When does a foreign scandal become known as such in the United States?
Larry Tovar Acuña, a former top lieutenant to the infamous Colombian drug kingpin Pablo EscobarBy Justin Delacour
Latin America News Review
August 12, 2011
Below is short passage of a 1993 Washington Post report that explains how Venezuela's interim president at the time --Ramon Velasquez-- mistakenly signed a letter of pardon for one of Pablo Escobar’s top lieutenants, Larry Tovar Acuña. Tovar Acuña had been imprisoned in Venezuela for drug-trafficking and money laundering. The presidential letter of pardon allowed Tovar Acuña to walk free from a Venezuelan prison.
There has never been a conviction here on charges related to money laundering, and U.S. officials say high-level governmental corruption remains a barrier to successful prosecution.
A particularly revealing example surfaced in late October when an operative in the office of President Ramon Velasquez slipped a letter of pardon into a stack of documents to be signed by the president. The letter allowed one of Escobar's top lieutenants, Larry Tovar Acuna, to walk free from a Venezuela prison.
"The pardon order made this incredible leap through the system. It bypassed all the normal checks and balances that would prevent such a mistake from happening," a U.S. official said.
"It is not just a dark hand behind these activities, but a dark political hand that has been managing the situation," Justice Minister Fermin Marmol Leon said. The president's private secretary was arrested.
What’s striking about the story is that, in the United States, what would seem to have been a scandal of significant proportion was barely a footnote in U.S. news reporting about Venezuela in 1993. I’ve analyzed thousands of U.S. newspaper, television and radio reports about Latin America spanning the past 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever come across any mention of this particular episode in the U.S. press. And, mind you, the report above doesn't even treat the episode as a scandal. The passage above is basically just a sidenote, coming after the first seven paragraphs of a story entitled "Venezuela Takes Steps Against Illegal Money Laundering."
Now, I suspect that, if Venezuela’s current president --an official U.S. enemy-- were to mistakenly sign a letter of pardon for a top lieutenant of an infamous drug kingpin, there would be wall-to-wall news coverage about such a scandal. My guess is that one talking head after another would prattle on for months about how Hugo Chavez is the new Noriega.
This demonstration of how media subjectively decide what constitutes a scandal and what doesn’t is illustrative of how media can very easily manipulate public perceptions of the outside world. When does a foreign scandal become known as such in the United States? The answer is that foreign scandals become known as such when powerful people deem that they have some interest in exposing such scandals. When powerful people do not have an interest in exposing a scandal (about an allied government, for example), you hear little about the scandal in question. In contrast, when powerful people have an interest in exposing a scandal (about an official U.S. enemy, for example), the public is often treated to all manner of wild conjecture about the implications of the scandal.
In sum, the media’s ability to downplay some foreign scandals and highlight others really calls into question whether our culture is capable of truly understanding the politics of foreign countries. Because I’m deeply skeptical about our culture’s ability to genuinely inform itself about the politics of foreign countries, I’m also deeply skeptical of the notion that the U.S. public is able to make consistently sound judgments about how and when the United States should intervene abroad.
posted by Justin Delacour | 2:49 PM
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