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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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and other charges—including the charge that the chief of the Treasury
Police, who had been implicated in some of the worst atrocities, was on
the CIA payroll and that elements of the US government supported or
acquiesced in “death squad” activity—were investigated by the Senate,
which claimed to find no evidence that the US was implicated in
political violence. The report, however, “does not pretend to be the final
word on the subject,” Washington correspondent Daniel Southerland
observed, since it did not even interview Salvadorans believed to have
information about death squads and largely limited itself to US
government sources. 48
Carter’s war against the peasantry began in full force in May, with
large-scale massacres, primarily in areas scheduled for land reform. 49
The first major massacre was at the Rio Sumpul on May 14, when
thousands of peasants fled to Honduras to escape an army operation. As
they were crossing the river, they were attacked by helicopters,
members of ORDEN and troops. According to eyewitness testimony
reported by Amnesty International and the Honduran clergy, women
were tortured, nursing babies were thrown into the air for target practice,
children were drowned by soldiers or decapitated or slashed to death
with machetes, pieces of their bodies were thrown to dogs. Honduran
soldiers drove survivors back into the hands of the Salvadoran forces. At
least 600 unburied corpses were prey for dogs and buzzards while
others were lost in the waters of the river, which was contaminated from
the dead bodies; bodies of five children were found in a fish trap by a
Honduran fisherman. 50 The massacre is not mentioned in the State
Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices produced by
the Carter Administration and was suppressed by the media for over a
year, and then only barely noted, though the facts had been reported
shortly after the events in the foreign press and Church-based press in
the US. This was just one example of news suppression so extreme that