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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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president, after having been marginalized for some time, and shortly
after was arrested. Majano later described Duarte as “the military’s ally,
who covers up human rights violations.” 63
Duarte was also well aware of the measures undertaken under his
auspices to overcome the popular support for the guerrillas: for example,
the reconstitution and incorporation into the civil defense forces of the
80,000-member terrorist organization ORDEN, which, as he had
explained in 1977, employed “the method that was used during the
Nazi system to control the people directly.” 64 US officials surely
understood the scale and character of the massacre they were
organizing, which has now been extensively documented by human
rights groups, much to the distress of the US government, which has
regularly attempted to undermine such groups, and of Duarte, who has
denied the existence of documented massacres and now refuses to
accept reports by the Church human rights office because, he says,
“these people are permanently working under the direction of [those]
trying to help the subversives.” He also claimed that “we use the air
force only to support ground troops under fire”; yet indiscriminate air
strikes against civilians are documented in grim detail by human rights
organizations. 65
Moreover, it is not only the Church human rights office that is
working for the “subversives,” according to this darling of the American
press. He also claimed that in 1979 and 1980, a “Marxist news
structure” dominated US press coverage of El Salvador; this, it will be
recalled, is the period when the atrocities committed by his government
were virtually suppressed. Furthermore, Duarte explained, David
MacMichael, the former CIA analyst who publicly denied unsupported
government claims about a weapons flow from Nicaragua to the El
Salvador rebels, is “clearly a Marxist” (“there are infiltrators
everywhere”), as are many of the Mothers of the Disappeared. He also