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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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Duarte’s 1985 apologetics for the massacres conducted by the
government over which he presides conform to his regular practice. After
the slaughter at Rio Sumpul, Duarte stated that about 300 were killed,
all of them “Communist guerrillas”—including, presumably, the infants
sliced to pieces with machetes. When the army killed 20 civilians in
January 1983, some after torture, Duarte claimed they had been killed
in a “battle”; that they had been murdered in scattered locations was
confirmed by the press and a diplomat who investigated. In the case of
the massacres at Los Llanitos and the Gualsinga river (see chapter 1,
3.2), Duarte denied the facts or blamed the guerrillas. He promised an
investigation of the Los Llanitos massacre, but neither the survivors who
had been interviewed by Church investigators, nor the journalists who
looked into the massacre, nor Americas Watch were ever approached.
Duarte did not release the report of the alleged investigation, but
claimed that it produced no evidence of military abuses. He conducted
no investigation of the Gualsinga River massacre, but denounced the
“terrorists” for “using the masses as shields and . . . to provoke,
exposing these people to be killed”; “This is horrible. This is inhuman.
But this is not my problem. It’s the problem of the subversives’ terrorist
actions and they have to be responsible,” not the perpetrators of the
massacre against defenseless civilians. The surviving victims see it
differently: “Duarte’s men went after our children, and now he’ll go on
television to say he didn’t do it,” a survivor of the Los Llanitos massacre
commented bitterly. 71
No less startling was Duarte’s denial that there were any bodies at El
Playón and his claim that stories about this charnel house were
“fabricated.” This was after the press had discovered what even Elliott
Abrams conceded was a “hellish place,” an “infamous body dump”—
though Abrams accompanied the admission with transparent falsehoods
about army innocence. What reporters found in El Playón was “a