Frozen in Time:--The WSJ's Paranoid Lens on Latin America

February 24, 2004
Frozen in Time
The WSJ's Paranoid Lens on Latin America
By PHILLIP CRYAN

In one of her Wall Street Journal columns last year, Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote that U.S. lawmakers and State Department officials who criticize the Colombian military's human rights record are "still fighting the Cold War, on the wrong side." She struck again February 6, accusing nongovernmental organizations of publishing fraudulent statistics about Colombia's record. She said they're "cooking the human-rights books," aiding a guerrilla effort to dupe U.S. officials into reducing military aid.

O'Grady, a senior Journal editorial writer since 1999, is far from the only journalist guilty of bias and omission in coverage of Colombia. Most U.S. reporters provide no historical context and base their claims on government sources and on opinion polls that exclude the country's poor majority.

But O'Grady's distortions differ from such biases. They are purposeful and consistent, systematic.

A typical column from 2002 was headlined, "Capitol Hill Leftists Side With Colombia Terrorists." By "terrorists," she meant only the guerrillas, not the paramilitaries. One of the "leftists," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), wrote in response that O'Grady's "absurd" arguments aimed "to brand people who defend human rights as enemy sympathizers."

An O'Grady column published November 13, 2003 led to a similar response from a Fellowship of Reconciliation volunteer living in San José de Apartadó, a western Colombian village where dozens of residents have been killed for refusing to acknowledge the authority of any armed actors, whether guerrillas, paramilitaries or official security forces. The volunteer, Sarah Weintraub--in a somewhat better position than O'Grady to assess the community's practices, having lived there for nearly a year--found it bewildering O'Grady's column labeled the community a "guerrilla haven," an accusation that invited paramilitary attacks on the villagers. "This was not a misunderstanding," Weintraub wrote in her group's newsletter. "This must have been deliberate."

She has not confined her reckless accusations to Colombia. She started a 2002 column with the hysterical question, "Is Fidel Castro busy cooking up viruses in Cuban labs to share with Islamic fundamentalists?" And she wrote at least two columns defending President George W. Bush's 2001 appointment of Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. Reich was a key figure in the Reagan administration's Iran-contra scandal and multiple Latin American counterinsurgency wars, yet O'Grady called Democratic Party opponents of his nomination Castro supporters still sore over the defeat of Nicaragua's socialist government.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/cryan02242004.html