Mailing address:
3536 - 106 Street
Edmonton, AB T6J 1A4
403-436-5652
FAX: 403-437-0719
August 20, 1991
Enclosed for your information are copies of a couple of newspaper
commentaries on the reaction of the Canadian forestry industry to
growing national and international criticism.
Attachment #1: from THE VANCOUVER SUN, Monday, July 22, 1991
FORESTRY FLACKS' RECORD: DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE
By Stephen Hume
In Argentina, the military junta of 1976 faced the same problem
as B.C.'s forest industry today. Repeated abuse of the public
trust had eroded confidence in its integrity.
The government there hired Burson-Marsteller to help solve that
problem and the public relations firm's mandate was to improve
Argentina's image so that credibility might be restored.
The firm has now been hired here to restore confidence in the
integrity of B.C.'s forest industry. Companies that undermined
public faith by abusing their civic duties of resource
stewardship now fear they risk a major collapse in trust.
Writing about Burson-Marsteller's strategy for B.C.'s Forest
Alliance, SUN reporter Ben Parfitt drew attention to the firm's
historic connections with Argentina's military dictatorship.
Some Forest Alliance directors were incensed. At a meeting with
THE SUN they were unanimous in condemning the story as unfair,
irrelevant, even unethical. It raised "a continuing intimation
that because they (Burson-Marsteller) are associated with those
events that they're somehow colored by them."
Indeed, they are. The day Burson-Marsteller was engaged by
B.C.'s forest industry, one independent truck logger told me the
choice was wrong precisely because of the company's past clients.
I considered exploring further the implications of Burson-
Marsteller's history as window-dresser for one of South America's
bloodiest regimes, especially in the context of its campaign here
to heal communities bitterly divided by failures of trust.
But the intensity of Forest Alliance objections gave me pause.
In the context of contemporary B.C., would it be ethically
improper to resurrect what one of the directors described as
"ancient history"?
"I don't know anything about Argentina," protested Gary Ley, the
decent, pleasant-mannered Burson-Marsteller representative who
serves as executive director for the Forest Alliance.
So I took my ethical dilemma to some disinterested referees.
Mark Wexler is professor of policy analysis and business ethics
at Simon Fraser University; Michael McDonald holds the chair of
applied ethics at the University of British Columbia.
I presented the problem this way: Fifteen years ago a company
worked to develop credibility and economic viability for -- and
thus knowingly helped perpetuate -- a criminal regime. Is it
ethical to raise this as an issue of corporate morality now?
"Yes it is. It's easy to take this position," said Wexler.
"It's not unethical to raise an issue like this," said McDonald.
"Have they done things in the past that might call into question
the integrity of what they do now? Yes, you should ask who their
former clients are. That's a legitimate question."
In other words, we are connected to our history. We cannot
divorce ourselves from it, evade it, ignore it or erase it.
Forest Alliance director Patrick Moore argues that Burson-
Marsteller's contract was with Argentina's economic ministry only
and its non-political role was to encourage foreign investment.
"It has a record of truth in public relations as its bottom
line," he said, citing the firm's forthright and admirable
handling of a crisis involving poisoned Tylenol capsules.
He objected strongly to Parfitt's juxtaposing the reality of
state murder of political opponents with Burson-Marsteller's
strategy for marketing the perception of Argentina's stability.
Besides, argued Moore, "people get killed everywhere."
Wexler prefers the analogy of an accountant. If the client is
polygamous, that's none of the accountant's business. It is
another ethical matter entirely if the accountant is hired to
help prepare a misleading prospectus.
And that's the nut of this issue. In Argentina, Burson-
Marsteller was hired to make the world think better of a
government widely known to be butchering its own citizens. Thus,
what the public relations firm was doing in Argentina was "not
merely image-making. This is falsification of history. This is
an attempt to hoodwink," Wexler points out.
What about the argument that Burson-Marsteller worked for a minor
element of the junta's government? Or that Argentina and New
York are far away and people here know nothing about it?
"This is the argument we call pluralistic ignorance. 'That's bad
but, golly, I have nothing to do with it.' You get bright people
together and they divide things up as specialists and agree that
whatever falls outside their immediate area of speciality they
are not responsible for," Wexler says.
"They will basically plead ignorance or they will argue that they
were not hired to represent that particular part of the client's
persona. I think the process itself stinks. It is very
troubling. It's a way in which we extract high rents from
activities from which we then distance ourselves."
Attachment #2: from THE VANCOUVER SUN, Wednesday, July 24, 1991
MURDER? TORTURE? THEY DIDN'T SEE A THING
By Stephen Hume
If Burson-Marsteller was employed to project a sunny public
relations prospect of stability and business opportunity in
Argentina, what was the reality that lay in the shadows?
Let's look for it on LA NOCHE DE LOS LAPICES, The Night of the
Pencils, the night the junta rounded up the high school kids.
One group of 10 was arrested in La Plata in September of 1976.
Of these, the youngest was 14, the eldest 18. Only three were
seen again. Seven joined the legions of the "disappeared".
Exactly how many doctors, students, professors, journalists and
trade unionists were "disappeared" remains uncertain. Human
rights groups say it was 35,000. But since names were routinely
erased from all official records, Argentina's National Commission
on Disappeared People could document only 8,960 cases.
Pablo Alejandro Diaz was one teenager who survived. May 9, 1985,
he told a court about The Night of the Pencils:
"They told me they were going to give me the truth machine. I
asked them to take me to it because I thought it was like the
ones you see in films that say if you are lying."
Instead he encountered an electrical device for searing men's
genitals and women's breasts. Jacobo Timerman, a newspaper
editor arrested for reporting on the real Argentina, recalls it
in his book PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME, CELL WITHOUT A NUMBER:
"All that a man feels is that they're ripping apart his flesh.
And he howls." Pablo howled -- and smelled his own flesh
burning. Then they used pliers to pull out his toenails.
Burson-Marsteller repudiated state terror as an impediment to
foreign investor confidence. It didn't repudiate its contract.
"The killings were thought to be good for the economy," V.S.
Naipaul wrote of the junta in 1977. "The trade unions and their
leaders had to be disciplined...Another, more becoming Argentina
was to be created..."
Pablo overhead what Argentina had already become:
"She's dead, throw her to the dogs." Maria Ciocchini had pleaded
with the guards to kill her rather than touch her again. They
apparently obliged. Before 16-year-old Claudia Falcone
"disappeared" too, she told Pablo she'd just been raped.
"I told her to keep calm, that they were going to let us go
because we weren't guerrillas, we hadn't planted any bombs." But
innocence made no difference in the Argentina behind the image.
"A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also
someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to western and
Christian civilization," said junta President Jorge Videla. The
junta told the UN in 1976 that death squads were healthy
"antibodies" protecting the regime from subversive "microbes."
"First we'll kill all the subversives. Then we'll kill the
collaborators. Then the sympathizers. Then the undecided. And
finally, we'll kill the indifferent," promised General Iberico
Saint-Jean. Some members of this increasingly demented regime
advocated a "final solution" to Argentina's "Jewish problem".
The national commission's formal report on the atrocities these
evil men condoned required 50,000 pages. In it there is evidence
that girls like Maria and Claudia faced unspeakable depravities
by agents of the state. Gasoline was introduced to vaginas and
ignited. Girls were forced to have violent sex not only with
torturers but with dogs specially trained for the purpose.
Afterward, too injured to recover, they were murdered.
Pregnant women and parents with infant children were arrested.
In 1981, Amnesty International named 53 pregnant prisoners and
revealed the place where they were tortured. It was Argentina's
principal naval training academy. "Only one of the parents
detained with their children was ever seen again", Amnesty said.
More than 200 children are still listed as missing.
"Those who did not lose their babies on the torture tables,
having survived the interrogation stage, were thrown into the
cells under the same conditions as the rest." And then they lost
their babies anyway. Newborns were taken for government couples.
Then the mothers were "transferred" -- usually to a mass grave.
Burson-Marsteller, which here proudly served the Children's
Hospital, there worked diligently to help promote the interests
of a government which murdered children and once sent a pleading
mother the hands of her daughter in a shoe box.
Can such things be ethically compartmentalized? Can a particular
job be isolated from the general context of the evil to which it
contributes, however indirectly? Is calculated ignorance a
defence? Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi thought not.
In THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, he condemned "those who, faced by
the crimes of others...turn their backs so as not to see it and
not to feel touched by it...deluding themselves that not seeing
was a way of now knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of
their share of complicity."