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’My Only Friend Is My Conscience’: Face to Face With El Salvador’s Cold Killer | by Jonathan Blitzer | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/07/my-only-friend-is-my-conscience-face-to-face-with-el-salvadors-cold-killer

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I was due to fly to El Salvador the next night, because I wanted to confront Ochoa about the theft. While I was packing my bags in New York, the Salvadoran police began rounding up the culprits. Within hours, four were in custody, and several others had gone into hiding. The names of the officers appeared on television sets across El Salvador, listed by rank on the local news. These were aged and haggard men, geriatric fugitives. Two of them had been arrested before, in 1991, but were released from prison after the passage of the amnesty law.

Around the time that the Jesuit priests were killed, Ochoa had retired from military service and was working as the head of the state electric company, a privileged civilian post, and his name was circulating among officials at the State Department and CIA as a possible presidential candidate. He wasn’t personally implicated in the Jesuit killings, but he was friendly with another colonel who’d been found guilty of orchestrating the murders. Several months after the assassinations, Ochoa appeared on 60 Minutes saying that his friend was acting on someone else’s orders. This was farther than even the friend was willing to go—he had known enough to stay quiet. But Ochoa, who felt unencumbered by institutional allegiances, declared that “it was all planned beforehand,” implying that a group of military and political leaders had organized the crime. This flummoxed the Salvadoran government, which had no choice but to issue a string of denials.

Soon, there was talk in political circles of sacking Ochoa and forcing him to “wallow in the assembly, where he could talk to his heart’s content,” as one US Embassy cable summarized. (It is a mark of the times that a spot in congress was considered a demotion, a posting far from the action.) Ultimately, American officials cautioned their Salvadoran counterparts against making a martyr out of Ochoa. It was a lesson that would never be fully learned. In 2012, the left-wing president of El Salvador, reacting to another of Ochoa’s typically incendiary public comments, tried to remove him from contention for congress by reactivating his military status and conscripting him back into service. Ochoa coasted to reelection.

This Poisonous Cult of Personality | by Pankaj Mishra | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/01/this-poisonous-cult-of-personality

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Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House these days, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.

Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”

Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority. Her personal sacrifices remained for too long the basis for assessing her political outlook, though the record of Robert Mugabe, among many other postcolonial leaders, had already proved that suffering for the cause of freedom is no guarantee of wise governance, and that today’s victims are likely to be tomorrow’s persecutors.