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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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in villages could be effectively exploited, with the “young elite” who are
“ambitious to get ahead in business, profession or politics” mobilized for
“civilian counter-terrorist organization” (meaning: paramilitary terrorist
organization). In Central America, the “young elites” were trained to sow
terror to protect their interests, which happen to coincide with US
interests. There was also a flow in the other direction, as US advisers
who helped set up the terror system in Guatemala moved on to apply
their skills in Vietnam. The US terror network is worldwide.
Police units were formed in Guatemala to “lend assistance, in cases
of emergency, to the owners or administrators of estates, haciendas,
agricultural lands, forests and rural properties . . . [and] observe all
activity that tends to inflame passions among the peasant masses or in
the rural communities and, when necessary, repress through licit means
any disorder that should occur,” according to a 1965 government
decree; the concept of “licit means” covers quite a bit of ground under
the US-backed dictatorships.
In general, the basic idea was to develop a paramilitary system
working closely with the professional security forces to “lock the stable
door before the danger ever arises,” in the words of Truman’s Secretary
of War Robert Patterson in 1947. The Kennedy Administration
succeeded in putting this system of state terror in place under the guise
of “counterinsurgency,” with gruesome consequences. 35
The system was to be preventive, not reactive. In 1962, Kennedy’s
Ambassador to Guatemala, John Bell, sent to Washington a Guatemalan
Internal Defense Plan which formulated “the primary objective of the US
in Guatemala”: “the prevention of the accession to power of Communists
in Guatemala,” not the needs of the suffering population. The danger of
insurgency was remote, Bell held, but, the Internal Defense Plan
observed, “the danger of other forms of subversion, forms which provide
a base from which insurgency can develop, is real and present.”