Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace

Rating:
Summary: Can you handle the truth?
Review: A book that will gnaw at your guts like a rabid sewer rat. The irrefutable facts are all here: How the U.S. government, and especially the heinous criminals in the Reagan administrations, brought a nightmare of rape, torture, and mass murder to impoverished students, peasants, and community activists in some of the most destitute countries in the world. Every American should read this book...and vow "NEVER AGAIN".

Rating:
Summary: Twisting the Truth
Review: According to Noam Chomsky, the US has turned Latin America into "one of the world's most awful horror chambers," in which every attempt to bring about some constructive change has been met with "a new dose of US violence" (pp4-5). Turning to the facts, democratic revolutions occurred with US support in Ecuador (1979), Peru (1980), Bolivia (1982), Honduras (1982), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985), Uruguay (1985), Guatemala (1986), El Salvador (1989), Panama (1989), Chile (1990), Nicaragua (1990) and Paraguay (1993).

Moreover - and Chomsky ignores this point - even under the prior military regimes, the death tolls are instructive: in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay (hundreds); in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador (thousands); or in Guatemala (scores of thousands) - major crimes, surely, but hardly noticeable in comparison with the multiple millions butchered at the same time in Marxist hell states such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique.

Chomsky suppresses these facts, invoking one far-left front group after another: Americas Watch, Oxfam America, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, the Latin American Studies Association, the Institute for Policy Studies. On El Salvador, he repeatedly cites the Legal Aid Office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador (pp15, 18, 25). He does not explain that the first Legal Aid Office, Socorro Juridico, was repudiated by the Catholic Church because of its misleading civilian death counts (Washington Post, May 15, 1982), while its replacement, Tutela Legal, was found to have invented an army massacre of 250 people (Washington Post, August 19, 1984). He does not explain that far from supporting a feudal oligarchy against social change, the US backed a leftist regime which nationalised the banks while expropriating major land holdings for redistribution to the poor. He does not explain that in retaliation, the far right and its military allies organised death squads which killed not only radical activists but also the ruling Christian Democrats, at one point even targeting the US Ambassador (Washington Post, September 17, 1984). Since he conceals these facts, it is hardly surprising that he does not predict the outcome: the US achieved democratic reforms while ending death squad murders and defeating the communist FMLN, producing a multi-party system with a free press, freedoms of speech, religion, occupation and movement, independent labour unions, a mixed economy, and improving civil, political and judicial guarantees (John Norton Moore, "The Secret War in Central America," p121).

On Nicaragua, Chomsky's source for Contra abuses is the infamous Reed Brody report (pp10-1), written "at the initiative of a New York law firm representing Nicaraguan interests" (p256n18), i.e. prepared on behalf of the Sandinistas' law firm with Sandinista complicity. When Chomsky pretends that the Contras were terrorists, he does not explain that four-fifths of the fatalities in their operations were combatants, as the Sandinistas admitted (Shirley Christian, "Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family," p369). In a typical move, Chomsky quotes a Contra leader to show that he is killing civilians (p11), transferring to a footnote his very next sentence: "We are not killing civilians" (p256n19). Conversely, when Chomsky denies that the Sandinistas are guilty of mass murder, he does not mention that 2,000 political prisoners were killed in the first months of their dictatorship (Moore, p143n94), with 3,000 disappearances, according to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights (Roger Miranda, "The Civil War in Nicaragua," p193); that the Sandinistas kill their victims by stabbing, or that "the prisoner's arms and legs are cut off while he is alive, and he is left to bleed to death" (Moore, p126). He does not mention 4,200 political prisoners (Washington Post, March 31, 1982), the ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Miskito Indians (Miranda, pp253-6) or the forced removal of 200,000 peasants to resettlement camps in order to create free-fire zones, allowing the Sandinistas "to use their artillery without concern for civilian casualties" (Sam Dillon, "Commandos: The CIA and Nicaragua's Contra Rebels," pp159-60).

When Chomsky excuses Sandinista crimes as wartime measures (pp72-5), he does not explain that the Sandinistas were building an army of 200,000, the largest in the region, before there was any Contra threat (New York Times, February 20, 1981). When he tries to whitewash the Sandinistas' antisemitism (pp77-8), he does not mention that his sources have been discredited (Joshua Muravchik, Susan Alberts and Antony Korenstein, "Sandinista Anti-Semitism and its Apologists," Commentary, September 1986). When he denies the totalitarian goals of the Sandinistas (pp80-2), he does not mention the many defectors who warned of a communist dictatorship, including Alvaro Baldizon of the Ministry of the Interior, who "related that alleged opponents of the revolution had been tortured and murdered by the thousands" (Martin Kriele, "Power and Human Rights in Nicaragua," German Comments, April 1986); Miguel Bolanos Hunter of the State Security Service, who detailed the training of Salvadoran guerrillas and warned of the plan to overthrow democracy in Costa Rica (Moore, pp26, 31); and Roger Miranda, chief of staff to Sandinista Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, who wrote of "a dictatorial, antidemocratic system" which "proclaimed adherence to Marxism-Leninism" as it entered "the Cold War camp of the Soviet Union" (Miranda, pp19, 75, 77). All such evidence is suppressed in this book.

When Chomsky defends the veracity of the 1984 election (pp137-43), he does not explain that there was no freedom of speech, that the democratic opposition was denied access to the media, that the only remaining independent newspaper was censored, that campaign rallies were broken up by gangs of thugs resembling "the stormtroopers (SA) of the Nazi era in Germany," that the major opposition parties withdrew in protest and that there was no secret vote, since the ballots were marked with personal numbers (Kriele, ibid.). Chomsky did not predict that having crushed the population, devastated the economy and caused 50,000 deaths (Miranda, p281), the Sandinistas would incur landslide defeats in free elections in 1990, 1996 and 2001. Indeed, Chomsky's communist "popular movements" have never won a democratic vote in Central America. Is further comment necessary?

Rating:
Summary: It's Old But It's Still Chomsky and It's Pretty Interesting
Review: Chomsky published this book in early 1986 on U.S. imperialism in Latin American and its institutional roots and history. It was published before such events as the June 1986 ruling of the World Court of Justice ordering the United States to cease its terrorist war against Nicaragua and pay substantial reparations to it, the 1987 Esquipulas accords and the 1990 elections in Nicaragua all or much of which Chomsky covers in books published in the years after this book ("The Culture of Terrorism," "Necessary Illusions," "Deterring Democracy," etc.). But nonetheless he makes some excellent points in this book and I'm glad I read it.

There is alot of stuff in this book about the background to the U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980's including the Kennedy administration's policies like the "Alliance For Progress" and the decision to switch the mission of the Latin American military from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security" in 1962, as well the secret documents from the 1940's from George Kennan and the other evidence where U.S. planners lay out their plan for the "Grand Area," define just what they mean by "communist" and "communist aggression," and so on. He has written on this in alot of other places.

But the immediate roots for the intervention and support for the death squads, Chomsky shows, started during the Carter "human rights" administration. During that time, he shows, the Reaganite programs of massive military spending and cutback of social programs began. Carter continued to support the Guatemalan Nazi-like military, despite a few token gestures that were apparently not enforced. Contrary to much illusion, he tried to keep Somoza in power to the very end of his barbaric rule, and probably sparked the final uprising against him by sending a letter in the summer of 1978 praising him for his devotion to human rights (he was making similar comments to the Shah of Iran at the same time). He vastly increased U.S. aid to El Salvador after an October 1979 military coup by reformist officers who were quickly pushed aside by fanatic rightist officers who began their mass murder in early 1980, as the archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero was writing to Carter to beg him to stop military aid to the murderous junta and the oligarchy saying that it would "sharpen injustice against the people's organizations who are fighting for their most fundamental human rights." Archbishop Romero was assasinated shorly after by the forces of Ricardo Lau, a Nicaraguan Contra, in the employ of the notorious death squad leader Roberto D'aubuisson, according to the former chief of Salvadoran intelligence Roberto Santivanez. As Archbishop Romero's successor was condemning "a war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civillian populatoion" Jose Napolean Duarte, a former dissident liberal, decided to completely sell out and become the figurehead civillian president of the junta to salve the conscience of the New York Times liberals. He joined forces with the killers whom he had been condemning shortly before, and though at one point admitting "the masses are with the guerillas he spent alot of his time denouncing the Salvadoran Catholic church and other courageous people struggling to document the unimaginable horror the U.S. backed military was committing against defenseless peasants.

During the Carter years, congressional legislation prevented direct aid and training to the remnants of Somoza's national gaurd operating in Honduras, so Israel, the neo-Nazi dictatorship in Argentina, and other such friends of freedom stepped in to fill the void. The Reaganites, of course, felt no need for such caution and jumped in to aid and train them directly. Chomsky traces the evolution of the Reaganite campaign against Nicaragua: the February 1981 White Paper which was so ridiculous even many U.S. journalists saw its fraudulence, to the downright silly claim that Nicaragua was managing to send weapons to El Salvador through the Gulf of Fonseca, to the final policy settled upon which was that Nicaragua was a Stalinist dungeon taht was destablizing its neighbors (translation from Orwellian: trying to acquire weapons to defend itself from the terrorist war being waged against it by the U.S. and its proxy army). He notes that the 1984 elections in Sandanista Nicaragua was declared to be free and fair by a wide variety of observors who took note of the extraordinary fact that political forces calling for the overthrow of the government were allowed to take part in the election. The U.S. dismissed it as fraudulent while declaring to be a model of democracy the election that took place in El Salvador the same year which was declared by Lord Chitnis of the British parliamentary delegation to be conducted under conditions of "intense terror, grizzly rumor and macabre reality."

He also analyzes the bipartisan attack on democracy and the welfare state (what we have of one) in the wake of the erosion of U.S. economic dominance of the world because of the Vietnam war, spearheaded at the time of his writing by the Reagan "conservatives" i.e. statist reactionaries devoted to a massive welfare state for the wealthy, one that is violent, intrusive and unaccountable in its actions at home and abroad. He devotes a section to analyzing "Star Wars" and U.S. nuclear policy. I'm not going to say I understood everything in it but it was immensely helpful nonetheless, especially considering the recent emergence of "National Missle Defense" and its bipartisan support and unfortunate support amongst the general population.