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

Free World Vignettes
figure and leading democrat by our domestic partisans of mass
slaughter, mutilation, torture and degradation. 19
A mother describes how her husband, a lay pastor, and her five
children were kidnapped; when she found them the next day, “They
were left all cut up. Their ears were pulled off, their throats were cut,
their noses and other parts were cut off.” An American parish priest
reports that in this region of three towns and scattered mountain
communities, contra attacks have caused “hundreds of deaths and
thousands of displaced people,” including many taken to Honduras. A
Miskito teacher kidnapped by the contras describes the tortures to
which he and eight others were subjected in Honduras, where US
authorities can pretend no ignorance about their agents:
In the evening, they tied me up in the water from 7 PM until 1
AM. The next day, at 7 AM they began to make me collect
garbage in the creek in my underwear, with the cold. The creek
was really icy. I was in the creek for four hours . . . Then they
threw me on the ant hill. Tied up, they put me chest-down on the
anthill. The ants bit my body. I squirmed to try to get them off my
body, but there were too many . . . They would beat me from
head to heels. They would give me an injection to calm me a little.
Then they would beat me again.
A French priest who trains nurses in the north testified before the
World Court about a handicapped person murdered “for the fun of it,” of
women raped, of a body found with the eyes gouged out and a girl of 15
who had been forced into prostitution at a contra camp in Honduras. He
accused the contras of creating an atmosphere of terror through
kidnappings, rapes, murder and torture. 20
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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