July 8, 1997

U.S. MEDIA MISCAST AS HUMAN-RIGHTS WATCHDOGS

By Norman Solomon


     During Hong Kong's first days under the Chinese flag, many
American journalists speculated on the future of human rights in
the former British colony.

     As the royal yacht Britannia sped away from Hong Kong,
network anchors worried aloud. A front-page New York Times
headline asked: "Will Beijing Honor Vows?" And so on.

     Recent coverage might leave the impression that U.S. media
outlets are vigilant watchdogs for human rights in other
countries. That's a pleasant image -- but it has little to do
with reality.

     For instance, the media establishment in the United States
has barely stifled a yawn at the Western Hemisphere's worst
ongoing human-rights disaster. In Colombia, many lives are
shadowed by carnage:

     * Journalism is a hazardous profession for Colombians. Last
spring, attackers took the lives of newspaper editor Gerardo
Bedoya and photographer Freddy Ahumada. The U.S.-based Committee
to Protect Journalists cites "evidence of renewed violence."

     The committee says that Colombia's journalists face "death
threats, physical attack, bombings and kidnapping at the hands of
a broad range of players -- drug barons, the military,
paramilitary groups and guerrilla terrorists -- all intent on
silencing them."

     * While receiving $169 million in annual military aid from
Washington, the Bogota government maintains direct ties with
paramilitary death squads in the Colombian countryside.
Abductions, torture and grisly mutilations are common. Punishment
is rare.

     A Human Rights Watch report -- released last fall but
virtually ignored by the U.S. press -- showed that the Clinton
administration is equipping "killer networks" operated by
Colombian military and paramilitary units.

     * The media myth is that drug traffickers are to blame for
most of Colombia's murder and mayhem. Guerrilla insurgents, who
are guilty of atrocities, also get a lot of bad press.

     But independent monitors, such as the Colombian Commission
of Jurists, have documented that the government's army, police
and allied armed groups commit about two-thirds of Colombia's
political murders -- which occur at an average rate of 11 per
day. Among those killed in recent years: more than 3,000 elected
members of the alternative Union Patriotica party.

     * "The most atrocious violence that we are experiencing
comes from the state and its secret affiliates, which are the
paramilitary groups," says Father Javier Giraldo. He's a Jesuit
priest who heads the Inter-Congregational Commission for Justice
and Peace, a panel formed by 55 Catholic religious orders in
Colombia.

     Father Giraldo points out that "the United States continues
sending military aid to our government without conditioning it on
respect for basic human rights."

     Irked at Colombian President Ernesto Samper's drug policies,
Washington has halted some assistance to his government. But the
cutoff hasn't interrupted the flow of U.S. aid to Colombia's
military and police.

     In theory, the Yankee dollars are earmarked for anti-drug
efforts -- but in practice, they fund militarized repression
aimed largely at popular organizations, labor unions and the
poor. For good measure, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence
agencies keep hundreds of advisers in Colombia.

     Such aid is reassuring to foreigners with a huge economic
stake in Colombia. These days, the country's biggest legal export
isn't coffee -- it's oil. Companies like Texaco, Chevron and
Occidental Petroleum are heavily invested.

     Overall, as the Wall Street Journal noted last year, U.S.
firms "are responsible for more than half of all foreign direct
investment in the country." As far as they're concerned,
Colombia's status quo is worthy of protection.

     In contrast to Hong Kong's uncertainties, some nightmarish
realities arrived long ago in Colombia -- where violence takes
about 35,000 lives yearly in a country of 37 million people.

     The dire shortage of media attention to those realities is
especially tragic because the Colombian military is hyper-
sensitive to negative publicity in the United States.

     A few months ago, a high-ranking Colombian officer, General
Rito del Rio, angrily denounced a World Wide Web site operated by
the Colombia Support Network based in Madison, Wisconsin. The
human-rights information on the web -- at www.igc.org/csn -- has
infuriated commanders of the Colombian armed forces.

     But the top brass of Colombia's murderous military don't
have much to complain about when it comes to U.S. media coverage
of human rights.

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Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His book "Wizards of
Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News" (co-authored
with Jeff Cohen) has just been published by Common Courage Press.