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

Free World Vignettes
how they flung him hard and hurt his head. It split open, and they
threw him inside the house.
The 1982 strategy of the Ríos Montt regime, defended by President
Reagan and his Human Rights specialist Elliott Abrams, as we shall see,
was described at the time by a respected journal: 68
The army strategy is to clear the population out of the guerrilla
support areas. Troops and militias move into the villages, shoot,
burn or behead the inhabitants they catch; the survivors are
machine-gunned from helicopters as they flee.
Two years later, a British Parliamentary investigation concluded that
“if anything, [the situation] has worsened since 1983” in a continuing
slaughter that the conservative Bishops’ Conference describes as
“genocide.” “The grim statistics summarizing Guatemala’s political
reality—100,000 killed since 1960, 100 political assassinations a
month in 1984, 10 disappearances a week, 100,000 orphans, half a
million displaced—barely reach the North American, let alone the
European newspapers.” Government claims that the guerrillas are
responsible and that the “disappeared” have gone to Cuba or the USSR
are “a brazen lie”; “The evidence points inexorably to the state security
apparatus as being responsible for these crimes.” Presenting testimony
of gruesome torture and murder, the report cites estimates that in the
most recent series of state massacres, some 25,000 had been
slaughtered, mostly Indians, in three departments where a census was
taken; the Roman Catholic Church administrator in the town of Quiché
“estimates that in recent years about 20,000 Indians have been killed in
Quiché province alone,” the Wall St. Journal reports, quoting another
churchman who says: “The roads began to stink, there were so many
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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