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

Patterns of Intervention
3. The US and El Salvador in Historical Perspective
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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urrent US intervention in El Salvador also breaks little new
ground, apart from scale. In 1932, thousands of peasants were
massacred in the Matanza, as Hernández Martínez took power;
he was duly recognized by the US while going through the forms of an
election, in which he was the only candidate (see chapter 2, section 1).
The population was traumatized and subdued by the Matanza. “The
effectiveness of the Matanza at suppressing dissent was indicated by the
passage of over a generation before rural organizing began again. As late
as 1978 a reporter quoted a conservative lawyer who stated, ‘Whenever
the peasants make the least demand, people start talking about 1932
again’.” Power remained in the hands of a tiny oligarchy of about 100
major families who enriched themselves and foreign investors while
much of the population starved or emigrated. Here, as elsewhere, the
US “wanted stability, benefited from the on-going system, and was
therefore content to work with the military-oligarchy complex that ruled
most of Central America from the 1820s to the 1980s.” 27
Historian Thomas Anderson comments that “the whole political
labyrinth of El Salvador can be explained only in reference to the
traumatic experience of the uprising and the matanza,” while Jeane
Kirkpatrick assures us that “To many Salvadorans the violence of this
repression seems less important than the fact of restored order and the
thirteen years of civil peace that ensued,” an accurate rendition of the
views of those Salvadorans who count. 28
C
No problems arose in one of the world’s most miserable countries
until 1960, when a junior officer’s coup established a “moderately leftist
government [that] lasted for only a few weeks before other officers,