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

Free World Vignettes
different tune, lauding this mass murderer for “positive” developments
as Guatemalan security forces have been “taking care to protect
innocent bystanders” during their counterinsurgency operations—they
were actually engaged in wholesale murder and torture of civilians—and
lauding also the army’s “program of civic action” in “backward areas.”
When General Mejía Víctores took over from Ríos Montt in another
coup, it turned out that Ríos Montt hadn’t been quite such a saint after
all. The State Department human rights report conceded that under his
rule, “there were many allegations of abuses against Guatemala’s Indian
population, some of which were confirmed”—a forthright denunciation,
Reagan-Abrams style, of past abuses of the sort briefly reviewed earlier.
Now, however, the situation has improved, the Administration alleged.
Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams added that
the violence and refugees should be blamed “on the guerrillas who are
fighting the government”; violence and refugees are “the price of
stability.” As for the refugees in Mexico, their testimony can be
discounted, Abrams held, because some may be “guerrilla
sympathizers”; in any event, they “are not a representative proportion of
the population.” “Reporting on events in Guatemala without stepping
foot into the country is not recommended,” Abrams explained—
naturally enough, since it is only in the refugee camps that testimony
can be taken freely, without fear of the state terrorists. In congressional
testimony in May 1984, Abrams stated that General Mejía Víctores had
“continued a large number of the [human rights] improvements that Ríos
Montt had begun,” thus expressing his admiration for the most savage of
the thugs who have ruled Guatemala with US support. State Department
Human Rights reports and government officials claimed constant
improvements, even ‘dramatic decline’’ in violence as government
atrocities soared, or blamed the guerrillas, when evidence of atrocities
could not be denied. “In September 1983 as the rate of assassinations
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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