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

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thus we read in the New York Times, without comment, that “The death
squads have been linked by United States officials to . . . the extreme
right-wing Republican Nationalist Alliance, which has sought to block
social changes proposed by President José Napoleén Duarte’s moderate
Christian Democratic Party.” The report from San Salvador continues:
“Archbishop Romero’s killing is widely believed here to have been
planned by right-wing death squads . . .” 35
This Times report illustrates the typical device of insinuating official
propaganda in the news columns by selective choice of sources and
vague unattributed references. In fact, what is “widely believed” in San
Salvador and is well supported by credible evidence, as we shall see, is
that the government was directly implicated in the Archbishop’s killing
and sought to prevent any inquiry into it. And US officials, as we noted
earlier, concede privately that the atrocities are carried out by the
security forces of the government that Duarte seeks to legitimate. The
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports that “Death Squad
activities . . . have originated in the Salvadoran security services,
including the National Police, National Guard and Treasury Police,” and
that “numerous Salvadoran officials in the military and security forces as
well as other official organizations have been involved in encouraging or
conducting death squad activities or other violent human rights abuses,”
including “officials in the civilian government, representatives of the
private sector organizations, and various individuals associated with the
traditional oligarchy of that country.” Salvadoran interim President
Alvaro Magafia (the US candidate) stated earlier that “All of the death
squads are related to the army or paramilitary.” 36
The pretense transmitted by the Times is impossible to sustain in the
light of available evidence and never was even remotely tenable. The
vice-chairman of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch writes: 37
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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