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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
248
This study suggests a plausible explanation for the correlation
between US support and human rights violations. The guiding concern
of US foreign policy is the climate for US business operations, a fact
well-supported in the historical and documentary record and easily
explained in terms of the domestic institutional basis for foreign policy
planning. But in the Third World, improvement in the investment
climate is regularly achieved by destruction of popular organizations,
torture of labor and peasant organizers, killing of priests engaged in
social reforms, and general mass murder and repression: “it is the
function of state terrorism to keep popular participation down, to limit
services to the lower classes, and to freeze the structures that have
generated” a situation of deprivation for the lower income classes. 190
Investigation of such topics is hardly a priority for American social
science; in fact, such elementary questions as the relation of
corporations to formation of foreign policy have been under a virtual
taboo in the literature on international relations and US foreign policy, 191
and the questions just reviewed have not exactly been on the agenda
though they seem rather significant. It would, however, be no surprise to
discover that the results of these few studies hold up to more extensive
inquiry and that the theory they suggest proves to be valid over a large
range.
What about “the raising of the living standards”? In Latin America,
there has been economic growth, accompanied by widespread, often
increased suffering for a very large part of the population. Consider
Brazil, the most important of the Latin American countries, where the
civilian government was overthrown by a US-backed coup in 1964 in
what Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lincoln
Gordon called “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the midtwentieth
century,” instituting a murderous military dictatorship that
Gordon lauded as “totally democratic” and “the best government Brazil