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

Free World Vignettes
negotiations” between Duarte and the guerrillas—Duarte’s noble and
courageous “peace initiative,” as the press described it, referring to
Duarte’s acceptance of longstanding guerrilla proposals, which he then
refused to pursue further. 58
Americas Watch reports that the testimonies they reproduce ‘‘were
not selected because the events they describe were more or less
horrifying than those described in other testimony,” presented in
extensive detail in the monthly reports of the Church Human Rights
office Tutela Legal but ignored by the media. “Rather, they are
representative of what is endured constantly by Salvadoran civilians in
conflict zones and guerrilla controlled zones.
The Americas Watch report correctly warns that refugee testimony
must be critically evaluated. In fact, on the rare occasions when US
journalists investigate massacre reports, they are cautious and
scrupulous in presenting and evaluating testimony—for example, in the
September investigation by James LeMoyne of the July 1984 massacre
at Los Llanitos, 59 carried out by the US-trained elite Atlacatl battalion,
who killed 68 people according to the on-the-spot investigation of Tutela
Legal a few days after the massacre, most of them women, old people
and children; the bodies were then burned with gasoline brought in by
helicopter.
LeMoyne writes that “the villagers’ account has not been confirmed,
and it may be colored by their sympathies for the guerrillas.” What
would count as “confirmation” he does not say, and it is, of course, the
norm for reports of atrocities to come from the victims, who are not
likely to be sympathetic to the murderers of their families and friends.
But to raise doubts on this score is permissible only in the case of
atrocities conducted by US client states, atrocities that are generally
ignored or described with much skepticism and with the US role
pointedly omitted, as in this case. The need for care is regularly
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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