authorisation by the newspaper to report on certain issues, the self-censorship of the reporters themselves for fear of reprisals–whether from the government or from the newspaper itself–and ignorance on these issues due to a lack of interest are the three factors that explain the silence" on human rights violations, the authors write. Promoting the coup On Sept. 11, 1973, General Pinochet (1915-2006) headed the bloody military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), who was elected at the head of the Popular Unity (UP) coalition of leftwing forces. The truth reports commissioned by the governments of the centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy, that has ruled the country since the return to democracy in 1990, have documented more than 3,000 people killed or forcibly disappeared and some 35,000 victims of torture under the Pinochet regime. "Enough information has been declassified to confirm the involvement of (Agustín) Edwards (who is still president of El Mercurio) in the United States vis-à-vis the government of (Richard) Nixon (1969-1974), in supporting and promoting a coup against the UP government," says the book. "He (Allende) complained, protested, made a fuss, but he respected freedom of the press, which allowed us to carry out the entire campaign (against the government)," Arturo Fontaine, former assistant director and director of El Mercurio, admitted in an interview in the book. There are three principles that have consistently formed the basis of El Mercurio's editorial line: defence of private property, respect for the free market, and the subsidiary role of the state, said the manager of the newspaper, Jonny Kulka. This explains why El Mercurio saw Allende's socialist policies as such a threat, the authors write. "When you talk about El Mercurio, you're talking about a national institution, more than a newspaper," says the book. The Edwards family bought El Mercurio de Valparaíso in 1879 and founded El Mercurio de Santiago in 1900. Five generations of "Agustín Edwards" have presided over the paper. "It is difficult to understand the history of Chile without El Mercurio," then President Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) said at the celebration of the newspaper's 100th anniversary in 2000. Due to its broad social influence, the paper plays the role of a political party, says the book. It is the paper read by the country's better-off classes, and as such, draws the largest proportion of advertising, as well as a large share of government advertising. Disinformation operation "There wasn't much to censor, because the media did quite a bit of self-censoring. Nor did we give them 'guidelines', although we provided 'orientations' on the proper use of certain information," journalist Federico Willoughby, who served as media adviser to Pinochet, told the authors of "Agustín's Newspaper". In its pages, El Mercurio helped built up the dictatorship's "founding myth," as described by Claudio Salinas: "Plan Z", an alleged leftwing plot to kill senior military officers at a Sept. 18, 1973 independence day celebration, to solidify the Allende government's control over the country. The fictitious plot was used by Pinochet and El Mercurio to justify the Sept. 11 military coup. El Mercurio, along with other newspapers, also participated in the disinformation ploy known as "Operation Colombo", mounted by the regime's secret police, DINA, to cover up the forced disappearance and murder of 119 leftists in 1974. The media campaign, which was carried out in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, was a kind of forerunner of Operation Condor, a U.S.-backed coordinated plan that emerged in late 1975 among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing and eliminating leftwing opponents and social activists. Under the "Operation Colombo" campaign, several newspapers reported that the 119 Chilean "extremists" were killed in internal purges or in firefights with police in Argentina and Brazil. The 1976 assassination of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria by agents of the dictatorship was reported by El Mercurio as an accident. A bottle of pisco–a local grape brandy–and a letter found in his car, which was dragged out of a canal into which it supposedly fell, pointed - according to the newspaper's reports - to a man who had got drunk over his wife's supposed unfaithfulness and crashed. "In the case of Carmelo Soria, one of the military regime's favourite strategies was put into effect: the portrayal of human rights violations as accidents or common crimes," says the author of that chapter, María José Vilches. The case of the 15 poor farmers who were forcibly disappeared in Lonquén, a quiet town in the hills 50 km southwest of Santiago, was also reported at first as just another case for the police. But as the legal investigation advanced, El Mercurio echoed the version put out by the dictatorship that the 15 bodies found in December 1978 in an abandoned lime kiln in Lonquén were leftist subversives who died as a "consequence of the civil war initiated in 1973 by the Marxists," as Hans Stange writes. The justice system eventually determined that the 15 men and youths had been arrested by the carabineros (uniformed police) in October 1973. And although their families loudly denounced their disappearance, the case was basically ignored by El Mercurio. The book ends with the chapter written by Dougnac: "I compared the newspaper's reporting from the 1970s and 1980s, and saw that there was a major opening in the 1980s in terms of news coverage. However, I found that in the editorial portion, the hard-line denial of human rights violations continued," she commented to IPS. Besides "documenting and disseminating some truths, which to some extent had become common sense in journalistic circles," the book "legitimately asks the question about what is journalism, based on specific cases from a given moment in the history of Chile," editor Claudia Lagos told IPS. This leads to critical thinking about journalism in Chile today, "when many reporters make an effort to do their work well, although it is also true that every day we feel indignant over small errors or major disasters in terms of coverage and the treatment of the poor, Mapuche Indians, women, sexual minorities and a long list of others," she said. Agüero's documentary, which has drawn more attention than the book, has sparked debate on these issues, said Lagos. One of the guests invited to the presentation of the book was Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, the president of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights group in Argentina, who described the study carried out by the five young reporters as "systematic and rigorous." "For journalists to investigate the country's leading media outlet is very encouraging; this just does not happen in other countries," he said. "This is an exemplary study because it contributes to generating a sense of responsible citizenship in a freer, more informed society," he said. Despite the accusations and evidence, El Mercurio has never issued a "mea culpa" for its actions during the Allende administration and the 17 years of military dictatorship, as other media outlets have attempted to do. And only one journalist who worked at the newspaper in the 1980s, María Angélica de Luigi, apologised in a letter published in another local paper, The Clinic, in 2000.