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

The Fifth Freedom
These consequences were the direct and predictable results of fateful
decisions of the Kennedy Administration, to which we return. Meanwhile
“Alliance funds in massive amounts went to US-owned firms and to the
Central American oligarchs that controlled banks and mercantile
businesses, as well as the best tillable land.” US investment rose
rapidly, and while the first decade did record statistical growth of their
economies, its effect was to shift subsistence production to export crops
for the benefit of foreign corporations and local oligarchs, while every
country of Central America increasingly lost the capacity to feed itself
and starvation and misery grew; again, the result of specific decisions
with predictable consequences. The substantial growth of military forces
trained for internal repression was a natural concomitant of the Alliance
for Progress, which “helped make such a force necessary” as the
expansion of the export economy “took lands from campesinos and set
the class war in motion.” 6
Few statesman were more given to uplifting pronouncements about
the rights of the weak and oppressed than Woodrow Wilson, “the
greatest interventionist of all,” 7 who celebrated his doctrine of selfdetermination
by invading Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
One supplicant approached Wilson’s Paris residence during the
Versailles conference in 1919, hoping to present a petition entreating
the victorious allies to support his country’s “permanent representation
in the French Parliament by elected natives in order to keep it informed
of native aspirations.” But in vain. “The appeal went undelivered. United
States Marines, guarding President Wilson in his quarters, chased the
would-be petitioner away, ‘like a pest’”—an important phase in the
education of the man later known as Ho Chi Minh. 8
The noble rhetoric remains unsullied in Western discourse (including
much scholarship). But many poor and suffering people have a much
clearer understanding of the reality it has always masked.
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
77