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

killed by the army:
Free World Vignettes
In July 1982, soldiers flew into the area by helicopter. First they
went to ——, a nearby town, and killed five people, burned the
town, and threw people, including women and children, into the
flames . . . Children’s throats were cut, and women were hit by
machetes. [A man] watched as the soldiers killed fifteen people,
including women, with machetes. They set fire to the houses, and
sometimes opened the doors of huts and threw hand grenades
inside. In all, fifty people in his village were killed. Soldiers also
killed forty-nine people in the nearby town of ——, which they
burned as well . . . From a kilometer away, he saw women from
the village who were hung by their feet without clothes and left.
Others describe how villagers were hacked to death by machetes,
beaten to death, raped and tortured by soldiers, their towns burned to
the ground. The perpetrators of such widespread massacres were easily
recognized as Guatemalan army forces by their uniforms and their Israeli
Galil rifles, standard issue for state terrorists in Latin America.
Survivors of the massacre at Finca San Francisco in July 1982
describe how 300 people were killed, the women raped and shot or
burned to ashes in houses put to the torch, the old people hacked to
pieces with machetes, the children disemboweled: 67
Finally they brought out the last child. He was a little one, maybe
two or three years old. They stabbed him and cut out his stomach.
The little child was screaming, but because he wasn’t dead yet,
the soldier grabbed a thick, hard stick and bashed his head. They
held his feet together and smashed him against a tree trunk. I saw
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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