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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
154
months after we sign a peace treaty, and these leftists start wandering
around the country organizing legally, all the agrarian reform
cooperatives would turn communist.” Another problem is that the left
might organize among school-age youth and in the labor movement.
Shirley Christian reports in the Times that the National Federation of
Trade Unions is “making tough wage demands,” and that “Christian
Democrats say they are haunted by the memory of 1979, when the
same groups were prominent in the near-anarchy that swept El
Salvador,” leading to the October 1979 coup, soon taken over with
Carter’s assistance by the right-wing military; “By mid-1980, the
agitation dried up as many street activists joined the guerrillas and
others disengaged out of fear for their lives, while the Government
imposed the wage freeze and state of siege” amidst “accusations of
human rights violations” (NB: only “accusations”). Now the fear is that
these dangerous groups, who “acknowledge” their former affiliation with
the political arm of the guerrillas, may attempt to reactivate the “mass
organizations” that were thankfully destroyed by the “violent repression
of strikes and demonstrations” along with other Carter-Reagan atrocities
left unmentioned, for example, the murder or disappearance of
thousands of union activists and workers, which somehow tends to have
a dampening effect on labor organization. 31
As always, the current problem is to devise something that will pass
for “democracy” among commentators at home—not a difficult task, as
we shall see—so that aid will flow unhampered to allow the security
forces to do their work, while ensuring that “democracy” excludes
democracy.
Though the suppression of Salvadoran labor under the US-imposed
governments has elicited little interest, the diligent reader can find an
occasional report. Thus, some notice was taken when in February 1984,
nine labor leaders including all top officials of one major federation were