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

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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From these real world considerations, one can come to understand
the “lust” to strike out against Nicaragua—or Allende, or Cuba, or the
National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. It is not because of the
abuses of human rights and democratic principle, often real, sometimes
despicable, but rarely approaching what we tolerate with equanimity,
directly support, or carry out ourselves. Rather, US policy towards
Nicaragua is immediately predictable from the fact that the priorities of
the new government “meant that Nicaragua’s poor majority would have
access to, and be the primary beneficiaries of, public programs,” the fact
that infant mortality fell so dramatically that Nicaragua won an award
from the World Health Organization for the best health achievement in a
Third World nation, health standards and literacy sharply improved, a
successful agrarian reform was carried out, GDP expanded by 5% in
1983 in contrast to other countries in the region, production and
consumption of corn, beans and rice rose dramatically and Nicaragua
came closer to self-sufficiency than any other Central American nation
and made the most impressive gains of any Latin American nation in the
Quality of Life Index of the Overseas Development Council, based on
literacy, infant mortality and life expectancy. 96 Burns comments that
“Nicaragua should, in many ways, stand as an example for Central
America, not its outcast. The grim social statistics from Honduras, a
country in which the population is literally starving to death, stand in
sharp contrast to the recent achievements of Nicaragua.” That is just the
point; the infection must be stopped before it spreads.
Similarly, the crime of the Allende government was that it quickly
raised production and real wages, conducted an effective agrarian reform
and such programs as milk distribution for children, “measures that
increased consumer demand and permitted industry to take advantage
of unutilized capacity and idle labor,” and worse, did so under
parliamentary democracy—though such dangerous progress could not