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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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physical threats.” 181 A military coup, quickly recognized by the Kennedy
Administration and perhaps encouraged by it, prevented this danger.
The new regime, guided by the Kennedy counterinsurgency doctrines,
rapidly expanded the instruments of state terror with enthusiastic US
support. 182 Rising repression and impoverishment elicited insurgency
and further US intervention. A counterinsurgency campaign in 1966-8
led to the slaughter of perhaps 10,000 peasants with the help of
American Green Berets; also napalm bombing by US planes based in
Panama, according to Guatemalan vice-president Rojas. In subsequent
years, impoverishment of the mass of the population and indescribable
terror increased, with constant US assistance and occasional notice
here. Thus, in a brief report of the murder of yet another professor at the
national university, the Times noted in passing that more than 40,000
people have disappeared and more than 95,000 “have died in political
violence here since 1954” according to “the Mexican-based Guatemalan
Human Rights Commission”: to translate from Newspeak, some
140,000 have been eliminated by the governments installed and kept
in power by the US since the US overthrew Guatemalan democracy in
1954 (the crucial fact, regularly omitted in news reports and editorial
comment), according to a Human Rights Commission which is Mexicanbased
because its members could not long survive in Guatemala. In May
1982, the conservative Guatemalan Conference of Bishops stated that
“never in our history have such extremes been reached, with the
assassinations now falling into the category of genocide.” “A new study
by two American anthropologists,” Douglas Foster reports, “estimates
that more than 50,000 Guatemalans—most of them Mayan Indians—
have been killed since 1980” (see chapter 1, section 4); one of the most
powerful Guatemalan businessmen, not without reason, told him: “You
Americans killed your Indians long ago, so don’t lecture us.” At the same
time, US military aid increased, along with renewed terror, as the