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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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plausibly argues. 130 The regular Americas Watch reports yield the same
conclusion, and the careful reader can discern it through the haze of
press reporting.
It should be stressed, however, that reference to US and other foreign
mercenaries is misleading, since even the indigenous terrorists in Central
America are essentially US mercenaries, much like the native forces
used to hold down the domestic population by the British, French,
Russians, South African whites, and others in the past, or the forces
organized by the US in South Vietnam and Laos. The elite units that
carry out successful massacres in El Salvador, mass murderers such as
Ríos Montt (who studied at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and served as
director of studies for the Inter-American Defense College in
Washington 131 ), and numerous other state terrorists in Latin America and
elsewhere receive their training from the United States, which also
provides the means for them to carry out the lessons they have learned.
The contra armies can hardly be called “guerrillas,” considering their
origin as mercenaries organized by the US and its proxies in Honduras
and their lavish support and equipment, comparable to the best-armed
regular military forces in Central America. 132 They are surely the only
“guerrillas” in history who complain that their air force is inadequate, or
that they lost their only helicopter (the latter was Edén Pastora’s
problem when his helicopter crashed 30 miles inside Costa Rica,
followed by claims that he had disappeared within Nicaragua; this was
the event that elicited the comment from his brother, cited above).
Regular commentary by their masters, some already cited, makes it
clear that the contras are incapable of functioning without continual
direction. Their own leadership, as noted, recognizes that they are the
creation of the US government, and its agents. Their actual leadership,
apart from US intelligence, is overwhelmingly drawn from Somoza’s
National Guard, including the supreme FDN military commander and