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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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ending the misery” of the country; Duarte refuses negotiation and
ceasefire offers despite the pleas of his own supporters, such as the
centrist Popular Democratic Union, which “demanded” that he accept
these offers by the political organization of the guerrillas, and despite the
evident desires of much of the population, though not the military,
which holds power locally, or the superpower boss running the show to
which Duarte lends a cloak of legitimacy. 81
5.3 Towards “Democracy” in El Salvador
The US-organized massacres escalated as Reagan took over. A year
later, the Church reported that some 30,000 civilians had been killed
and 600,000 made refugees—13% of the population—while Jeane
Kirkpatrick praised the “moral quality” of the government that was
carrying out the slaughter and the New Republic declared itself
“pleasantly surprised by the development of Reagan policy” in Central
America, which is “basically right”; a few months earlier, when the
massacres had reached their peak of intensity and horror, the editors
had given “Reagan & Co. good marks for their performance (so far) in . .
. El Salvador,” where they had overcome Carter’s obsessive concern for
human rights, illustrated by the slightly lower number of victims tortured
and massacred during the successful campaign launched under his
administration to wipe out the popular organizations. 82 The numbers of
killed and refugees have doubled since, very likely.
When the country was sufficiently terrorized and any hope of
independent politics was eliminated, the US ran staged elections, which
are about as meaningful as elections in Poland; the farce was repeated
in 1984, when elections were held in an “atmosphere of terror and
despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality,” in the words of the