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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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he says, “but they cannot leave their hideouts, surrender their arms and
join the political process because the death squads would exterminate
them.” Francisco Acosta, US-Canadian representative of The National
Federation of Salvadoran Workers, reports that peasants are denied the
legal right to organize and that the government raises numerous barriers
to the (technically legal) organization of urban workers, making it “very
difficult to legalize a union.” One difficulty is that “union organizers are
immediately accused of being communists,” which means that they are
fair game for the security forces. “Since the labor movement started to
become more active in the urban areas [in 1985], there have been
many kidnappings, and murders of trade unionists, but there has been
no international press coverage,” he adds; media outrage (and extensive
coverage) is restricted to suppression of civil liberties in Nicaragua,
under attack by the United States. The peasant-labor coalition Popular
Democratic Unity, which backed Duarte in two elections, accuses
Duarte “of foot-dragging on trials of officers accused of violent
repression, on meeting with the guerrilla movement’s leaders, and on
improving economic conditions,” Shirley Christian reports. The
organization is also “in an uproar over efforts by [AIFLD] to confine it to
bread-and-butter issues,” thus eliminating the danger that a popular
organization might permit serious participation in democratic politics on
the part of the poor. Some union leaders are accused of taking payoffs
from AIFLD, the government-linked AFL-CIO organization that has a
miserable record of anti-labor activities throughout the world. Acosta
places much of the blame for Duarte’s anti-labor policies on AIFLD. 69
AIFLD naturally paints a different picture. The chief of its Information
Services lauds the “new political freedoms” enjoyed by trade unionists
who “now live in a democracy where they can voice, no matter how
loudly, their discontents with both national and trade-union
leadership” 70 —as they are being dragged off by Duarte’s security forces.