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

The Fifth Freedom
observes that “one sign of Latin American feelings toward the US was
the cool reception Vice-President George Bush and Secretary of State
George Shultz received” when they appeared at the inauguration of the
new Brazilian president. They “are not personally unpopular in Latin
America,” he notes, “Yet at this reception they were booed, while
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega was applauded,” a fact generally
unreported here. Two months earlier, ABC reported that on a visit to
Uruguay, Ortega was “greeted by wildly enthusiastic crowds, cheering
his name as if he was about to be named president of Uruguay,” a fact
again generally ignored in the media. 22 But few Latin Americans will risk
offending the hemisphere’s Big Brother when the chips are down.
Returning to Guatemala, the relevant point is that whatever the facts,
Guatemala had to be an agency of the Commie conspiracy so as to
justify the U.S. overthrow of its democratic government, motivated on
quite different grounds.
This characteristic device of US foreign policy is now being employed
in the familiar manner in Nicaragua, where the Reagan Administration is
attempting to drive the Sandinista regime securely into the hands of the
Evil Empire just as it is acting to undermine the private sector through
embargo, so as to create the “totalitarian” state that is required to justify
US violence, to the distress of business groups and the conservative
Nicaraguan Church hierarchy that we purport to favor. 23
Harvard Business School professor James Austin describes the
embargo as “a flagrant violation of international agreements,” and also
“an affront to the basic values of our society” and a “foreign policy
blunder” that is “counterproductive” because it drives Nicaragua towards
dependence on the Soviet Union. The first point is correct; the second
reflects a serious misunderstanding both of the basic values of our
society as they are expressed in historical practice, and of the goals of
the policy. Austin observes that the boycott violates the GATT
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