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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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the years of murderous Israeli strikes against Lebanon, many without
even a pretext of “retaliation.” 58
To take another case, in Guatemala in the 1980s, the guerrillas lost
popular support as a result of their inability to protect the population
from the huge slaughter carried out with the aid of the US and its
clients. And now we see the same pattern repeating in El Salvador.
Leonel Gómez, the chief adviser to the Salvadoran Institute for Agrarian
Transformation who fled in January 1981 after the assassination of the
Institute’s head and death squad warnings, testified before Congress that
“one is very cautious about rising up against the government when one
has seen bodies of people sawed in half, bodies placed alive in battery
acid or bodies with every bone broken,” as he had during 1980. A
woman fleeing from the Guazapa mountain, where soldiers destroyed
everything after years of ferocious bombardment, says: “When it began,
in 1980, [the guerrillas] promised us a better life. That’s what we were
fighting for. It hasn’t turned out that way.” 59 The struggle for a better life
described by Charles Clements (see chapter 1, section 1) was totally
defeated, as the population was murdered or removed to squalid refugee
camps, a major victory for the Carter-Reagan policies.
Despite official pretenses, few knowledgeable people could have had
much doubt about the character of what T. D. Allman properly called
“Matanza II,” in one of the few exceptions to media obedience. 60 In
public, the Carter Administration was claiming that most of the violence
was perpetrated by the guerrillas, some by “right-wing extremists,” and
only incidentally by “some elements of El Salvador’s security forces,”
while the government was “unable to end such abuses.” Meanwhile, it
was telling reporters in confidence that 90% of the killings were
attributable to the government security forces (see chapter 1, section
3.1). Ambassador White, in a confidential 1980 cable on “El Salvador,
One Year After the [October 1979] Coup,” stated that “Plainly put, the