Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [266]
68. Quoted in Update, pp. 30–31.
69. On the Tyler investigation, see Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, pp. 78–80.
70. Stephen Kinzer, “Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads,” New York Times, March 3, 1984.
71. Carrigan, Salvador Witness, p. 265.
72. See Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Doubleday, 1982), pp. 32–47, 54–63.
73. Virtually all independent observers were of the view that land reform was also highly desirable for both equity and efficiency. See, especially, José M. Aybar de Soto, Dependency and Intervention: The Case of Guatemala in 1954 (Boulder: Westview, 1978), chapter 6.
74. Ibid. See also Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).
75. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday, 1981), p. 222.
76. Piero Gleijeses, “Guatemala: Crisis and Response,” in Richard B. Fagen and Olga Pellicer, The Future of Central America: Policy Choices for the U.S. and Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 188.
77. Ibid., pp. 191–92.
78. Ibid., p. 192.
79. U.S. officials have often pressed for purely formal democratic reforms and reductions in rates of murder, but they have consistently supported and helped organize the framework that eroded the democratic reforms and increased rates of murder. In Guatemala (and elsewhere), the reasons for the regular backing of antidemocratic institutions have been the fear of the left and the chronic hostility of U.S. officials and businessmen to popular organizations (unions, peasant organizations, mass political parties), for both economic and political reasons. Thus the periodic support for liberal forms has been rendered nugatory by the systematic bolstering up of institutions that regularly undermine the substance of liberalism. As Lars Schoultz points out, the function of “military authoritarianism,” beginning with the U.S.-backed Brazilian coup of 1964 and widely prevalent in Latin America and elsewhere within the U.S. sphere of influence, has been “to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the participation of the numerical majority, . . .” (Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], p. 7). We may let them “participate,” however, with elections held after extended periods of military pacification and the dismantling of popular organizations. See chapter 3.
80. See “Counterrevolution and the ‘Shakedown States,’” in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 61–66.
81. From 1977, Guatemala turned for aid to Israel, which has provided similar services regularly for the U.S. government. For details, see Bishara Bahbah, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection (New York: Pantheon, 1987); and Jane Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1987). On the continued flow of arms from the United States to Guatemala during the Carter years, see Lars Schoultz, “Guatemala,” in Martin Diskin, ed., Trouble in our Backyard (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 187ff.
82. Piero Gleijeses estimates that “the Guatemalan army has killed close to 100,000” since 1979 (“The Reagan Doctrine and Latin America,” Current History [December 1986]).
83. See, for example, Amnesty International, Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder (London: AI, 1981); Parliamentary Human Rights Group, “Bitter and Cruel . . .,” Report of a Mission to Guatemala by the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, October 1984; Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986).
84. Amnesty International, Guatemala: Massive Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas under the Government of General Efraín Ríos Montt, October