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

Free World Vignettes
3. Challenge and Response: El Salvador
3.1 The Carter Years
trocities in Nicaragua are, however, a small-time affair by US
standards. Our concepts of civilization and justice are revealed
more graphically in El Salvador, where the growth of unions,
Church-based self-help organizations, peasant associations and other
such threats to order in the 1970s called forth the familiar response. In
the muted words of the State Department: “Faced with increasing
demands for social change in the 1970s, traditional ruling groups
continued their dominance by employing electoral fraud and
repression.” 30 As traditional ruling groups in the US took over the task,
terror rapidly escalated.
For the year 1980, the Human Rights office of the Archdiocese of
San Salvador tabulated 8062 murders of “Persons of the popular and
progressive sectors killed for political reasons, not in military
confrontations, but as a result of military operations by the Army,
Security Forces, and paramilitary organizations coordinated by the High
Command of the Armed Forces.” These are cases where the data could
be “fully checked,” not including victims of bombardments or the more
than 600 campesinos murdered in the Rio Sumpul massacre by a joint
Honduran-Salvadoran military operation, and unknown numbers of
others, primarily in the countryside where “verification was
impossible.” 31
To rephrase these facts in Carter Administration Newspeak: 32
A
The Church has condemned the violence of left, right, and the
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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