Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read Free Page A

competent.
    But the point is, what was the need to develop this huge international terrorist network involving mercenary states? It’s that the U.S. government couldn’t intervene directly whenever it wanted to anymore, so it had to do it in what amounted to quite inefficient ways. It’s a lot more efficient to do what Kennedy did, and what Johnson did—just send in the Marines. That’s efficient, it’s an efficient killing-machine, it’s not going to be exposed and put a crimp in the works, you don’t have to do it around the corners. So you’re right: the Reagan administration did support Guatemala—but indirectly. They had to get Israeli advisers in there, and Taiwanese counter-insurgency agents and so on.
    Just to take one example of this, the Chief of Intelligence for the F.D.N., the main contra force in Nicaragua, defected about six months ago, a guy named Horacio Arce; he’s the most important defector yet. This was of course never reported in the United States, but he was very widely interviewed in Mexico.   12 And he had a lot of things to say, including details of his own training. He had been brought illegally to Eglin Air Force base in Florida, and he described in detail what the training was like there and then in San Salvador where he was sent for paratroop practice. The trainers were from all over the place: they had Spanish trainers, plenty of Israeli trainers, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Taiwanese, Dominicans, separate Japanese trainers for the Misquito Indian recruits—they’ve got a huge operation running. And it’s all clandestine, and all obviously illegal.
    And it’s lethal alright, I mean, in Guatemala alone maybe a hundred thousand people were killed during the 1980s, and the popular movements were decimated.   13 But lethal as it is, it would have been a lot worse without the restrictions that have been imposed by U.S. domestic dissidence in the last twenty-five years. I think that’s the important point. If you want to measure the achievement of the popular movements here, you have to ask, what would things have been like if they hadn’t been around? And things would have been like South Vietnam in the Sixties—when the country was wiped out, and may never recover. And remember, Central America’s a much more significant concern for the United States than Vietnam: there’s a historical commitment to controlling it, it’s our own backyard, and American business wants it as the equivalent of what East Asia is to Japan, a cheap labor area for exploitation. Yet the Reagan administration was unable to intervene there at the level that Kennedy did in an area of marginal American concern, Vietnam. That’s a big change, and I think it’s primarily attributable to the domestic dissidence.
    After all, what are the Iran-contra hearings about? What they’re about is the fact that the government was driven underground. Well, why was the government driven underground, why didn’t they just come out and do everything up front? They couldn’t. They couldn’t because they were afraid of their own population. And that’s significant, you know. It’s very rare that a government has had to go this deep underground in order to carry out its terrorist activities. It’s an unusual situation; I don’t even think there’s a historical precedent.
    Overthrowing Third World Governments
    W OMAN : The Allende coup in Chile—that wasn’t above ground. [Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup engineered by the C.I.A. in 1973.]
    The Allende thing was underground, that’s true—but that was a one-shot affair. And even there, notice that it was done in a different style: it was done in the classic style, it was like the Iran side of the Iran-contra affair. See, there’s a classic technique when you want to overthrow a government: you arm its military. That’s the standard thing, for obvious reasons. You want to overthrow a government, who’s going to overthrow it for you? Well,