PressEthic

George W. Bush is heading to Argentina next month for a Heads of State of the Americas Summit.

In anticipation, four home-made bombs were detonated in Buenos Aries on Thursday. One was at a Blockbuster Video; another was at a Bank Boston; the other two were at Citibank. Notes that read “No to Bush in Argentina!” were found at each site, signed by the “Che Guevara Anti-Imperialist Commando.” Reuters is the only news service I’ve found that covered the bombings. The NYT didn’t even have the story in its “Americas” section a day later. I had to search the site to find it.

That’s probably because no one was killed.

Yet you would think such a symbolically loaded terrorist attack that threatened George W. Bush would have more currency and news value than a single newswire story. According to Reuters, Argentine government officials even said that they expect more attacks in the near future.

But “if it bleeds it leads” isn’t the only adage at work here. Latin American news in general has been reduced to near insignificance since the Middle East and Asia came to dominate the international pages.

The grossest example of this was the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the free trade pact modeled after NAFTA, which was legislated over the summer. That was a huge, huge story, but there was little coverage. During July, when CAFTA passed, there were about 40 stories in the NYT, WSJ, WP, USA Today and the LAT combined. And most of what ran contained little international reportage—they were stories about political muscle and economic powerhouses, but not about what mattered just as much, if not more: people. How would CAFTA affect the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and the Dominican Republic? This question was absent from the dialogue.

In other un-reported Latin American news, on September 30 Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez pulled $5 billion in reserves out of US treasury bonds and moved them to Euros. Anyone following the “dollar crisis” might think such a shrewd move deserves at least a little coverage. Yet the AP wire story was posted on a few financial sites like MSN Money and Business Week. None of the majors picked it up.