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

Free World Vignettes
death squads were never apprehended or prosecuted; they
operated with impunity during curfew hours; they passed police
checkpoints without challenge; the security forces sometimes
blocked streets to permit death squads to operate without
interruption; uniformed forces sometimes conducted joint
operations with nonuniformed death squads; bodies were dumped
in heavily patrolled areas; death squads had access to good
intelligence; the volume of death squad killing was adjusted in
response to pressure on governmental forces; and so on.
Evidence from defectors and other sources simply confirms the
obvious, recognized indirectly by US authorities who seek to deny it. An
Embassy spokesman in San Salvador comments: “If you pursue the
squads it is going to cut so far back into the fabric of Salvadorean
society you may face the destabilisation of the society.” In other words,
we must not interfere with the practices of the elite groups who
constitute that part of the society that matters, or we might disturb its
stability. The same problem was noted by Arturo Cruz with regard to the
contras (see section 2 above).
It is not easy to employ killers for your work and then expect them to
act like gentlemen—particularly, when their professional skills are
instrumental for the task at hand. Furthermore, it is impossible to deny
the crucial “Washington connection” in forming, training and
maintaining this system of highly organized state terror. 38
Occasionally the press does concede that security forces are
responsible for atrocities. In a report on repression in Nicaragua,
Stephen Kinzer notes that “Nicaragua has not reached the level of abuse
attained a few years ago in Guatemala and El Salvador, when squads of
security men in civilian clothes arrested, tortured or killed hundreds of
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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