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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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military have the power: no government can exist without their
approval,” and members of the security corps and the army “continue to
hunt down and kill suspected leftist subversives,” a very broad category
indeed. Ray Bonner writes that confidential cables and documents
partially released under the Freedom of Information Act “reveal that El
Salvador’s political landscape was almost indistinguishable from that
before the [1979] coup: The armed forces ruled, employing the same
repressive methods they had in 1932, in 1948, in 1972, in 1979.” In
October 1980, the director of AIFLD stated in a confidential
memorandum that “Government here operates with no real popular
support” and “In the past several months, Duarte and company have
sided with the conservative military (perhaps because this group holds
the key to power now), which has hurt their image among the
population . . . the conservative officials who look to a military solution
are very much in control.” Bonner adds that “No one in Washington was
telling Congress or the American people this.” 61
The meaning of all of this, to put it plainly, is that the government
was wholly illegitimate, a foreign implant supported by military forces
that are hardly more than mercenaries of the foreign power that is
responsible for the violent attack against the population of El Salvador
under the facade it had created.