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

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have spent some time in zones under attack, reports that the peasant
population in those zones was reduced by a third to a half during 1984
by air attacks, operations by US-trained elite battalions, and burning of
fields to cause starvation and flight of the population, though she found
no signs of combat. A religious worker says that “this is a war of
attrition, and food—or an attempt at starvation—has become a weapon
too”; an old US specialty, dating back to the Indian wars and employed
effectively in Vietnam. The army commander blocked food deliveries by
the Red Cross and the Catholic relief agency Caritas. Farmers cannot go
to fields because of bombing. Peasants report that the planes, now
directed by high technology US reconnaissance, “go after anything that
moves.” 50
Visiting a refugee camp in Honduras, Elizabeth Hanly reports the
testimony of a Salvadoran peasant woman who describes a 1983
massacre, when the National Guard came to her village in US-supplied
helicopters, killing her three children among others, chopping the
children to pieces and throwing them to the village pigs: “The soldiers
laughed all the while,” she said. Like her, other women “still had tears
to cry as they told stories of sons, brothers and husbands gathered into a
circle and set on fire after their legs had been broken; or of trees heavy
with women hanging from their wrists, all with breasts cut off and facial
skin peeled back, all slowly bleeding to death.” They described how
“they had worked, generations of them, all day, every day on someone
else’s land,” their children starving or parasite-ridden. Peaceful visits to
the landowners to beg for food had brought the National Guard: “We
asked for food; they gave us bullets.’’ More ‘‘annoyance” in Christian
Science Monitor terminology, courtesy of the American taxpayer, who
must be protected from awareness of these facts. 51
The record of horrors has been compiled in regular publications of
Americas Watch—only very partially of course, since the scale is so
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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