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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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country strides towards democracy in official parlance. 183
As in El Salvador, the national university has been a prime target of
state terror for many years, and still is. The last two rectors were killed,
in 1981 and 1983. Another fled into exile, in fear for his life. The
current rector, who has received 20 death threats, narrowly escaped in
1983 when gunmen fired at his car. His possible successor was gunned
down while walking to a class on campus. According to university
records, 36 students and 10 teachers were killed or have disappeared in
two years, 12 in early 1985. The US Ambassador, Alberto Piedra, is coauthor
of a 1980 book that dismisses the university as “a publicly
financed echo chamber of revolutionary Communism.” The rector, in
contrast, “described the students of the university as members of a
generation that had been wounded by state repression and political
violence and that held little hope for the future,” James LeMoyne
reports. They do not disguise “their antipathy for the United States,
which they hold responsible for supporting 30 years of repressive
governments after a coup in 1954 supported by the Central Intelligence
Agency.” 184 LeMoyne deserves credit for departing from the norm with
this reference to the US coup; he might have added that the US is not
just held responsible, but is in large measure responsible for the 30
years of terror that followed.
As noted earlier, US military aid to the mass murderers never ceased
during the Carter years, contrary to what is commonly alleged, and in
fact remained close to the norm. Furthermore, the US military
establishment maintained its close relations with the Guatemalan
military, giving them a “convincing signal” that the human rights rhetoric
was hardly to be taken seriously. In January 1980, top American
military officials visited Guatemala, and the press noted the “particular
satisfaction” the Guatemalan regime derived from the visits. Piero
Gleijeses comments: