Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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condition.
By the time the Good Neighbor policy was officially announced,
Nicaragua was effectively controlled by the most important of these
domestic guardians of order, Somoza’s National Guard, while the Trujillo
dictatorship ruled in the Dominican Republic through the medium of the
National Guard, also established as a result of US intervention. Martinez
had taken over in El Salvador after the Matanza, soon to be recognized
by the US, and most of the rest of the region was also in safe hands by
1940 as the US replaced France and Britain. Meanwhile Roosevelt
created the Export-Import Bank to subsidize US exports and in general
acted to increase the dependency of the Central American nations on the
US for food, as they shifted to export crops to the US, with grim longterm
effects. The Good Neighbor policy relied on regimes which
occasionally went through the forms of elections for propaganda
purposes, meanwhile maintaining a status quo in which the Fifth
Freedom was preserved and “2 percent or less of the population in four
of the five Central American nations controlled the land and hence the
lives of the other 98 percent.” Dictatorships were thus “not a paradox
but a necessity for the system, including the Good Neighbor policy,”
which “carried on interventionism in Central America and tightened the
system far beyond anything Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson
probably imagined.” 44 The Good Neighbor policy was summed up by
journalist William Krehm, who observed its effects on the spot: “First
there had been intervention to impose a puppet and then—in the name
of nonintervention—propaganda, funds, and connivance to keep him in
the saddle.” 45
Quite generally, state policy served to guarantee business interests. In
the rare conflicts between them, the state generally prevailed, a
consequence to be expected, as LaFeber aptly observes, “if a system
was to be maintained.” This pattern is quite a regular one. The state is