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

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These “civilians say he turned mortar fire on them.” Ochoa says there
are no civilians in these areas, adding that
We are anticommunist, democratic, or at least aspire to that, and
we believe in the market system . . . We represent the Judeo-
Christian Western civilization. We defend a system . . . We need a
leader—someone to lead us. It’s this way in Latin America. We
want a strong man. Someone to lead us—to guide us.
He runs his area “like his private country,” according to an observer
with a human rights group “who echoes views fairly widely held here,”
while receiving much praise from his US advisers for his successes.
In the Guazapa area, where Dr. Clements had worked, regular air
attacks against civilian targets continued after Duarte’s rules of
engagement were announced. The scattered remnants of the population
attempt to hide from ground sweeps following the shelling and
bombardment by helicopters and jet bombers, watching their children
die of starvation and thirst. In Cabanas, two months after Duarte’s
pronouncement, one man reported that “about fifteen people got killed,
children, pregnant women, adults, etc.,” by A-37 planes and
helicopters. Earlier, soldiers had swept through, raping, cutting the
throats of victims, killing children with knives. “If they find somebody,
they kill, they even kill the poor dogs and other animals,” another
refugee testified, reporting night bombing (an effective terror technique,
now possible thanks to US air force technology and aerial support) and
ambushing of people fleeing in October 1984. The soldiers also
destroyed crops and houses, “even pans one uses to cook in . . . in order
to leave one without anything.” Fleeing women and children were killed
by bullets and grenades, or sliced to pieces and decapitated with
machetes. The attacks became particularly vicious after the “peace
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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