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

Free World Vignettes
the miseries of traditional life and continued repression evoke resistance,
and to ensure that domestic order will be maintained even if some
pretense of formal democracy is occasionally permitted for the benefit of
the US home front. After the CIA coup, LaFeber notes, US advisers took
a “rag-tag force” and converted it into an efficient modern army with
“institutional pride and allegiance” and an understanding of its political
as well as its military mission, a fit force to rule the country, as the US
determined again in 1963, when Kennedy supported a military coup.
Similarly in Honduras, the army, “not yet a self-conscious, professional
institution,” could do little to block social and political development in
earlier years, but is currently more capable of doing so, now that “US
training raised the military’s self-awareness, and North American
equipment made it the decisive political force.” As Americas Watch
observes, “what the United States is doing for the army of El Salvador
today, it did for the army of Guatemala twenty years ago,” and there is
every reason to expect the long-term consequences to be the same. The
major steps in providing the Latin American military and internal security
forces with an understanding of their political mission and with the
proficiency to realize it were taken under the Kennedy Administration, in
part through the Alliance for Progress; we return to that topic in chapters
three and four. 91
The model for these programs was Nicaragua, where in the late
1920s, the US undertook to create an efficient domestic military force to
replace the US Marines who occupied the country for two decades. The
result was that “Nicaragua was clearly a nation occupied by its own
army, . . . one of the most totally corrupt military establishments in the
world,” maintained with enthusiastic US support from the days of FDR
to the fall of Somoza. 92 Guatemala’s turn came in the fifties, and after
early steps under the Alliance for Progress, El Salvador is undergoing the
same process today, with Honduras not far behind. Costa Rica has been
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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