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

Free World Vignettes
seventies. 96
When the land is finally denuded and devastated, we may tolerate
the victory of some future guerrilla movement, then denouncing its
failure to carry out real economic development, another proof of the evils
of Communism.
The process extends back many years in Central America, to the
Spanish conquest in fact, when grazing by cattle introduced by the
conquerors, unrestricted under Spanish law, was a factor in the
elimination of close to 20 million people in about 50 years, a notable
chapter in the history of genocide. 97 The major factors that caused
Honduras to “lose the ability to feed its own people,” the Oxfam report
continues, include “the economic power of US corporations, the interests
of a small Honduran elite, and the policies of US and international
banks and aid agencies,” which have driven these developments
throughout Central America. Just in the past few years, US corporations,
which have virtually owned Honduras since 1900, bribed Honduran
officials to avoid paying taxes and hired Honduran army officers to bring
troops to arrest members of a peasant cooperative who sought to evade
their market control, while US government policies are designed to
guarantee their increasing profits. All of this is quite apart from the
regular subversion and military intervention over the years if the society
held in thrall to the foreign investor threatens to change in the wrong
direction, towards concern for the needs of its own population.
In part these developments simply reflect the dynamics of the
market, given the distribution of economic power. “With the fastest
growing and most profitable markets for agricultural commodities
located in the advanced capitalist countries, the most dynamic sector of
capital accumulation is in export production,” so it is here that
modernization has taken place; those who have only their labor to sell
can expect to fall by the wayside, or to be removed by force if they are in
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
68