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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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reporting of El Salvador was selected as “Top ‘Censored’ Story of 1980”
by an annual media research project, not because there were no reports,
but because they were so biased and inadequate. 51 As noted earlier, it
was later implicitly conceded that the media suppression was deliberate
(see chapter 1, section 3.1).
With the US press silent and the public unaware, the massacre of the
peasantry could continue. Peasants were the major victims of the 1980
state terror.
In June, the university was shut down after an army attack that left
many killed, including the rector, and facilities looted and destroyed.
The dean of the Department of Science and Humanities reports (in
exile):
The army burned complete libraries; in the law school, where we
once had about 100,000 volumes, we now have only 3,000. In
the first days of the occupation, the officers of the army grabbed
as much of the equipment, furniture, medical supplies [as] they
could, and the rest they destroyed. Whatever equipment they
didn’t understand, they ruined. For example, when they found the
computer machinery, they tossed bombs and destroyed all of the
university’s records. In the agronomic science department, they
discovered infrared equipment. The officers told their troops that
the students used these ‘torture rooms’ against policemen and the
army, so they destroyed them.
Medical equipment and most of the medical library were also
destroyed. The humanities building was burned to the ground. Some 30
faculty members were murdered or disappeared, according to the new
rector. As the university—what is left of it—reopened four years later,