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

Free World Vignettes
3.2 Reagan Takes Command
As Reagan took over in 1981, the massacres increased both in sadism
and scale, with 12,501 cases documented by the Church Legal Aid
Service for 1981 along with unknown numbers of others, again,
attributed primarily to the various military and police forces. Meanwhile
torture reached “extraordinary dimensions,” human rights groups who
investigated the matter observed; “Of the many thousands of bodies
which have appeared after detentions and abductions of security
personnel, a very high proportion show signs of torture including
dismemberment, beating, acid burns, flaying, scalping, castration,
strangulation, sexual violation, and evisceration.” Churches and Human
Rights offices were attacked; the judge investigating the murder of
Archbishop Romero was driven from the country by death threats and
assassination attempts after the government had ensured that no
investigation could proceed; relatives of another judge were murdered,
their heads severed and laid at his home, to prevent inquiry into state
terror; patients were machine-gunned in hospitals; peasants, teachers,
health workers, union leaders, students and others were brutally tortured
and murdered with increasing ferocity. Meanwhile, President Duarte and
US officials attempted to cover up the atrocities and denied the
complicity of the military forces and police, whom they knew to be
responsible. 44
A medical mission of the US National Academy of Sciences and other
professional and human rights groups investigated reports of barbarous
treatment of health workers in January 1983. They report that
“Wherever we turned we found the chilling effects of the ever-widening
devastation to health and health care that has been caused by the
breakdown of education, the slashing of budgets for national health
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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