Networks of radical contention: The co-constitutive relations between structural conditions and public relations strategies and tactics in the committee in solidarity with the people of El Salvador

Abstract

In the 1980s, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) became a key node in a vast network of political opposition against US foreign policy. In this article, we argue that these webs of political opposition constitute the geographies on which the public relations (PR) strategies deployed by CISPES were pursued and corresponding political opportunities were structured. We use newspaper analysis, interviews, and archival research to map three such networks in an effort to understand the changing climate in which CISPES pursued its political agenda during the 1980s. We conceptualize these networks as ‘networks of contention’ and contend that variations in these networks correspond to CISPES’ efforts to take advantage of unforeseeable political opportunities, which raised the profile of CISPES as well as its overall position as a radical activist organization opposing the Reagan government. We conclude by arguing that an attention to networks of contention is necessary for understanding both the strategies and tactics pursued by PR activists and the political opportunities that shape those tactics and strategies. Our analysis is sympathetic with the sociocultural ‘turn’ in the PR theory that assesses structural and contextual constraints on the strategies and tactics deployed by PR professionals. In the end, this article argues that the networks of contention that organizations find themselves in during particular moments of political crisis play a key role in shaping the kinds of strategies and tactics available to pursue them. We also contend that the collision between relationship management strategies and the contexts in which they are embedded suggests that the tactics and strategies pursued by PR professionals have to be embedded in and are structured by perpetually changing sociopolitical environments, which often refuse management and require constant strategic adaptation and flexibility.

Keywords

El Salvador political public relations Ronald Reagan social network analysis strategies

Introduction

In February 1988, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conceded that it had conducted a ‘full international terrorism investigation’ regarding the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) between 1983 and 1985 (Shenon, 1988a). During that time, the agency believed that CISPES, a US-based activist organization, was providing money and supplies to the Salvadoran insurgency of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). As early as 1980, CISPES recognized FMLN as the genuine representatives of the democratic revolution in El Salvador (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), 2016). The Reagan administration viewed the FMLN as a communist group operating in concert with the United States’ primary geopolitical antagonists: the Soviet Union and Cuba. By the end of 1985, however, the FBI had dropped its investigation into CISPES and acknowledged that CISPES’ activities and other organizations challenging Reagan’s foreign policy were nonviolent, democratic, and constitutional (Shenon, 1988b). The publicization of the FBI’s investigation of CISPES scandalized the agency and made CISPES and the FBI front page news in national newspapers. The controversy also triggered a wave of congressional investigations into the constitutionality of the FBI’s activities and resulted in the demotion of several intelligence officials.

In the early 1980s, CISPES functioned primarily as a grassroots American NGO (nongovernmental organization) opposed to Reagan’s foreign policy in El Salvador and Central America: organizing protests, marches, sit-ins, and mobilizing students on college campuses. After the FBI’s investigation of the organization was exposed and the resulting scandal, it emerged as a major node in a network that extended far beyond its focus on El Salvador. In major metropolitan newspapers, CISPES became a key condensation point for general anti-Reagan sentiment connected to a variety of religious and secular organizations. CISPES’ transition from an El Salvador-focused NGO to a major node in a larger oppositional ecology transformed their networked geography, which in turn created new political opportunities that required new public relations (PR) strategies and tactics. At the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, as congressional investigations into the FBI concluded and a new president took office, CISPES receded from public view but maintained a profile as both an advocate for the people of El Salvador and a generally pro-democracy, pro-peace NGO, thereby validating its support of the FMLN to a wider audience.

Traditionally, the PR literature has argued that strategies (i.e. public relationship management) and tactics are the most important elements that guarantee the success of a campaign (Ledingham, 2001; Sommerfeldt, 2013b). However, there has been a recent interest in examining structural factors such as the social and economic environments that condition the creation of PR strategies and tactics (Hon, 2016). Our emphasis on networks, geographies, and political opportunities is sympathetic to what has been called by Edwards (2012) as ‘the (radical) socia-cultural turn’ in the PR literature (p. 1). This turn departs from the hegemonic paradigm that understands PR as a functional and transactional field, and embraces the richness and complexity of contextual factors that hinder or facilitate PR, especially in junctures in which PR is a tool for cultural resistance (Curtin and Gaither, 2010; Hon, 2016; Edwards, 2012). In this article, we argue that the relational networks in which activist organizations find themselves constitute the geographical terrain on which political opportunities and the tactics and strategies designed to pursue them are built. Shifts in alliances and changes in a relational context transform these network geographies and thus create new political opportunities for activist organizations to pursue. We conceptualize these network geographies, following Stefan Vicari (2014) and Karen Barkey and Ronan Van Rossem (1997), as ‘networks of contention’ and argue that PR needs to take them more seriously as not just a mode of analyzing social relationships or social capital in the digital era (Sommerfeldt, 2013a), but also as a structural condition, on which strategies and tactics grow and political opportunities emerge.

This article uses newspaper coverage to periodize three networks of contention that CISPES inhabited between 1980 and 1990, a time period coinciding with the majority of the Salvadoran Civil War. We produced three visualizations that show the changing topography of CISPES’ networked relations. Through the creation of these visualizations, a content analysis of the corresponding newspaper coverage and archival research, we show how these networked topographies shaped the strategic context in which CISPES pursued their agenda. Rather than use SNA to analyze the relationships between individual nodes, we are mobilizing the method strictly in an effort to visualize our data and highlight each network’s ecological structure. We are heavily influenced by the work of digital humanities scholars who use actor-target networks to investigate the depersonalization of political actors in the US media (Lindenberg, 1976.) Our method is historical because we examined PR strategies, tactics, and coverage retroactively (Stacks, 2011).

Our analysis reveals that CISPES, an entity largely constituted by American middle-class activists, became one of the leading oppositional voices against US foreign policy through the perpetual reconstitution of its networks of contention and the political opportunities that emerged as a result of these reconstitutions. Our findings have methodological, theoretical, and practical implications for activists and PR professionals. In particular, the theoretical contribution of this article is the development of an ecological approach to studying activist PR that embraces environmental uncertainties as central, an approach that challenges the assumption that the strategies and tactics pursued by PR professionals are autonomous from the sociopolitical environment in which they are pursued.

Literature review

In this literature review, we survey how PR strategies and tactics are conceptualized within the literature on political PR. The PR literature primarily focuses either on (a) how the internal dynamics of particular organizations generate the strategies and tactics deployed in a particular campaign or (b) assessing the positive or negative effects of particular strategies and tactics used in activist contexts. Following a recent social-cultural turn in political PR scholarship, we argue that these two research trajectories obscure the external factors that constrain the strategic and tactical choices made by PR professionals while also generating new political opportunities that change organizational agendas and the arsenal of strategic and tactical choices available to activists. Building on the literature in political communication, we contend that one important external factor constraining and creating political opportunities for PR professionals are the networks of actors, organizations, and institutions to which activists find themselves connected. We conceptualize these networks as networks of contention and show that they are the undulating terrain out of which political opportunities emerge, organizational agendas are articulated, and strategies and tactics are deployed. In short, we argue that these networks are one major condition of possibility for the practice of political PR.

Political PR, activism, and critical PR

Traditional PR has overlooked the categories of activism, power, and persuasion in favor of a model (e.g. Grunig et al., 2006) in which the strategic pursuit of profits is the primary goal (Coombs and Holladay, 2012; Curtin and Gaither, 2005). For example, the relationship management approach argues that ties between organizations can be controlled to a great degree through strategic and tactical planning (Ledingham, 2003; Ledingham and Bruning, 1998). The expectations for greater control in organizational public relationships have been applied in several phases of organizational communication. Scholars have been able to discern different types of relationships between organizations such as mutual, communal, symbiotic, or manipulative (Hung, 2005), the relevance of blogs as effective tools for building relationships (Sweetser and Metzgar, 2007), new conceptualizations that see relationships beyond legal and financial paths to create wealth (Phillips, 2006), and the role of interpersonal relationships in organizations (Bruning, 2002). Many of the perspectives of relationship management take the corporate model as the archetype for PR. In this vein, the focus of corporate PR is on economic revenues, private actions, and the professionalization of their practitioners (Dozier and Lauzen, 2000; Strömbäck and Kiousis, 2013).

Recently, scholars have expanded the scope of relationship management to include political organizations as possible subjects of study in PR, effectively creating a political PR field. Political PR is the practice of establishing, building, and maintaining relationships and reputation between political actors pursuing a strategic agenda related to social goods (Strömbäck and Kiousis, 2013). Among other factors, political PR focuses on political purposes and the relevance of volunteers and activists (Ledingham, 2001; Levenshus, 2010). This literature embraces political action as a constitutive part of their field of study (Kiousis et al., 2011; Saffer et al., 2013) and conceives of activism as the process of exerting power on corporations and state institutions to change policies (Smith, 2013; Smith and Ferguson, 2010).

Derville (2005) defines radical activist organizations as those that come ‘together in opposition to something in their environment, including threats to the status quo’ (p. 528). The study of activist PR has focused on the design of communication strategies and tactics (Jackson, 1982). Activist organizations have used carnivalesque demonstrations and occupations of buildings to influence public opinion and media coverage (Weaver, 2010) and to stress the negative environmental record of corporations (Murphy and Dee, 1992). The use of extreme actions aimed at building identity inside the group’s constituency energizes the movement and stresses the idea that the system is skewed (Derville, 2005). Radical tactics also tend to trigger the sharing of information by people who are informed about those types of events (Jahng et al., 2014).

The relevance of tactics and strategies in political PR has moved the focus to the Internet, especially social media. Through a study of hyperlinks and semantic network analysis in media coverage, Saffer et al. (2013) conclude that the relationships between various members of the network against the 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) included a diverse set of organizations such as NGOs and corporate actors. Sommerfeldt et al. (2012) found that while activists still believe websites are secondary communications tools, they are helpful in catching media attention. Social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter channeled interactions between the LGBTI-asylum NGOs and stakeholders (Rodriguez, 2016), facilitated the achievement of specific organizations’ behavioral goals (Paek et al., 2013), helped to disseminate content using corporate social media (Veil et al., 2015), and call for international intervention in conflicts in Central and East Africa (Madden et al., 2015). This literature as a whole tends to focus on the types of strategies and tactics deployed by PR professionals in a digital environment, with a particular interest in how messages can be controlled and relationships maintained in network spaces. In our view, this focus on the efficacy of particular strategies and tactics underestimates the environmental conditions that both constrain the behavior of organizations and play a crucial role in generating the strategies and tactics used to manage relationships and design and control messages and strategic planning.

Social movement theory is helping political PR move away from this instrumental focus on strategies and tactics toward an ecological approach in which the controlled practices of PR practitioners and the uncontrolled aspects of social environments collide. Hon (2016) embraces political process theory in examining the structural factors that led to the explosion of coverage of the Trayvon Martin case in social media. Through an analysis of news and social media, she proposes a model of digital social advocacy that follows four steps: antecedents, process, digital ecosystems, and outcomes. In Hon’s view, while digital media accelerates social mobilization in the contemporary moment, it alone cannot explain the reasons some political causes become more relevant than others. In a similar fashion, neo-Marxist views of PR such as circuit of culture (Curtin and Gaither, 2005) and postcolonial PR (Dutta, 2015; Munshi and Kurian, 2005, 2016) show that the chessboard on which PR is played continues to change with each major political and economical shift, an outcome that places politics beyond the control of practitioners and their organizations. In other words, major shifts in the political environment of activist organizations can open windows of political opportunities, in which the balance of power between small organizations and powerful governmental entities tilts in favor of the former regardless of the sophistication of the strategic advantages of the latter.

From PR to political opportunities

Traditionally, social movement theory has understood political opportunities in terms of the incentives and constraints that create openings for political activism (Tarrow, 2011). Conceived of as exogenous to the operations of a particular social movement organization (SMO), these opportunities primarily structure an SMO’s interaction with formal political institutions and processes and function as the context which limits their ability to mobilize and influence potential activists. Opportunities are therefore broadly defined and can include state capacity, elite competition, international factors, socioeconomic conditions, and the selective use of repressive tactics (Meyer, 2004; Meyer and Minkoff, 2004). McAdams (1982), in his pioneering work on the civil rights movement, provides a longitudinal analysis which stresses migration, demographic changes, and the openness of various state institutions as playing pivotal roles in both the emergence and the success of the movement. The structure of political opportunities then sets in motion and helps sustain cycles of contentious political actions, which are ‘produced when threats are experienced and opportunities are perceived, when the existence of available allies is demonstrated, and when the vulnerability of opponents is exposed’ (Tarrow, 2011: 33).

Over the years, there have been numerous criticisms of the political opportunities approach. These criticisms tend to undermine the explanatory value of structural factors in favor of more agency-oriented approaches to understanding the specific actions of social movement actors. Goldstone (2004) argues that the political opportunities approach is unwieldy and nonspecific, lacking the ability to specify which factors contribute to emergence and which contribute to the success of a movement. Furthermore, political opportunity approaches are often too broad and point to large structural conditions rather than movement-specific factors. Finally, political opportunity approaches tend to underestimate the role that social movement politics plays within the structure of democratic societies. Goodwin and Jasper (1999) suggest that the political opportunities approach is ambiguous, tautological, and instrumentalizes and essentializes cultural resources by assuming that identity politics and cultural categories are preexistent resources available to social movement activists. In their view, political opportunity approaches need to embrace a context-specific understanding of structure and resist the urge to overgeneralize the factors that contribute to social movement emergence and success.

Sympathetic with these critiques, we wish to attach structural analysis to a movement-specific context and question the degree to which structural factors are in fact exogenous to the strategies and tactics deployed by specific social movement actors. In our case, our opportunity structures are networks of contention and the context is the evolution of CISPES’ organizational identity in the 1980s. Following Koopmans (2004), we turn to the media as a resource for excavating our networks of contention because the fluidity of press coverage and its easy periodization destabilize the mechanistic or totalizing qualities that critics of political opportunity structures argue against. To develop our understanding of networks of contention as a kind of political opportunity structure, we now turn to the recent literature in political communications, which emphasizes an ecological approach to understanding social movements and political outcomes.

Political communication and ecological approaches

Sympathetic with sociocultural views of PR and political opportunities in social movement theory, we also build on recent political communications scholarship, arguing that another condition structuring political opportunities and constraining the generation of specific strategies and tactics are the networks created by an organization’s relationships with other actors. Recent work by political communications scholars such as Alexandra Segerberg and Lance Bennett (2012) and Andrew Chadwick (2013) has argued that a distinguishing feature of digital activism is the spaces created by online interactions. In this view, relationships forged through likes, retweets, and text messages become the networks, which make social movement politics possible. Segerberg and Bennett explore how these networks helped constitute the 2009 G20 protests in London, focusing on the implications of their ecological view for social movement participation, strategic communication, and the personalization of collective action. Alex Maireder and Christian Schwarznegger (2009) have looked at the role of social media in the networked politics of the 2009 Austrian student protest movement. Similarly, Paulo Gerbaudo (2012) and Yannis Theocharis et al. (2015) have investigated new forms of dissent offered through online mobilization in the Indignados movement, Occupy and the Arab Spring.

Together, this scholarship asks us to rethink traditional models of goal-oriented collective action, social movement framing, and political communication by demonstrating that the substance of social movement politics cannot be reduced to the strategies and tactics of a clever organizer, but instead is the collective articulation of myriad-networked relations. Merlyna Lim (2012), in her analysis of the Egyptian Revolution, shows that the revolution did not just emerge from offline and online modes of coordination of a variety of actors including the Egyptian blogosphere, activist organizations, Facebook users, labor unions, and other groups, but the relative nonparticipation of the military and Muslim Brotherhood and the repressive tactics deployed by the Mubarak regime as well. In this view, the success or failure of the particular strategies and tactics employed by an individual or organization have to account for and capitalize on the fluidity of the relations which compose these networked spaces, which include actors of differing and opposed political agendas as well as nonparticipants. In other words, networks structure the political opportunities available to political activists and these networks are not generated solely through the instrumental calculations of social movement actors.

In this article, we call these political opportunity structures ‘networks of contention’, arguing that they are a useful way of analyzing the environmental conditions in which political PR professionals ply their trade. We define networks of contention as the ties that connect the many actors who participate in the struggle to influence the public and the media regardless of their particular agenda. We believe that tracing these networks of contention creates a better understanding of the positionality of each actor, the political opportunities available to them, and the types of strategies and tactics that can be deployed in a given situation. Crucially, we also argue that these networks are dynamic and change according to the telluric forces of the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions. In what follows, we trace the shifting networks of contention that CISPES found itself in during the 1980s, using qualitative and quantitative analysis of newspapers from the era, interviews, and archival research of CISPES’ internal documents. To perform this inquiry, we ask two primary research questions:

RQ1: According to the newspaper coverage, what were the organizations with which CISPES was associated between 1980 and 1990 and were those relationships positioned positively, negatively or neutral in the press?

RQ2: How do the Networks of Contention generated by CISPES’ relationships with various actors change over time?

Method

Inspired by the work of digital humanities scholars (Lindenberg, 1976,), we use Social Network Analysis (SNA) to visualize each network of contention. Rather than examine quantitative network characteristics such as centrality, we use the method in concert with archival research, content analysis, and interview data to develop our theoretical argument. Given that our argument focuses on the conditions of possibility for CISPES’ PR strategies throughout the 1980s (Figure 1), we chose the organization as the central node in each of our visualizations. However, in Figures 2 and 3, we also included the FBI as a central node as they are positioned as CISPES’ primary antagonist (and all organizations negatively tied to CISPES in these visualizations were positively associated with the FBI). The cruciality of these antagonistic relationships to CISPES’ PR strategies is proved by the archival research and in-depth interviews. Visualizations were created using Cytoscape software by Dr. Kristi Potter, a data visualization specialist at the University of Oregon.

To obtain the data used in each of our visualizations, we, first, performed a quantitative content analysis that evaluated the daily printed editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post between 1 January 1980 and 31 December 1990. The decision to examine those newspapers was based on the previous literature that shows the relevance of the national media in setting the public agenda on foreign affairs (Wanta et al., 2004). Given that CISPES’ lobbying activities were primarily focused at the federal level, we feel the New York Times and The Washington Post provide the most comprehensive coverage of the organization’s activities. This examination has chosen this period of study in order to provide a longitudinal view of CISPES’ relationship with three presidential administrations in the United States (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. Bush). In addition, we reviewed CISPES’ internal documents which provide accounts of the PR and political strategies of the organization during the same period. Finally, we supplement our quantitative and qualitative content analyses with archival research and interviews with relevant CISPES leaders.

LexisNexis was used to find all the articles in which CISPES was mentioned. In total, 78 news articles (not including op-eds) were selected with 458 mentions of governmental organizations and NGOs, members of Congress, and other US officials. Article-level associations were judged positive, negative, or neutral based on how a particular organization was related to CISPES. Positive ties were coded when an organization was either positioned as an ally of CISPES or as an opponent of the FBI or Reagan Administration. Negative ties were coded when an organization supported US foreign policy in El Salvador or supported the FBI or Reagan Administration. Neutral ties were noted when an organization was not connected positively or negatively to CISPES or their political agenda. To test the method, two independent coders reported an intercoder reliability of 0.826 in Krippendorf’s Alpha. Values above 0.70 are acceptable (Krippendorff, 2004). In this research, we used intercoder reliability rates only to guarantee that the two coders were indeed analyzing the documents in a comparable fashion, but the methodology does not imply that we attempt to produce a quantitative model out of the material in the media. Our mixed-method approach helps us build a triangular version of the organization’s journey through the information provided by each methodology (content analysis, archival research, and in-depth interviews; Rothbauer, 2008).

After the content analysis, we used the data to visualize our networks of contention. SNA has been used in the PR literature to establish relationships between different stakeholders in face-to-face interactions or via social media (Sommerfeldt, 2013b, 2013c, 2013a). According to Marin and Wellman (2011), a social network ‘is a set of socially relevant nodes connected by one or more relations’ (p. 11). The basic unit of analysis of SNA is three points of data: two actors and the tie or link between them. In this article, the attribute between two organizations is the tone with which organizations are positioned toward CISPES or the FBI in the journalistic coverage. This research has taken an event-based approach to define the boundaries of the network, understanding as an event the journalistic coverage of the two newspapers between 1980 and 1990 (Laumann et al., 1983; Marin and Wellman, 2011). Since CISPES is our object of study for this analysis, we have made it the hub of the network of organizations involved in the discussion on El Salvador in the United States during all the three time periods.

SNA has a strong tradition of examining documents such as journal articles and websites as a means to understand the behavior of social structures (Scott, 2013; White et al., 2004). This method has also been relevant in the construction of social movement theory (De Fazio, 2013; Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Murphy and Dee, 1992). In PR, SNA has been primarily used to investigate the deployment of strategies and tactics in a digital environment, creating the sense that the method is only useful in those contexts (Sommerfeldt, 2013b, 2013c; Uysal and Yang, 2013). We argue, however, pulling on an earlier conception of SNA that it can be applied as an analytical tool in a variety of media contexts, including those predating the digital era. As early as the 1930s, anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists began using social network analysis as a way to explain the ‘fabrics’ and ‘webs’ of social life and ideas (Scott, 2013). SNA has been subsequently used in a diverse array of fields, including as an instrument to connect philosophical concepts (Lindenberg, 1976) and as a method to understand the connections between people displayed in newspaper coverage (Burt, 1983).

If the quantitative method evaluated the basic architecture of SNA (organization, tie, and organization), this article used a qualitative approach to divide the 10-year time frame into three different periodizations. In each of the three periods, CISPES established different strategies toward their stakeholders and in each of the three periods, CISPES experienced the transformation of its initial radical struggle into, what we see, as a political PR battle. In what follows, we present a visualization of the network of contention for each time period: 1980–1984, 1985–1988, and 1989–1990. In each section, we offer a description of each visualization in terms of our data and then create a historical narrative anchored in our visual representations.

Background

Between 1980 and 1992, El Salvador suffered a civil war between the Salvadoran government, which was backed and financed by the United States and the FMLN. The FMLN was a coalition of five Marxist-Leninist guerrillas, supported by the governments of Cuba and Nicaragua, both geopolitical enemies of the United States and allies of the Soviet Union during the Cold War (Allison, 2006). In October 1980, CISPES was founded and its goal was challenging the anti-Communist stances of the most likely winner of the US presidential elections, Republican Ronald Reagan. Since its inception, CISPES sided with ‘those fighting for a democratic revolution’, which meant the FMLN (CISPES, 2016). The relationships between CISPES activists and FMLN representatives dates back to the late 1970s, in the last months of the administration of the then Democratic president, Jimmy Carter (Donaghy, 1990).

As expected by CISPES, Republican President Ronald Reagan framed the civil war in El Salvador as a matter of national security. Reagan argued that Central America was the ‘doorstep’ and was becoming the ‘stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere’ (Reagan, 1984). In order to deal with opposition to his plans, Reagan’s government hired PR and advertising companies to lobby for the continuation of military aid and political support for the Salvadoran government in Congress (Smith, 2010). CISPES responded through a combination of extreme and mainstream tactics including mass civil disobedience actions at US governmental agencies, demonstrations in front of United Nations’ headquarters in New York City, rallies with thousands of participants, pamphlets, meetings with local and federal legislators, bulletins, TV ads, media appearances in newscasts, such as ‘ABC’s Nightline’, and documentaries (Little, 1994; Cunningham, 2004).

Up to now, research on Central American solidarity movements in the 1980s has examined the wide array of organizations that attempted to stop Reagan’s policy toward Central America (Perla, 2013; Smith, 2010). Perla (2013) called this diverse network of human rights organizations, local and national secular organizations, and religious congregations the US-Central American ‘counterpublic’(p. 167). The US journalistic coverage was a fundamental site of struggle between the frames devised by the Republican administrations and the counter frames of the US-Central America counterpublic (Bennett, 1990; Lenart and Targ, 1992; Lenart and Targ, 1995; Smith, 2010). Due to its open support of the FMLN, a geopolitical enemy of the United States, CISPES is an ideal case study that can reveal how radical organizations in the United States used political alliances as PR tactics that improved the visibility and the relevance of those organizations. For this, we have to understand the networks of contention CISPES participated in and how those changed from 1980 to 1990.

Findings

CISPES as emerging organization (1980–1984)

During this time period, CISPES was dispersed and scattered. It is apparent that the majority of CISPES’ ties with civil society organizations (blue), religious organizations (green), and educational organizations (orange) were regularly positive (lines in blue). Positive means that they reported a positive tone toward CISPES’ goal instead of open denunciation or a neutral position. There are exceptions to this rule, such as the World Council of Churches, College Republicans and the union AFL-CIO, which helped the US government neutralize the alignment of organized labor with the revolutionary aspirations of the FMLN in El Salvador.

Some of the examples in this dispersed and scattered network are the relationships of CISPES with the liberal Religious Task Force, the AFL-CIO, and the conservative Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles. The Religious Task Force, an entity created by organizations and religious leaders who were taking actions against human rights abuses in El Salvador, was mentioned four times, each time with a positive tone toward CISPES’ goals. The newspapers quoted the AFL-CIO on three occasions, all of them in 1982, two of them shedding negative light on CISPES and one with a neutral position toward CISPES’ goals. At the beginning of 1980, the union supported the Salvadoran government but then two of their members were killed in El Salvador by death squads (Kleiman, 1981; in January, 1981). The Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, an entity that wanted to challenge the emergence of left-wing organizations in US universities, was mentioned three times and all three were negative toward CISPES.

The relations between CISPES and officials in the executive branch of the US government, think tanks, and trade associations were mostly negative (red lines), which indicates support for military intervention and political aid to Central American governments and resistance to CISPES. An exception was the position of Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s Vice President, who shows a neutral stance toward the conflict in El Salvador. Mondale’s position is logical if we consider that he worked for an Administration that emphasized the centrality of human rights. The anti-communist shift in the US policy toward El Salvador clearly emerged when President Reagan and his two Secretaries of State, Alexander Haig and George P. Schultz, opened fire on CISPES’ goal of stopping American influence in the Central American country (Gutman, 1988). Reagan, Schultz, and Haig can be seen as extreme nodes in our visualization.

The relations between CISPES and the legislators are more nuanced. In this period, the newspapers only mentioned four legislators: Senator Charles Percy (R-IL), Senator Alphonse D’amato (R-NY), Rep. Toby Moffet (D-CT), and Rep. Michael D. Barnes (D-MD). Percy and Barnes were neutral toward the goals of CISPES, D’Amato had a negative position, and Moffet had a positive relationship with the organization.

Discussion

In 1980, CISPES began as a collection of social organizations with a common goal of challenging the US policy toward El Salvador. After the inauguration of President Reagan in 1981, CISPES began their attempt to create a more unified front amongst other opposition groups in the discussion about the Central American region (Donaghy, 1990). In the period between 1980 and 1984, CISPES attempted to become a valid voice among a social network of organizations that wanted to sway the debate on the region in their ideological direction. Internal documents reveal that CISPES was attempting to construct a committed militant audience through the publication of booklets and newsletters in order to increase the pressure to stop military aid to El Salvador by the US Congress (CISPES, 1981a; CISPES, 1981bb). The network of contention during this period, as discussed above, reflects the issue-oriented grassroots character of the organization’s allies and the emerging constellation of government actors that would become involved in issues related to foreign policy in Central America. These groups included religious organizations (organizations of civil society which are defined by faith-oriented goals), legislators, civil society organizations, international actors, unions, and some officials of the Executive branch. Considering these facts, it is obvious that the network of contention of CISPES between 1980 and 1984 shows the emergence of the Reagan Administration as the most relevant adversary for CISPES, but at the same time, it reveals that nonprofit organizations, college student associations, and religious organizations provided CISPES with enough margin of maneuver to influence the political discourse through the journalistic coverage. In this case, the strength of CISPES was in establishing alliances that contradicted the hegemonic discourse on Central America offered by the Reagan Administration in multiple ways. Nevertheless, CISPES also needed allies among the political elites of the Washington establishment. The intervention of federal legislators such as Barnes, who was at the time the chair of the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives, in supporting CISPES’ position was a powerful tool to transform a cause raised by a radical organization into a mainstream policy position.

This period also shows that the targets of political activism by CISPES, civil society organizations, student associations, and think tanks were Congress and the Executive Branch, where the US policy in Central and Latin America was being debated. Reagan’s spokespeople originated principally from the State Department, while the advocates for a change in US foreign policy came from civil society. However, this focus shifted in 1985, when the FBI became the most visible adversary of CISPES. The network of contention around CISPES between 1985 and 1988 changed the stage from one in which targeted political activism was used to influence a policy debate to one in which spies, defectors, and police officers became protagonists.

Historical interlude (1985–1988)

As discussed in the previous section, in the early 1980s, CISPES existed as a major node in grassroots campaigns against the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy in Central and South America. However, in February 1987, a scandal erupted after Frank Varelli, a former FBI informant testified before the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights detailing his role in the FBI’s investigation of CISPES. Varelli had been tasked with infiltrating the Dallas chapter of CISPES and in this capacity had found out about the Bureau’s quest to ‘break’ the organization. Varelli claimed that the FBI had burglarized CISPES’ offices in Dallas and Washington D.C., vandalized cars outside the organization’s meetings, and tapped CISPES’ phones. Varelli claimed also that he had compiled a ‘photo album’ for the FBI of FMLN-affiliated guerillas, who were also CISPES members as well as oppositional elements within the US government. The album purportedly included Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Representative Pat Schroeder (D-CO) and former US ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White (Babcock, 1987; Carlson, 1987).

While Varelli’s claims were disputed by the FBI, in late 1987, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a report further detailing the FBI’s extensive 1981–1985 investigation into CISPES and other oppositional organizations. In the report, the CCR found that the FBI had tenuously connected CISPES to over 100 other organizations including church groups, educational organizations, nonprofits, think tanks, and international actors as well as a notable handful of individuals including members of Congress and the clergy. Nearly 1300 pages of FOIA documents indicated the scope of the FBI’s investigation, which included extensive, multistate surveillance, the sharing of surveillance with a variety of government agencies ranging from the Department of Justice to the Federal Aviation Administration to the Department of Agriculture as well as FBI overseas offices (Legats) in Ottawa, Bogota, and London, and the computerization of membership information at the FBI’s Terrorist Research and Analytical Center (TRAC) (Buitrago, 1989; Center for Constitutional Rights, 1987, 1988). Varelli’s testimony, which garnered national press attention, and the release of the CCR’s report fundamentally altered CISPES’ profile as an activist organization.

CISPES as hub (1985–1988)

As can be seen in our visualization, CISPES shifts from being a major hub in grassroots activism to a major hub in the movement against both the Reagan Administration and the FBI during this period, as the result of the publicization of its investigation into CISPES. In the press, the organization is connected to a variety of organizations that the FBI and the Executive Branch saw as seditious or problematic, including the American Indian Movement, the Association of Research Librarians, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Roman Catholic Sanctuary Movement, Christian churches in Washington State, California, Massachusetts and Ohio, the National Gay Task Force, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Women’s Rape Crisis Center in Norfolk Virginia. CISPES was also conveniently linked to international organizations and governments including the Soviet Union, the Cuban Government, and the World Peace Council.

During this period, the FBI and CISPES were locked in an acrimonious struggle in the press. The FBI as an organization was mentioned 22 times between 1985 and 1988, all of them were negative toward CISPES. The newspapers mentioned the FBI directors William Sessions and William Webster seven times, six of them negative toward CISPES and one neutral. The neutral opinion of the federal agency in regard to CISPES occurred on 3 February 1988, when Sessions, in an interview with The New York Times, argued that CISPES was not involved in any terrorist activity (Shenon, 1988b). Another protagonist of this network was the Center for Constitutional Rights, mentioned 20 times, all of them positive toward CISPES. This center worked with CISPES to document its positions against the FBI’s surveillance and served as an instrument in the dissemination of information to journalists and as a surrogate for CISPES’ positions from a legal perspective.

The other important feature of this visualization is its orientation. Between the two hubs lie a variety of congressional and nongovernmental actors that are variously aligned with either CISPES or the FBI. Crucially, in the press, each of these actors’ alliances is linked to their attitude toward the FBI. For example, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and a variety of congress people, most notably Don Edwards (D-CA), head of the House Subcommittee, are positively linked to CISPES because they are aligned against the FBI and Reagan. Importantly, this interstitial space is composed of actors not necessarily named by the FBI in their CISPES report and, therefore, is representative of CISPES’ ecological shift from grassroots hub to the center of a broad coalition against the Reagan Administration. Edwards was mentioned 15 times with eight neutral opinions toward CISPES and seven positives. On the contrary, Republican Congressman, F. James Sensebrenner Jr. (R-WI) referred negatively to CISPES three times and one neutral.

The publicization of the FBI’s investigation into such an eclectic group of organizations (rationalized by their perceived connection to CISPES) created resistance to FBI policy and the Reagan Administration more generally in the press. Tonally, the press sees CISPES and these other organizations as allies solely because they are the object of the FBI’s investigation. In other words, each organization’s discrete political agenda ceases, in a sense, to matter as they are forcibly unified in opposition to the FBI in the press. The other hub of this visualization is the FBI. In the press, the FBI is positively linked to a variety of nonlegislative governmental organizations and think tanks such as the Council for Inter-American Security, the State Department, the IRS, and the White House. It is through these linkages that the press transforms CISPES-oriented opposition to the FBI into a broader coalition against the Reagan administration.

Discussion

Throughout 1987 and 1988, CISPES became a crucial mediator in a diverse network of contention, capable of linking the FBI’s abuse of power to the Reagan administration. Initially, the Reagan White House supported the FBI’s investigation into CISPES. In an article for the New York Times by Philip Shenon, Martin Fitzwater, a spokesperson for the Reagan administration, is quoted as saying that CISPES ‘was established with the assistance of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the Communist Party of El Salvador’ (Shenon, 1988b). CISPES is ‘painted red’ by the White House and the FBI, linked to communist groups, the Soviet Union, and even the KGB (McGrory, 1988). It was foreign and potentially violent. However, this support quickly eroded. As the case unfolded, the CISPES scandal was rhetorically connected with the case of Donald Rochon, an African-American FBI agent, who filed a discrimination complaint against the Bureau in 1988 detailing rampant racial harassment at the FBI, including death threats as well as a class action lawsuit filed by nearly 300 Latino agents arguing that they had faced systemic discrimination during their time at the FBI (Ungar, 1988). Throughout 1987 and 1988, the White House gradually distanced itself from the bureau’s investigation, expressing concern for the rights of US citizens while also making it clear that it did not prompt the investigation. The Rochon case, the class action lawsuit, and CISPES together demonstrated systemic corruption at the FBI. Occurring at the end of the Reagan Presidency, the White House, dealing with its own scandals, disengaged, acted cryptically, allowed Congress to investigate aggressively, and forced the resignation of FBI director William H. Webster (Omang, 1987; Shenon, 1988b; Ungar, 1988).

While the White House is a minor player in the scandal resulting from the FBI’s investigation of CISPES, it demonstrates quite dramatically the changing network of contention in which CISPES found itself in the late 1980s. CISPES is no longer discussed as a group concerned about El Salvador. Instead, they are a paradigmatic example of Reagan-era attacks on civil liberties, the excesses of the FBI, and the failures of Reagan’s foreign policy. For example, CISPES spokespeople such as Angela Sanbrano argued that these kinds of accusations were evidence of the FBI trying to ‘divert the issue’ and that CISPES is involved in ‘building protests, demonstrations, congressional pressure, educational events … raising humanitarian aid for civilian projects and response to human rights violations …’ (Thornton, 1988). The link built between the White House, the FBI, and CISPES facilitated the creation of a network of contention that both casually validated CISPES’ specific cause and neutered anti-communist rhetoric. CISPES then becomes emblematic of general opposition to the Reagan administration and its specific political agenda is filtered through this environment.

Morris, a national leader of CISPES located in the organization’s headquarters in Washington D.C. in the mid-1980s, confirmed the relevance of the FBI surveillance scandal to CISPES’ PR. Morris argues that:

the only time we (CISPES) got substantial national media was, you know in 89’ and then prior to that was when you know the FBI after the Freedom of Information Act and you know there was explosive hearings and everything else about harassment. Political harassment by the FBI of CISPES of other Central American groups, but focused a lot on CISPES. And so you know, we used that to be, obviously focus the media around it. But it was hard to get national media for anything, so a lot of what we focused on was local. Again we kind of go back to the 1980s, we were really focused on local television, local newspapers, and also we did a lot of tours with Salvadoreans, and that got a lot into local newspapers. Because again, that was something they would cover, a local interest story. We made alliances with other organizations, faith based groups, labor unions, you know, so we were very much about trying to build coalitions and often times those voices were more effective than ours about getting the message out.

CISPES receding (1988–1990)

In 1988, George H.W. Bush became the 41st President of the United States. With his election, CISPES’ network of contention once again shifts. CISPES’ mentions in the press drastically decline. Although attention is still paid to ongoing congressional investigations into the FBI (three negatives mentions), which would last into the 1990s, CISPES is no longer connected to a universe of actors protesting a variety of government policies through these investigations. The only mention of the Bush Administration in relation to El Salvador and CISPES specifically references the US role in prolonging the Civil War in El Salvador. In other words, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Reagan era foreign policy in Latin and Central America had been successfully challenged by activist organizations such as CISPES, such that the press assumed that it was problematic. In late 1988 and early 1989, CISPES was moving its PR and political focus from an emphasis on changing US foreign policy to legitimating the FMLN as an indispensable actor in the construction of a political solution to the Salvadoran Civil War. A document from CISPES’ Midwest Regional Office (1988) confirms the new shift in the organization’s strategic planning:

From that basis we came to a common agreement on CISPES strategy; to baldly confront the U.S. war in El Salvador and to politically and materially support the movement for self-determination in El Salvador. We see promotion and legitimization of the FMLN/FDR as a key part of our support for the movement.

This new strategy required different targets for political activism. For example, it is striking that during this time, CISPES began framing issues of American interference in the region as a matter of corporate responsibility, specifically attacking Procter & Gambler’s Folger Coffee plantation in El Salvador.

Discussion

The sudden shrinkage of CISPES’ network of contention is indicative of our overall argument. The organization cannot control environmental changes (a new president and the beginning of the end of the Civil War) and it cannot necessarily control what the press chooses to pay attention to. With Bush in power and the opening of opportunities to negotiate the end of the Salvadoran war through a political agreement between the FMLN and the Salvadoran government, CISPES’ agenda changed as the conflict receded in the US media. However, it is clear that CISPES’ status was permanently changed by the publicity they received from the FBI investigation. They were no longer simply an issue-specific grassroots activist organization, but symbolic of something more. This is made clear in a Washington Post piece by John Lancaster in 1990 about peace movements opposing the Gulf War. In this article, CISPES is mentioned as a major figure in the international peace movement alongside actors such as the Rainbow Coalition and the International Jewish Peace Union, with zero reference to El Salvador or CISPES’ specific issue profile (Lancaster, 1990).

Conclusion

As we have demonstrated in this article, CISPES’ transition from a major node in a grassroots network of contention against US foreign policy in Central and Latin America in the early 1980s to a major node in a widespread and multifaceted network of contention generally opposed to the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s was not solely the result of complex strategic planning by the organization, but, significantly, the result of changing environmental conditions and the political opportunities those changes facilitated. The fact that CISPES was being illegally investigated by the FBI between 1980 and 1984 and the publicization of that investigation were contextual factors that the organization could not control. The scope and scale of the investigation, which placed CISPES at the heart of anti-Reagan opposition, forcibly created relationships between CISPES and other actors opposed to Reagan. This new network of contention changed the PR game board on which CISPES pursued its agenda and forever altered its profile as an activist organization.

Our findings suggest that political PR scholarship needs to focus more attention on the unforeseen realities and structural conditions that shape the political opportunities pursued by particular organizations and the strategies and tactics deployed by PR professionals. We obviously do not mean that the examination of strategies or tactics is useless in political PR. On the contrary, we argue that the study of strategic planning only makes sense if we include the conditions that contribute to or hamper the success of communications campaigns. Those conditions are powerful, dynamic, and structural. The agency of political PR practitioners to influence the public agenda is significant, but much of that power originates in the position of their organizations in particular networks of contention. We are also not suggesting that strategies and tactics are simply reducible to or epiphenomenal of specific kinds of structural conditions. By highlighting a necessarily dynamic kind of structural condition, networks of contention, we suggest that future research explores how the relationships between structural conditions and the strategic efforts of PR professionals become co-constitutive of a particular political environment.

Returning to the provocation that began this article, our focus on networks of contention and the relationship between structural conditions and strategic action departs from functionalist and transactional approaches to PR. Sympathetic with the literature calling for a ‘radical social-cultural turn’ (Edwards, 2012), our research suggests that the strategic agenda, goals, and tactics deployed by activist PR actors are intimately connected to their political contexts. In this view, context is not simply a passive actor limiting the opportunities afforded various actors, but is composed of a complex, active tangle of shifting relations in which actors, allies, resources, and enemies are constantly reconfigured. These modulations force actors to improvise new tactics, create new goals, and embrace cross-cutting political agendas. In turn, these new modes of engagement restructure the environment in which they are deployed, creating an iterative struggle in which structural conditions and strategic action co-constitute an ever-undulating political terrain. This view creates new opportunities for critical PR research to reconceptualize not only the practice of activist PR, but also how strategy informs social movement politics and theory and formal political processes. Specifically, it complicates mechanical and parsimonious accounts of the role opportunities, ideological frames, and resource availability play in shaping the behavior of activist actors.

Methodologically, we have adapted the tools of social network analysis that typically study relations between individuals in a social context to investigate content. In fields such as sociology, political science, media studies, and journalism, document analyses are mechanisms of evaluation that go beyond the partial and incomplete perspectives of the practitioners. Research on new media has used various network tools to visualize relationships between various actors; we believe that a similar approach can be established with legacy media prior to the emergence of the Internet. We also want to stress that media such as newspapers are useful resources for conducting social network analysis. One motivating assumption behind this research is that media does not only play a role in setting the tone of or bounding the discourse around important political issues. Instead, we argue that the media are a field on which the relationships between, strategies deployed by, and the agendas of particular organizations become visible (Lindenberg, 1976). This makes newspaper coverage an ideal source to excavate networks of contention without concern for the strategic value of those networks to particular actors.

Future research

These examinations open new avenues of research in political PR. One of them is the necessity to understand how the process of internal strategizing engages with external sources of pressure. Mundy (2010) describes how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocacy organizations developed messages that attempted to place LGBT issues as part of the mainstream. Similar evaluations are needed in regard to radical organizations, such as CISPES, who want to keep a foot ‘inside’ the system in order to transform it substantially. Second, future research might use other data visualization techniques and networking tools to show how social capital facilitates or hinders the success of radical organizations. Social capital might represent a legitimizing factor of a radical cause in the eyes of political and economic actors.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. Kristi Potter (PhD, University of Utah) for designing the network visualizations in this paper.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ricardo J. Valencia

Author biographies

Ricardo J. Valencia, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Public Relations in the Department of Communications at the California State University, Fullerton. In June 2018, he obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Oregon. Between 2010 and 2014, Valencia worked as a diplomat at the Embassy of El Salvador to the United States, where he was responsible for designing and implementing public relations and public diplomacy strategies and tactics. He is interested in understanding the intersection of critical theory, radical activism, race, and international affairs. Ricardo J. Valencia holds a MA in Journalism, Media and Globalization from the University of Hamburg and Aarhus University.

Patrick Jones is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. His dissertation explores the history and deployment of electronic voting machines in India and the United States. His research interests include science and technology studies, digital politics, and political theory and philosophy. Jones holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Oregon.

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