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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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the paper reform in El Salvador which “has not been carried out” and
“was not intended to benefit the rural poor who had no access to land”
in the first place. The US war against Nicaragua has, however, largely
overcome these unique successes in Nicaragua, exactly as it was
intended to do. The report describes how farmers have been forced to
abandon their land because of contra attacks, which have severely
impaired food production, as intended. Peggy Healy, a Maryknoll sister
and member of Oxfam America’s board of directors who has lived in
Nicaragua for 10 years, comments:
If you talk to campesinos in the war zones—whether they are for
the Sandinistas or against the Sandinistas—and you try to
pinpoint when their real problems started, inevitably you will find
that those problems started when the contras came in. Before
that, the peasants had teachers for their schools, they had low
prices, and although they weren’t wealthy, they had land, credit,
fertilizer, they owned machetes. They had what they needed to
live.
Naturally the US will do nothing to bring about desperately needed
reforms in the areas under its control (apart from gestures for
propaganda purposes when trouble is brewing); indeed, these would be
contrary to the “national interest” for reasons already discussed. But the
US can at least ensure that they will not take place elsewhere.
When Nicaragua suspended civil liberties in October 1985, the Times
editors proclaimed in mock indignation that “There is no reason to
swallow President Ortega’s claim that the crackdown is the fault of the
‘brutal aggression by North America and its internal allies.’ A more likely
explanation is an eruption of discontent over a crumbling economy and
military conscription.” 121 The editors presumably hope that their readers