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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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in government and cooperatives. Even his critics recognized that
economic recovery was underway, though US aid dropped sharply when
he took office, to zero, in fact, apart from aid previously granted to the
business-run junta. Even Ambassador Martin, “certainly no friend of
Bosch, had to acknowledge: ‘The indisputable fact that his brief
Administration may well have been the most honest in Dominican
history, if not in Latin America’.” Obviously, he had to go. 171
After he was “let go” by the Kennedy Administration, corruption
returned “with a vengeance” among civilians and in the armed forces
and “the country suffered a grave economic decline” and a dramatic
increase in public debt: “Extreme corruption and mismanagement were
responsible for the country’s economic collapse after the incipient
recovery brought about by the Bosch government” and “the people knew
only suffering. The peasants remained silent beasts of burden.” 172
In 1965, the military-installed regime was overthrown by a
constitutionalist coup aimed at restoring Bosch to power. The US sent
23,000 troops to prevent this outcome. Recently declassified records
reveal that when the regime was about to be overthrown US
Ambassador Tapley Bennett was instructed by Washington to send a
message changing the basis for the planned US intervention “from one
of fighting communism [considered too ludicrous for plausibility] to one
of protecting American lives.” He gladly complied, and this became the
official pretext for the US invasion, repeated in President Johnson’s
memoirs. 173 US troops fought the constitutionalist forces who aimed to
restore the legitimate elected Bosch government, but were not permitted
to interfere with the subsequent massacres by the Dominican military
forces they had rescued, on the grounds that this would have violated
US neutrality. The threat of democracy was averted and the traditional
order restored, accompanied by an utterly fraudulent election to
legitimize the restoration.