- ‘The basic fact is that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite. The fundamental belief, or ideological pretense, is that the Untied States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective.’ (ix)
- ‘Since 1960 over 18 Latin American regimes have been subjected to military takeovers – a ‘domino effect’ neglected in the West.’ (ix)
- ‘The proof of the pudding is that U.S. bankers and industrialists have consistently welcomed the ‘stability’ of the new client fascist order, whose governments, while savage in their treatment of dissidents, priests, labor leaders, peasant organizers or others who threaten ‘order,’ and at best indifferent to the mass of the population, have been most accommodating to large external interests. In an important sense, therefore, the torturers in the client states are functionaries of IBM, Citibank, Allis Chalmers and the U.S. government, playing their assigned roles in a system that has worked according to choice and plan.’ (x)
- ‘It is, one might have thought, a formidable task to transmute increasing numbers of fascist thugs into respectable ‘leaders’ worthy of our subsidies and active support.’ (x)
- ‘As we describe in detail throughout this work, on fundamental issues the mass media in the United States – what we will refer to as the ‘Free Press’ function very much in the manner of a system of state-controlled propaganda, and their achievements are, in fact, quite awesome.’ (x)
- ‘The Free Press remained largely closed to direct access by the movement throughout the war. The peace movement also had to overcome the obstacle of active state hostility to its efforts. It is now well known that the U.S. government deployed its national political police in a major effort to undermine and destroy the mass movements of the 1960s…This experience shows that even the effective system of ideological controls of the United states has its limitations. It is not impossible for substantial groups to gain some real understanding of social and political reality and to organize and act to modify state policy.’ (xi-xii)
- ‘While the U.S. and its allies have armed the neo-fascist elites of the Third World to the teeth, and saturated them with counterinsurgency weaponry and training, long-term elite control of the underlying populations is by no means assured. The abuse of Third World majorities in the empire is so flagrant, and their leaderships are so corrupt, inept and visionless, that explosions and loss of control are highly likely in many states over the next several decades. The voiceless majorities can be helped by outsiders in many ways: among them, maximum world-wide exposure of the actual impact of the West on these peoples; strenuous efforts to stem the huge flow of aid and support to official terrorists; and helping to create an ideological and political environment that will make open intervention difficult when explosions do occur.’ (xii)
- ‘Well-known advocates of freedom of expression who were apprised of the matter have regarded it as insignificant, presumably on the grounds that there is no issue of state censorship but only of corporate censorship. This reflects, we believe, a characteristic underestimation of the importance of the selective policing of the flow of ideas by means of private structures and constrained access, while all the legal forms of freedom are in place.’ (xvi)
- ‘The population was driven into urban slums by bombing, artillery, and ground attacks that often degenerated into mass murder, in an expanding effort to destroy the social structures in which resistance was rooted. Defenseless peasant societies in Laos Cambodia
- ‘The United States Uruguay Montevideo U.S.
- ‘Since the installation and support of military juntas, with their sadistic tortures and bloodbaths, are hardly compatible with human rights, democracy and other alleged Western values, the media and intellectuals in the United States and Western Europe have been hard-pressed to rationalize state policy. The primary solution has been massive suppression, averting the eyes from the unpleasant facts concerning the extensive torture and killing.’ (11-12)
- ‘The mass media also feature heavily the positives of our military juntas, especially any alleged ‘improvements’.’ (12)
- ‘These tokenistic and public relations devices the dictators demonstrate improvement, our leaders show that we are a force for liberty, and possibly a small number of prisoners may be freed, all this without seriously disturbing the status quo.’ (13)
- ‘A striking example of these procedures is the case of Iran, where a brief experiment with democracy and independence was terminated by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1953, leading to the imposition of a regime that became one of the terror centers of the world.’ (13)
- ‘Martin Ennals, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, noted that Iran Iran United States
- ‘The annual survey of human rights put out by the U.S. State Department has this primary characteristic: it strives consistently and without intellectual scruple to put a good face on totalitarian states within our sphere of influence. The bias is so great, the willingness to accept factual claims and verbal promises of military juntas is so blatant, the down-playing of the claims and pain of the victims of official terror is so obvious, that these reports are themselves solid evidence of the primary official commitment to the dispensers of terror rather than its victims.’ (15)
- ‘U.S.
- ‘Even today, as regards East Timor, where our corrupt and brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) has very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our leaders. It is a ‘benign bloodbath’ in our terminology.’ (22)
- ‘There are no powerful interests embarrassed by tales of Khmer Rouge terror, a Moscow Vietnam
- ‘There would be strong objections to a constant stream of stories on U.S.-created orphans, prostitutes, starving children, destruction of fields and forests, and the continuing hundreds of deaths in Indochina from unexploded ordnance, or on the depredations of U.S. client states using U.S. arms, as in East Timor.’ (23)
- ‘The difference between a society with official censorship (e.g., the Soviet Union) and one without (the United States) is real and significant, but the extent and especially the policy consequences of such differences are often overrated.’ (23-24)
- ‘In Vietnam U.s.
- ‘There is a regular pattern of identifying reform and any criticism of the status quo with Communism, and seeing in any such outcroppings external and subversive evils that must be extirpated.’ (25)
- ‘In the early 1960s Robert McNamara, with his characteristic insight and prescience, argued for expanded support and training of the Latin American military on the grounds of the beneficial effect of their contact with democratic values. Between 1960 and 1969, 11 constitutionally elected governments were displaced by military dictatorships.’ (26)
- ‘While Cambodia Vietnam Vietnam
- ‘The portrayal of a drab Vietnam U.S.
- ‘Joseph Buttinger, an early advisor to Diem and one of his most outspoken advocates in the 1950s, contends that the designation ‘fascist’ is inappropriate for Diem because, although his regime had most of the vicious characteristics of fascism, he lacked the mass base that a Hitler of Mussolini could muster. This is true of other U.S.
- ‘Under ‘conservative’ administrations the United States supports subfascism aggressively and with little bother for the public relations aspects of human rights issues. Under ‘liberal’ auspices, the United States supports subfascism no less aggressively – sometimes even more so – but sometimes urges its leaders to give it a more human face.’ (32)
- ‘The linkage between U.S.
- ‘Liberals and humanitarians in public office have found ‘business confidence’ sagging and hostile forces quickly mobilized when they push too far, even verbally, in the direction of taking human rights values seriously. The system has its own dynamic, which has spawned the human rights arrangements that we now find in Chile Paraguay Philippines U.S. Indochina led to no institutional changes within this country.’ (33)
- ‘The Human Rights Administration has followed its predecessor in providing Indonesia with the military supplies it desperately needs to pursue its war of annihilation in East Timor.’ (34)
- ‘After the horrors of Indochina , some dramatic the image of U.S.
- ‘Suppose that the purpose of protest is to relieve human suffering or defend human rights. Then more complex considerations arise. One must consider the plausible consequences for the victims of oppression. It is for this reason, for example, that an organization such as Amnesty International urges polite letters to the most miserable tyrant. In some cases, public protest may be positively harmful, a fact familiar to people seriously concerned with human rights.’ (37)
- ‘A serious person will try to concentrate protest efforts where they are most likely to ameliorate conditions for the victims of oppression. The emphasis should, in general, be close to home: on violations of human rights that have their roots in the policies of one’s own states.’ (38)
- ‘As long as such protest is honest and accurate – often it is not, as we shall see – it is legitimate, though further questions may be raised about its impact.’ (39)
- ‘The ultimate vulgarity, perhaps, is the spectacle to which we are now being treated in the U.S. (indeed, Western) media, where many people who supported U.S. savagery in Indochina or perhaps finally turned against the war on ‘pragmatic grounds’ – the United States could not reach its goals at reasonable cost – now feign outrage and indignation over oppressive or murderous acts that are in large part a consequence of the U.S. violence that they tolerated or supported.’ (39)
- ‘These questions are not easy to answer and honest people may reach differing conclusions concerning them, but they deserve serious though, far more than has been publicly expressed during the postwar period of ideological reconstruction.’ (40)
- ‘At the end of World War II, if some prescient commentator had described the terror regimes that now dominate Latin America, liberals would have derided this visionary for spelling out the likely consequences of a Nazi victory.’ (41)
- ‘For most of the sample countries, U.S.-controlled aid has been positively related to investment climate and inversely related to the maintenance of a democratic order and human rights.’ (44)
- ‘Throughout Latin America graduates of U.S. military training – including Pinochet and Leigh of Chile, Geisel of Brazil, Massera of Argentina, and scores of others – have led the march to subfascism.’ (47)
- ‘Secret steps were taken in Brazil in the early 1960s by a group of senior military and police officials to create a coordinated autonomous torture and ‘death squad’ network to crush political opposition. To train personnel, illustrated lectures and live demonstrations of torture were conducted, using political prisoners as guinea pigs, by Operacao Bandeirantes, once described as ‘a type of advanced school of torture.’ Subsequently, trained Brazilian torturers traveled to military academies in neighboring nations to conduct courses in what is euphemistically called ‘interrogation’.’ Jean-Pierre Clavel (48)
- ‘SAVAK, the Iranian secret police noted for its sadism and frequent use of torture, was set up by the CIA in 1957, and the military officers who ran it from its inception ‘received special orientation programs at C.I.A. headquarters at Langley, Va. More SAVAK agents received U.S.
- ‘CIA destabilization operations have assumed many forms, of which only a few will be mentioned briefly here. First is the outright murder of political leaders like Lumumba (to be replaced by the more amenable Mobutu), or General Schneider in Chile Brazil Rio ’s evening paper, A Noite. And it subsidized the publication of numerous conservative books, ‘distributed free and without attribution.’ In its propaganda campaigns the CIA has long engaged in forgeries designed to discredit its enemies. In Brazil, for example, in order to undercut the position of a peasant leader threatening reform, the CIA printed leaflets announcing his presence at nonexistent meetings, and printed Marxist literature to be distributed after the coup to prove the existence of a Communist threat. In Chile
- ‘Deflationary policies and an open door tend to weaken domestic business and enhance the power of foreign companies that can borrow abroad at relatively low interest rates. Thus, foreign investment often takes the form of buying out ‘non-competitive’ local businesses in an accelerated process of denationalization.’ (55)
- ‘A persistent and crucial characteristic of neo-colonialism is the preservation of labor as a cheap commodity.’ (55-56)
- ‘Still lower wages have been obtainable by the use of prison labor. In Columbia, for example, where the minimum wage in 1975 was $1.33 per day, Container Corporation of America, B.F. Goodrich, and dozens of other companies have employed thousands of prisoners at still lower rates under programs put forward as ‘rehabilitation,’ although 75% or more of the prisoners have never been tried, but are ‘caught up in the Columbian system of justice.’ ’ (56)
- ‘The position of the poorest 60 percent typically worsens. Both relatively and absolutely, when an initial spurt of narrowly based dualistic growth is imposed on an agrarian subsistence economy…The gains of the top 5 percent are particularly great in very low income countries where a sharply dualistic structure is associated with political and economic domination by traditional or expatriate elites.’ Economic Growth and Social Equity in Developing Countries (60)
- ‘The background against which human rights issues have arisen in the period since 1945 includes an unparalleled, world-wide economic expansion by the United States, its establishment of a global military presence with a peak of over 3,000 foreign military bases ‘virtually surrounding both the Soviet Union and Communist China,’ and interventions in the affairs of other states that are unmatched in number, scale, violence, and global states that are unmatched in number, scale, violence, and global reach. In the reach of these developments, the myth has been successfully established in the public mind, and in liberal circles in Western Europe, that the United States is just ‘containing’ other ‘expansionist’ powers!’ (67)
- ‘As these examples illustrate, self-deception can reach quite extraordinary heights. Suppose that Fidel Castro had organized or participated in at least eight assassination attempts against the various presidents of the United States
- ‘Suppose further than Fidel Castro had arranged for his agents in the United States to disperse various disease carriers in agricultural regions in an attempt to poison and destroy livestock and crops. Can one imagine the hysteria of the Wall Street Journal and the Times on the depths to which barbarian evil can sink under Communism? The United States actually did carry out such acts against Cuba, reported in the press in early 1977 as minor news items – 500,000 pigs had to be destroyed in Cuba as a result of a deliberately spread viral disease.’ (69)
- ‘One of our main concerns in this work is the process of brain-washing under freedom as manifested in the selection and analysis of issues by the media and the relationship of such practice to human rights, to U.S. economic and political interests and to truthfulness. We will not attempt to unravel the detailed mechanisms of thought control – e.g., the mechanisms by which editors decide what to publish and how to present it – but rather the general principles to which their practice conforms. We focus on the fact, for example, that the mass media bewail the fate of Cambodian victims of Communist terror on an almost daily basis, while entirely ignoring or rationalizing Indonesian massacres in East Timor which are, on the available evidence, no less fearsome, and are being perpetrated in the course of unprovoked aggression – considered to be a rather serious matter since Nuremberg – and are carried out with U.S. weapons and de factosupport. The most extreme claims regarding Cambodian violence are immediately given credence and extensive publicity, and even if proven false are, with insignificant exceptions, not correctible in the mass media. We note, in contrast, that as regards East Timor, when the mass media on rare occasions touch gingerly on this subject, the ‘facts’ offered are not only often false, but are also regularly skewed in the direction of apologetics for Indonesian terror, exactly in accord with the U.S. government propaganda line.’ (71-72)
- ‘As regards both Indochina and the subfascist states, a clear ‘line’ is discernible in the U.S. Indochina is subject to regular, almost daily attention, focusing with laser-like intensity on terror and oppression. In keeping with this preoccupation, we find a gravitation to the most inflated estimates of repression and violence, a stripping away of the crucial historical context, a high moral tone, and non-correctibility of falsification and error. The line with regard to the U.S.
- ‘Alternative views and analyses are available in the United states, in fringe media that reach a miniscule sector of the population, probably less than 1%. Thus the ‘line’ that Vietnam is now solely a land of ‘woes,’ refugees, and would-be refugees victimized by cruel oppressors – not a country suffering from the legacy of U.S. violence – is the virtually uncontested portrayal in theNew York Times (daily circulation over 800,000 and enormous influence beyond) as well as in less reputable but even more widely circulated publications such as the Reader’s Digest(circulation over 18 million in the U.S. alone) and TV Guide (circulation over 19 million). In contrast, a visiting Quaker delegation, including Vietnamese-speaking relief workers with long experience in Indochina , gains no access to the mass media, though its members are free to report their perception of a nation attempting to rebuild from the wreckage of the U.S.
- ‘The adulation (including self-adulation) of the Free Press has long neglected the extent to which it also follows a ‘party line,’ especially on foreign affairs where the interests that shape policy are powerful and without any substantial internal opposition. Because it is not censored by the state, the Free Press enjoys an aura of even-handedness and dedicated pursuit of truth – an illusion and a dangerous one – as we shall document throughout this work. Especially where the issues involve substantial U.S.
- ‘Mass media enterprises are big business. Many of them are now divisions of conglomerates with a wide variety of activities, including the production and sale of weapons (e.g., Westinghouse, RCA, GE, and General Tire and Rubber); and their owners and managers share their interests and values of their business peers.’ (75)
- ‘Sponsors and media together want to produce an output that will help sell goods, will not seriously disturb any substantial consuming group, and will be ideologically and politically compatible with the business system and the multinationals that increasingly dominate mass media advertising.’ (75)
- ‘Exciting ‘entertainment’ provided the escape route – seemingly unrelated yet superbly supportive of what was being done…the drama could have meaning only if viewers accepted, consciously or unconsciously, its underlying premise: that ‘we’ faced enemies so evil and so clever that ‘the intricate means used to defeat them are necessary.’ ’ [source unclear] (76)
- ‘Because of this symbiotic relationship, media efforts that focus on matters which business does not want discussed are rare (e.g., wage rates and labor conditions in the Dominican Republic, or the use of police torture in states offering excellent opportunities to U.S. business, such as the Philippines and Brazil, or regular and in-depth treatment of occupational diseases).’ (76)
- ‘No central authority tells the mass media to ‘lay off’ the Indonesian assault on East Timor or the daily abductions and murders in subfascist Latin American states. It is sufficient that occasional editorial boldness in dealing with these off-the-agenda matters could well result in significant flak from government officials, interested businessmen, or representatives of the terror states. Normally, self-censorship does the job. The self-censorship is conducted within the journal (or station) by news selectors who have developed a feel for the ‘line,’ and who can identify and excise hot items likely to generate too much negative reaction upstairs from important people outside.’ (77-78)
- ‘The 99% of the population unreachable by U.S. dissidents are subject to the selective processes of the mass media that do not allow serious criticism of patriotic myths and untruths, with a brainwashing effect comparable to that of systems with explicit government censorship.’ (79)
- ‘An important virtue of Cambodia from the standpoint of mass media serviceability is that information is not only sparse but is also dominated by reports of refugees – which are often selected and transmitted by sources of limited credibility and extreme ideological bias.’ (80)
- ‘The media are only one component of the general system of indoctrination and thought control. A fuller discussion of the processes of brainwashing under freedom would explore the schools and universities as well. When the media want an ‘expert opinion’ on some topic of current interest, they naturally turn to academic specialists in that area. And the state propaganda system is generally well-served by this device. The academic professions rarely stray from orthodoxy in interpreting matters of sensitive concern or private power… Dangerous topics, such as the role of corporate interests in foreign policy are studiously avoided, as if under a taboo.’ (82)
- ‘Nevertheless, his study of ‘terrorism’ is limited to retail terror. This terminological decision affords endless possibilities for dredging up incidents of anti-establishment violence and for demonstrating its frequent senselessness and lack of specific connection with any injustice, while enhancing the general disregard for the wholesale terror of the established states. It is consoling to the privileged in the West to learn that the troublemakers of the world are evil and irrational outsiders, not responding to just grievances.’ (87)
- ‘The noted historian [Arnold Beichman] failed to identify those who refuse to condemn terrorist attacks, and indeed they would be hard to find, though it is a common and convenient illusion that they represent some significant force in the West.’ (91)
- ‘In mass media jargon today, Argentine guerillas attacking a police station are terrorists, while the police, military and officially protected ‘death squads’ and thugs are ‘maintaining order’ – even when the guerillas are exterminated and the abduction and murder of union leaders, scientists, political activists, priests, and the wives and children of people objectionable to the regime continues unabated.’ (94)
- ‘ Cambodia
- ‘The great public relations lesson of Vietnam
- ‘U.S. POWs ‘who talked of Oriental tortures were all able to stand up and speak into microphones, showing scars here and there,’ whereas the handful of prisoners released from the U.S.-run Saigon jails ‘were all incurably crippled while prolonged malnutrition had turned them into grotesque parodies of humanity.’ ’ Far Eastern Economic Review (98)
- ‘On the evidence of recent decades of U.S.
- ‘Prior to the Brazilian military coup of 1964, U.S. policy makers felt threatened by the efforts of Kubitschek, Quadros and then Goulart to strengthen internal labor and peasant organizations as a counter-weight to the United States and to U.S.-related comprador and military interests. Such developments would have allowed the Brazilian leadership some freedom of action to carry out an independent economic policy and a program of social reform by freeing it from the tremendous constraints of U.S. United States
- ‘In surveying the selective concern with terror, bloodbaths, and human rights, we will focus initially on instances where attitudes in the United States
- ‘A revolt of the Bengals of East Pakistan against the rule of the dominant Moslems of West Pakistan in the early 1970s led to a large-scale military effort at suppression by the West Pakistanis that quickly degenerated into a huge rape and slaughter. This terrible carnage was given publicity in the west and a small segment of the U.S. U.S.
- ‘During the spring and summer of 1972 perhaps 250,000 people were systematically murdered in Burundi
- ‘The relevant considerations were the absence of significant U.S.
- ‘Munzel records the campaign against the [Paraguay U.S. U.S. Asuncion
- ‘U.S.
- ‘The self-censorship of the U.S. Western Europe , where press, radio, and TV have featured reports of Paraguayan abuses of the Indians, and the United States U.S.
- ‘Even condemnations of genocide in Paraguay by the Roman Catholic Church (April, May, 1974) never made it to the national media in the United States.’ (118)
- ‘Guevara was killed by the CIA and local authorities, after an abortive and ill-conceived effort to organize the native population to better their lot.’ (125)
- ‘On December 7, 1975 Indonesian armed forces invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, only a few hours after the departure of President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger from a visit to Jakarta. Although Indonesia East Timor from the outside world, reports have filtered through indicating that there have been massive atrocities, with estimates running to 100,000 killed, about one-sixth of the population. An assessment by the Legislative Research Service of the Australian Parliament concluded that there is ‘mounting evidence that the Indonesians have been carrying out a brutal operation in East Timor ,’ involving ‘indiscriminate killing on a scale unprecedented in post-World War 2 history.’ We will return to the evidence, which compares very well in credibility with what is available concerning other areas of the world closed to direct investigation where atrocities have been alleged; Cambodia, to take an obvious parallel in the same time frame.’ (130)
- ‘The major point we wish to emphasize is that the United States
- ‘The crucial event was the military coup of October, 1965, which had two major consequences regarded with much admiration in the West: first, Indonesia rejoined the Free World as a fully-accredited member, a paradise for investors, free to be plundered by the industrial societies and its own rulers on a joint venture basis; second, the mass-based Communist party, which had posed a barrier to the kind of freedom offered to the underdeveloped world by the industrial West, was destroyed with the incidental murder of hundreds of thousands of people. Since recording these achievements, the military government of Indonesia United States
- ‘During the Second World War the few towns of Timor and many of the villages were either destroyed or badly damaged, largely as a result of Allied bombing’ (Dunn Report). Portuguese authorities estimated the number of Timorese who died at over 50,000. In contrast, the Australian commando force of 400 suffered 40 deaths (Joliffe, p. 46).’ (132)
- ‘The Portuguese announced that independence would be granted to the colonies in April, 1974.’ (133)
- ‘FREITLIN was a moderate reformist national front, headed by a Catholic seminarian and initially involving largely urban intellectuals, among them young Lisbon-educated radical Timorese who ‘were most eager to search for their cultural origins’ and who were ‘to lead the FREITLIN drive into the villages, initiating consumer and agricultural co-operatives, and a literary campaign conducted in [the native language] along the lines used by Paulo Freire in Brazil’ (Jolliffe, p. 69). It was ‘more reformist than revolutionary,’ calling for gradual steps towards complete independence, agrarian reform, transformation of uncultivated land and large forms to people’s cooperatives, educational programs, steps towards producer-consumer cooperatives supplementing existing Chinese economic enterprises ‘for the purposes of supplying basic goods to the poor at low prices,’ controlled foreign aid and investment, and a foreign policy of nonalignment. (134)
- ‘What reached the international press was largely the version approved by Indonesia
- ‘The New York Times published an account written by Gerald Stone, ‘an Australian television journalist, who is believed to be the first reporter allowed there since the fighting began’ (4 September 1975 ). In fact, the Times story is revised and excerpted from a longer report carried by the London Times (2 September 1975 ). The New York Times revisions are instructive. A major topic of Stone’s London Times story is his effort to verify reports of large-scale destruction and atrocities, attributed primarily to FREITLIN by Indonesian propaganda and news coverage based on it, then and since. These reports, he writes, ‘had been filtered through the eyes of frightened and exhausted evacuees or, worse, had come dribbling down from Portuguese, Indonesian, and Australian officials, all of whom had reason to distrust FREITLIN.’ Here are his major conclusions: ‘Our drive through Dili quickly revealed how much distortion and exaggeration surrounds this way. The city has been taking heavy punishment, with many buildings scarred by bullet holes, but all the main ones are standing. A hotel that was reported to have been burnt to the ground was there with its windows shattered, but otherwise intact… Undoubtedly there have been some large-scale atrocities on both sides. Whether they were calculated atrocities, authorized by Freitlin or UDT commanders, is another question. Time after time, when I tried to trace a story to its source, I found only someone who had heard it from someone else. Strangely, it is in the interest of all three governments – Portuguese, Indonesian and Australian, to make the situation appear as chaotic and hopeless as possible…In that light, I am convinced that many of the stories fed to the public in the past two weeks were not simply exaggerations; they were the product of a purposeful campaign to plant lies (our emphasis).’ Stone implicates all three governments in this propaganda campaign. Of the material just quoted, here is what survives editing in the New York Times: ‘A drive through Dili showed that the city had taken heavy punishment from the fighting. All the main buildings were standing but many were scarred with bullet holes.’ ’ (135-136)
- ‘Dunn points out that during this period the foreign press (at times including Pravda) relied heavily on Indonesian reports.’ (141)
- ‘In mid- and late-November Indonesian military activity increased; heavy supporting fire from artillery and naval vessels as well as use of aircraft was observed and reported by Australian journalists Michael Richardson and Jill Jolliffe.’ (143)
- ‘The pretense of ignorance is only one aspect of the U.S. Indonesia Indonesia Indonesia
- ‘With its traditional concern for human rights, the Times concludes that ‘the real losers are Portuguese Timor’s 620,000 inhabitants, whose interests and decries have been ignored by all parties to this deplorable affair’ – including the independence forces. Perhaps similar statements were expressed by thoughtful British commentators in July 1776 – though recall that Indonesia East Timor .’ (147)
- ‘I want to stress I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed. People were killed and that is always a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today…[Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secreatary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs].’ As for the numbers killed in the past, ‘we are never going to know anyway.’ So let us put that aside as unknowable history, and turn to the current problems.’ (148)
- ‘A review of the scope of New York Times coverage of Timor also gives some understanding of how the Free Press functions. For the year 1975, when the Portuguese revolution and the fate of the Portuguese colonies was a matter of great concern in the West, the New York Times index has six full columns of citations to Timor . In 1976, when Indonesian troops were carrying out a major massacre, coverage dropped to less than half a column. For 1977, when the massacre advanced to a point that some feel amounts to genocide, there are five lines. These five lines, furthermore, refer to a story about refugees in Portugal East Timor is a flat zero.’ (151)
- ‘Congressman J. Herbert Burke, then ranking minority member of the House subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, wrote: ‘I have my own suspicions respecting what might be behind the testimony [of Dunn’s], and I agree with you that it is in all our interests to bury the Timor issue quickly and completely.’ ’ (152)
- ‘The Commander of the Indonesian forces, asked whether U.S.
- ‘That is, that the United States was apprised, at least in general, perhaps specifically because I think Secretary Kissinger was in Jakarta the day before the invasion, we were apprised of the intention of the Indonesian government but we made no serious objection to what they proposed to do; that as soon as the military operations, which were by the testimony of other members of the State Department at least initially quite violent, within a matter of months after the major military operations came to an end and what I would regard as a façade of self-determination was expressed, the United States immediately indicated it was satisfied with what had transpired and resumed shipments of military assistance which it never told Indonesia it was suspending. U.S. United States
- ‘The evidence available supports the judgment that the United Stated not only took no significant action but also gave its tacit or explicit approval to the invasion. It was certainly known that an Indonesian invasion was imminent when President Ford and Henry Kissinger arrived in Jakarta Australia U.S.
- ‘The invasion took place while Ford and Kissinger were on their way from Jakarta Hawaii Hawaii Timor . He smiled and said: ‘We’ll talk about that later.’ But press secretary Ron Nessen later gave reporters a statement saying: ‘The United States Boston Jakarta United States United States Indonesia
- ‘The United States Indonesia Indonesia U.S. Timor . But [U.S. Timor with the Indonesians on the ground that the U.S. U.S.
- ‘A review of U.S.
- ‘On December 22 the United States April 22, 1976 the Security Council passed resolution 389 which repeated this demand.’ (158)
- ‘ ‘…Even in Indonesian Timor, the Timorese refugees virtually became prisoners in the camps set up by the Indonesians’ and were deprived of medical facilities and frequently humiliated, suffering many deaths.’ (166)
- ‘ ‘According to informants, many of the Indonesian troops killed indiscriminately from the beginning of their attack on Dili [the capital city]. However, several prominent Timorese said that the killing in the mountain areas, they claimed, whole villages were wiped out as Indonesian troops advanced into the interior.’ There follow detailed and specific accounts of mass murder, rape, looting, starvation. Refugees consistently agreed that a figure of 100,000 killed was ‘credible, because of the widespread killing in the mountains [where most of the population lives] and because of the extensive bombing,’ reportedly including napalm.’ (167)
- ‘[Dunn’s] account of refugee and other reports appears to be careful and judicious to an extent that is unusual for the genre. He insists that people not accept his account but rather use it as motivation for investigating the reports of refugees directly to check the authenticity of what he has discovered.’ (167)
- ‘The New York Times (15 February, 1976 ) had published a report that 60,000 people had been killed in East Timor , 10% of the population. This report appeared on page 11 at the bottom of a column below a story on another subject, and merited all of 150 words. This single reference to an ongoing massacre should, once again, be compared to the vast outpouring of denunciation and horror with regard to ‘genocide’ or ‘autogenocide’ in Cambodia, beginning immediately after the U.S.-backed government was deposed and continuing with mounting intensity thereafter. The most extreme allegations offered by those who have actually investigated atrocities estimate the numbers killed at about 100,000 out of a population of 7-8 million, though many other figures have been bandied about freely in the Western media.’ (168)
- ‘A more careful look at the 150 words that the Times devoted to the reported killing of 60,000 people in Timor reveals the duplicity of the Free Press with still greater clarity. The Times report of February, 1976 reads as follows: ‘About 60,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of civil war in Portuguese Timor last August, according to the deputy chairman of the territory’s provisional government… ‘The war is virtually over because only a few remnants of the Freitlin forces are fighting in the jungles or hills,’ Francisco Xavier Lopex da Cruz said. He referred to the Revolutionary Front for Independent East Timor, which has been fight [sic] forces favoring union with Indonesia
- ‘It should be noted that much of the cited material on Indonesian atrocities derives from element [sic] of the small urban elite that were initially disposed to accept Indonesian ‘integration,’ some with resignation. The bulk of the population is rural, non-Christian, voiceless here as elsewhere, and generally disregarded.’ (181)
- ‘The letter, published in the Nation Review (4-10 August 1978) describes the situation as of late 1977 and 1978. It tells of family and friends, one who had a baby ‘born in the confusion of the bombardment, when they were forced to go to the bush…for almost two months,’ others whose children had died of starvation ‘in conditions tragic enough.’ ‘As they proceeded in front of the bombing and shooting, only those who could survived. The wounded and dead were abandoned and left for the dogs.’ Still others ‘were driven from their home by Indonesian forces, supported by bombing,’ In January, 1978. ‘Many elements of the population were killed under inhuman conditions of bombardment and starvation….The waters of the river were filled with blood and bodies. Great was the tragedy people endured during their escape. Husbands, fathers, brothers and abandoned wives, sons and brothers, all in the same agony.’ Other relatives mentioned ‘are very thin, skeletons, from the bad times they had in the bush. That they did not die is a miracle. The time they spent in the bush has left them sad and emotional, reflecting on the drama that the Timorese people suffer in the bush: hunger, nakedness, sickness, the continual pounding of bombing and shooting.’ ’ (182)
- ‘The report is based on the account of French photo-journalist Denis Reichle of Paris Match, who was deported from Timor after his arrest by Indonesian soldiers when ‘he was photographing the West Timoreans dancing and cheering around a military truck carrying scores of corpses which were paraded through the garrison town of Atambua as slain communists from East Timor.’ His cameras and film were destroyed, including the results of a six-day visit to a mountain retreat of FRETILIN in East Timor . Reichle gives ‘a safe estimate’ of 70,000-75,000 East Timorese killed by the Indonesians in 18 months of combat. The Indonesians, he reports, do not seek combat with FRETILIN forces but ‘were ‘systematically wiping out’ the populations of villages known or suspected to be Fretilin supporters and destroying Fretilin supply lines and sources.’ ’ (183)
- ‘It is hardly imaginable that the distinguished correspondent of the New York Times would report the observation by Denis Reichle after his brief visit to East Timor: FRETILIN forces ‘are simply East Timorese who would rather die fighting than submit to what they consider to be Indonesian slavery.’ ’ (184)
- ‘…infant mortality rates of 50% and lack of medical supplies, a situation which, along with the ‘slaughter,’ was ‘placing in jeopardy the future of the Timorese people.’ ’ (187)
- ‘[Australian Congressman] Hodgman charged in Parliament that between 30-40,000 people have died in East Timor because defoliants destroyed their crops. In this connection, Rep. Donald Fraser wrote a letter to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on December 8, 1977, in his capacity as chairman of the Subcommittee on International Organizations, in which he stated: ‘We recently received a reliable report that Indonesian forces have been using chemical sprays on crops in areas under Fretilin control and that U.S.-manufactured planes, the OV-10s, are being used to spread these chemicals.’ ’ (188)
- ‘The British are also wasting no time. In April, 1978, British Aerospace signed a 25 million pound contract with Indonesia Finland South East Asia market, which is one of great potential.’ Plenty of defenseless people to kill there. The Southeast Asia correspondent of Le Monde, R.-P. Paringaux reported from Jakarta that Foreign Minister de Guiringaud had laid the basis for sales of military aircraft and other military equipment to Indonesia and for the eventual establishment of a plant for manufacture of light automatic weapons: ‘Asked about the position of France with regard to the annexation of East Timor by Indonesia, M. De Guiringaud stated that if that question would again be raised at the next session of the United nations, France would not place Indonesia in an embarrassing position in any manner. ‘The government has so far abstained,’ reported the Minister, who judged his visit to Jakarta
- ‘Information emanating from FRETILIN sources is excluded from the U.S.
- ‘ ‘The Indonesians have begun a full-scale Orwellian re-education program.’ Complete with indoctrination in the schools and signs reading ‘go to hell James Dunn’ and similar slogans, most of them, however, written ‘in Indonesian, a language none of the local people speak, let alone write.’ Meanwhile children sent to welcome him ‘kept up a continuous chant: ‘We are one nation, we are Indonesian’.’ (196)
- ‘Indonesia still has not granted permission to the International Red Cross or other relief agencies to enter East Timor, though it is willing to accept aid for the dispirited people who remind visitors of ‘victims of an African famine.’ But only on certain conditions: ‘Indonesia is looking for foreign aid for East Timor but the Foreign Minister, Professor Kusumaatmadja, who accompanied the party [of visitors], indicated the donor countries must acknowledge Indonesia’s sovereignty.’ (197-198)
- ‘This is borne out by the attempts of several thousand East Timorese in Dili to emigrate to Australia
- ‘As a grim experiment, we have taken, in recent months, to asking audiences at political talks in the United States if they know in which continent Timor is to be found. Few have even heard the name.’ (199)
- ‘Perhaps, when enough years have passed and a new Human Rights campaign is launched, thoughtful commentators will evoke some distorted memory of this holocaust as a testimonial to the new day that is dawning as the West turns over still another ‘new leaf’ in its never-ending efforts to bring the message of humanism, freedom, and justice to benighted peoples.’ (199)
- ‘A letter to the liberal journal Newsweek, inquiring as to its failure to devote a word to the slaughter in East Timor, elicited a response (5 December 1978) explaining that for the past 20 months the situation there has been ‘stable’: ‘with the responsibility of covering important developments from every corner of the globe each week…we cannot report on a stable situation,’ the letter explained. The week the letter was sent, Newsweek had met this awesome responsibility with a cover story on electronic toys.’ (199)
- ‘The massacre in Indonesia
- ‘As in the case of Brazil, the Indonesian military officer corps had been built and trained by the U.S.: ‘one-third of the Indonesian general staff had some sort of training from Americans and almost half of the officer corps.’ (207)
- ‘The mass killings began in late October 1965 in Central Java with the arrival there of the paratroopers, moved to East Java at the end of November as the paratroopers moved east, and on to Bali about mid-December, again correlated with a move of the paratroopers. Lists compiled by the military were given to right-wing Muslim groups, who were armed with parangs and transported in army trucks to villages, where they killed with bloody mutilation. Schoolchildren were asked to identify ‘Communists,’ and many so identified were shot on the spot by army personnel, along with their whole families. Many people were denounced as ‘Communists’ in personal disputes and ‘on the basis of one word or the pointing of a finger, people were taken away to be killed.’ The killing was on such a huge scale as to raise a sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra, where the smell of decaying flesh was pervasive and rivers were impassable because of the clogging by human bodies.’ (207-208)
- ‘The number killed in the Indonesian bloodbath has always been uncertain, but an authoritative minimum was established in October 1976 when Admiral Sudomo, the head of the Indonesian state security system, in an interview over a Dutch television station, estimated that more than 500,000 had been slaughtered. He ‘explained’ to Henry Kamm of the New York Times that these deaths had been a result of an ‘unhealthy competition between the parties’ who were causing ‘chaos’. Other authorities have given estimates running from 700,000 to ‘many more than one million.’ For the period of the massacres, the official figures for people arrested, exclusive of the 500,000 or more ‘Communists’ killed, is 750,000. AI estimated in 1977 that there were still between 55,000 and 100,000 political prisoners. Of the 750,000 arrested only about 800 have been brought to trail, usually by military tribunals, and usually receiving death sentences. Uncounted thousands died in prison of malnutrition and untreated illness. AI has ‘not found a single case of a prisoner not being found guilty.’ Thus, tens of thousands of prisoners today ‘are held captive without trial, or used as servants by local military commanders, or exploited as forced labor, or subjected to an archaic policy of transportation to penal colonies. They are ill-treated by the authorities. The majority have now been held prisoner for more than 11 years without trial. Men, women, and children are held prisoner, arbitrarily and at the discretion of local military commanders.’ [Ernest Utrecht] Conditions in the Indonesian prisoners have been and remain appalling and torture has been employed ‘systematically’ in interrogation. According to AI: Young girls below the age of 13, old men, people who were frail and ill, were not exempt from torture. It was used not only for interrogation, but also as punishment and with sadistic intent. Cases of sexual assault on women and extreme cruelty were reported to Amnesty International. Deaths from torture were frequently reported up till the end of the 1960s.’ ’ (208-209)
- ‘New agricultural technologies, the monopolization of rural credit by large individuals and corporate farmers, and the rise in price of agricultural land also resulted in massive dispossession of peasants and a greater redundancy of agricultural laborers, a fall in agricultural wage rates, widespread hunger, and a widening gap between villages rich and poor. Anderson
- ‘The division of tax monies and foreign aid into privileged pockets has also attained spectacular levels under the New Order. A scandal of 1968 involved the misuse and looting of about 30% of several hundred million dollars of aid made available by foreign governments in that year. Ingrid Palmer, in fact, estimates a 30% corruption drain in Indonesian aid programs in general.’ (212)
- ‘As the Thai police state consolidated itself and became both more bloody and more corrupt, U.S. support was in no way diminished and criticism by U.S. leaders, public and private, was minimal.’ (218)
- ‘When attention is called to the fact that Thailand U.S. Thailand
- ‘The large inflow of U.S. aid and arms, which totaled in excess of $2 billion between 1949 and 1969, in the official (Unger) view, helped Thailand ‘to improve its internal security forces so that it will be better able to meet the guerilla and terrorist threats which have been mounted by the Communists.’ In reality, throughout this period, until the U.S. Vietnam Thailand Thailand Thailand
- ‘Former CIA analyst Darling suggested that the military leadership of Thailand
- ‘U.S. penetration of Thailand was so extensive by the mid-1950s that the dominant factions – all military, and all extremely right-wing – were proxies for competing U.S. military and intelligence factions.’ (222)
- ‘The Vietnam War made Thailand even more thoroughly an occupied satellite of the United States, with 50,000 U.S. military personnel using Thailand as a ‘landlocked aircraft carrier’ in 1968 for bombing raids against the Indochinese peasant societies. Thai mercenaries were also used extensively in Laos Vietnam
- ‘The U.S. Thailand Chile United States Thailand U.S. Thailand
- ‘In the longer perspective, the entire Thai military and police structure is the creation of the United States
- ‘A benevolent king, a great many generals, unruly students, an unstable political scene, some typically Asian corruption, a beautiful countryside, a traditionally friendly relationship between the United States and a Thailand whose freedom and independence the U.S. has been generously trying to protect – this is the pattern of images conveyed to the public by the U.S. media, and it is a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda.’ (230)
- ‘After a brief interlude of post-World War II quasi-independence, and CIA-manipulated democracy, the democratic façade was suspended under Marcos in 1972 – without significant negative response from the United States – and the standard client fascist model was put into place and given undeviating support by the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations.’ (230)
- ‘The period of explicit colonial rule, lasting from 1898 to 1946 (with a brief World War II interregnum of Japanese occupation), was characterized by economic and political domination byU.S.
- ‘[Wideman] adds that to impress foreign visitors the martial law government invested $608 million in 14 hotels and a convention center in Manila – all of them money losers – while over a quarter of the Manila population live in shanties and life in the rural areas is usually even more bleak. The allocation of resources between the military establishment and urgent social needs such as medical facilities has also been typically subfascist; there has been a huge military build-up since 1972, the armed forces quadrupling in size to 225,000 and military outlays also increasing by more than five fold (from $129 million in fiscal 1973 to $676 million in fiscal 1977). While military-police expenditures soar, in Easter Visayas 85% of the population cannot afford to enter a hospital. According to public health officials, 37% of all doctors and 46% of all Philippine nurses work in Manila Philippines
- ‘The human rights-U.S. aid pattern is also familiar. Over 60,000 persons had been arrested under martial law by 1977, with the numbers detained at any one time necessarily obscure but running into the thousands. As late as December, 1975, Marcos asserted that ‘no one, but no one, has been tortured.’ But in fact torture has been ‘widespread and systematic’ according to Amnesty International, and 88 individual torturers were identified by name by AI in 1976. The forms employed are the ones that have now been standardized throughout the empire, fantastically cruel and sadistic, and highly reminiscent of those we associate with Nazism: ‘prolonged beatings with fists, kicks and karate blows, beatings with a variety of contusive instruments – including rifle butts, heavy wooden clubs and family-sized drinking bottles, the pounding of heads against walls or furniture (such as the edge of a filing cabinet), the burning of genitals and pubic hair with the flame of a cigarette lighter, falanga (beating on the soles of the feet) and the so-called ‘lying-on-air’ torture, in which an individual is made to lie with his feet on one bed, his head on a second bed, with his body ‘lying-on-air’ in between; the individual is then beaten or kicked whenever he lets his body fall or sag.’ ’ (234-235)
- ‘Mrs. Trinidad Herrera, a well-known community leader of Tondo, a huge squatter suburb of Manila, who has fought for the interests of the poor in opposition to ‘beautification’ projects of Mrs. Marcos, which would have demolished several urban poor communities, was arrested by the regime and subjected to beatings and extensive electric shock tortures including applications to extremities and nipples in a ‘safe house.’ Upon release she was in a state of shock and unable to speak for five days. She was released in part because of a strenuous protect by the U.S. Department of State, which was responding to indignant outcries both within the Philippines
- ‘On the essentials – that is, creating a hospitable investment climate and, in the Philippines case, allowing U.S. occupation of major military base sites – Marcos has been entirely satisfactory, which is the main reason why his human rights violations will never be compellingly important.’ (237)
- ‘There are still those who see U.S. actions in Vietnam as an aberration, a deviation from the disinterested concern and noble efforts that animate U.S. policy in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. This view of essential benevolence, in fact, has dominated scholarship, journalism, and school texts, with the aberration concept a necessary complement, providing an explanation for any ongoing exception.’ (242)
- ‘It will be recalled that the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent the displacement of the relatively benign fascist regime of Donald Reid Cabral by the Constitutionalist regime of Juan Bosch, who had been overthrown by a military coup in 1963 – without eliciting any U.S. intervention to save him and his brief experiment in democratic government.’ (243)
- ‘The Santo Domingo newspaper El Nacional last December 30 filled a page and a half of newsprint with the details of 186 political murders and thirty disappearances during 1970. The Dominican terror resembles the current wave of political killings in Guatemala…in that the paramilitary death squads are organized by the armed forces and police, which in both cases over the years have been given heavy U.S. material and advisory support.’ Norman Gall (244)
- ‘Gulf & Western is the largest private landowner and employer in the [Dominican Republic
- ‘The agricultural union Sindicato Unido, which operated the fields now owned by G & W was broken by police action in 1966 and 1967, and a number of its leaders, including the union lawyer Guido Gil were arrested and killed by the forces of law and order.’ (248)
- ‘Large numbers of squatters were evicted by the army. A fifth characteristic of the Dominican model, following naturally from the preceding, is the sharp deterioration in the well-being of the bulk of the population. In serving the interests of a traditional and expatriate elite, the Dominican Republic has turned into a tourist and industrial paradise, with a ’25-cent-minimum wage rate and hard-working peaceful labor’. ’ (250)
- ‘At last count, less than 1% of the farmers owned 47.5% of the land, while 83% farmed fewer than 10 acres…Land reform has moved with glacial speed…Most Dominican children don’t go beyond the third grade; only one in five reaches the sixth grade.’ Wall Street Journal (250)
- ‘In the Dominican Republic
- ‘Any resistance to business power and privilege in the interest of equity, or on the basis of an alternative view of desirable social ends or means, is a National Security and police problem. This applies to such organizations as peasant leagues, unions, student organizations or community or political groupings that might afford protection to the weak or threaten to become a political counterforce to elite domination.’ (254)
- ‘This repression is not undertaken out of sadistic impulses. Rather, as the church throughout the empire now recognizes, ‘this whole universe of atomized workers, powerless and obliged to humiliate themselves,’ are kept in that condition for sound economic reasons, given the ends sought and the model of economic development employed by the military juntas.’ (255)
- ‘The reasons for the scope and strength of church resistance in Latin America and elsewhere include certain features of the churches themselves, such as the post-Vatican II internal discussions and subsequent democratization, and the institutional shift in church constituency and support. With the middle and upper classes – the traditional basis of support and personnel – gradually abandoning the church after World War II, the constituency of the church has gradually shifted to the 80% plus that is voiceless, powerless and outside the orbit of interest under subfascism.’ (256)
- ‘The treatment of the mass of rural poor has been on the same humanistic place. The military regime has encouraged and subsidized the shift to export crops such as soybeans and battle, without the slightest concern, provision, or consideration for the (non-existent) opportunities for the millions of dispossessed: ‘Their lands, houses and crops are wiped out by the savage growth of latifundia and big agribusiness. Their living and working conditions are becoming more difficult. In a tragic contradiction, in which the government economic favors multiply herds of cattle and enlarge plantations, the small laborer sees his family’s food supply diminishing.’ ’ For Justice and Liberation (257)
- ‘Bishop Casadaliga was the first of many Brazilian bishops to be subject to military interrogation. Many have suffered more severely. Dom Adriana Hipolito, the Bishop of Nova Iguazu, who has often denounced the Brazilian Anti-Communist Alliance (AAB) as a ‘bunch of thugs directed and protected by the police’ was kidnapped by the AAB, beaten, stripped, painted red, and left lying on a deserted road. And in October, 1976, Father Joao Brunier, who had gone to the police station with Bishop Casadaliga to protest the torture of two peasant women, was simply shot dead by a policeman (who was eventually ‘apprehended’ and then ‘escaped’). Hundreds of priests and higher officials of the Latin American churches have been tortured, murdered or driven into exile. Six aides of Archbishop Camara have been murdered, and he is quite aware that only his international reputation has so far saved him from a similar fate. The Latin American churches have been unified and radicalized by subfascist terror and exploitation.’ (258-259)
- ‘It cannot be overstressed that while the church increasingly calls for major social changes, the vast bulk of its efforts have been directed toward the protection of the most elemental human rights – to vote, to have the laws enforced without favor, to be free from physical abuse, and to be able to organize, assemble, and petition for betterment.’ (260)
- ‘The Latin American horror chamber has been so extensively described by human rights organizations, refugees, priests, Latin American intellectuals, and others that we will make no effort here at a systematic review. Such materials are available in books, reports and articles in journals, although these normally reach only a tiny segment of the population. The mass media spare the general populace such painful and unrewarding fare. Scattered information can be found in the mass media, but it is episodic, very sparse in relation to the human issues involved, and generally devoid of any indication of the systematic character of the reduction of Latin America to barbarism or its roots in U.S.
- ‘The junta leaders have shown great deference to the bankers, meeting with them periodically to explain their policies and seek banker approval, much as if the bankers constituted the board of directors of a corporation called ‘Argentina.’ ’ (265)
- ‘Meanwhile, according to Walsh, real wages have been reduced by 60% in one year and food consumption has dropped by 40%, while ‘the only beneficiaries of your economic strategy are the old cattle-owning oligarchy, the new oligarchy of speculators, and a select group of international companies such as ITT, Exxon, U.S. Steel, and Siemens,’ to which the economics minister and his associates are ‘directly and personally linked.’ Walsh was kidnapped the day after his letter appeared and has not been heard from since.’ (266)
- ‘A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilizations.’ President Videlia (267)
- ‘Patricia Erb, the 19 year old daughter of a U.S. Mennonite Missionary, was abducted in September, 1976, by armed men in civilian clothes, blindfolded, and eventually tortured, but released under foreign pressure. She gave the following account of what she had endured: ‘The day after my abduction, I was conducted, as were many others, to rooms which we called the ‘torture house.’ There, men dressed in civilian clothes interrogated us, using torture ‘when it was necessary’ in attempts to extract confessions. This torture took various forms: beatings with clubs and fists, kicks, immersion in water or in fecal substance almost to the point of drowning, and the use of la picana (electric prod) which was applied to the most sensitive parts of the body, such as the mouth, eyes, nose, vagina, breast, penis, feet and hands. In order to cause greater pain, they would tie us down to a wire bed which carried an electric current and entangled wire between our fingers and toes, splashing water on us in order to increase the pain.’ ’ (267-268)
- ‘The Argentine catastrophe mirrors, the recent history of Brazil, Chile and Uruguay…U.S. involvement in the Chile coup, with its murderous and destructive aftermath, is too-well known [sic] to require discussion here. As for Uruguay Uruguay Latin America .’ Joe Eldredge, a former missionary who now heads the Washington Office on Latin America (sponsored by a coalition of religious and academic groups), writes that ‘with nearly one out of every 500 persons in jail or in concentration camps, Uruguay holds the dubious distinction of having, on a per capita basis, the highest number of political prisoners in the world,’ and he gives the rather common estimate that one-fourth of the population has fled. The Times story on the AI report cited above (31 October 1976 ) summarizes the situation in Uruguay Uruguay Uruguay
- ‘On the same day that President Carter announced the end of military aid, Galeano notes, ‘the World Bank, controlled by the U.S., announced a new credit of $30 million for Uruguay, added to the $55 million granted in 1976.’ The International Monetary Fund, he reports, is now the principal creditor of the country and directs its political economy so as to reduce popular consumption, lower wages, and stimulate exports: ‘The machine has its laws.’ It is only in the United States
- ‘Consider Guatemala, which, Joe Eldredge writes, ‘must have been the leader in all Latin America in terms of ruthless repression of large segments of the population’ in the 1970s, and where ‘the slaughter continues.’ A mild reformist government that threatened the prerogatives of the United Fruit Company was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup in 1954, terminating efforts at desperately-needed agrarian reform, decimating the labor movement (reduced from 100,000 to 27,000; more than 200 union leaders were killed immediately after the coup) and setting off waves of right-wing violence that have claimed thousands of lives, many during a U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency campaign in the mid-1960s. The 1954 coup, like others…was regarded as a great success in the U.S.
- ‘ ‘the [1954] Putsch was conceived of and run at the highest levels of the American Government in closest cahoots with the United Fruit Company and under the overall direction of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, backed by President Eisenhower.’ U.S. Guatemala
- ‘Amnesty International published a report on Guatemala
- ‘Clean running water is a luxury to the majority of Guatemalans.’ (280)
- ‘Jonathan Dimbleby took up the forbidden theme, however, in the New Statesman. ‘It was the poor, whose houses were too weak to withstand the shock, who died in the earthquake,’ he comments. He then recounts the effects of the U.S. subversion of 1954: more than 50,000 children die from malnutrition every year ‘in a country which could easily feed not only its own population, but the people of at least two neighboring countries – if only the army and the Americans had permitted the reforms to go ahead’; ‘starvation wages’ and ‘squalor that should cause a world outcry’; ‘a nicely balanced combination of mass poverty and mass murder’ while Guatemala’s oligarchy, and Western businessmen are enriched; U.S.-guided pacification programs with thousands of victims; ‘30,000 peasant graves’.’ (281)
- ‘If they proceed beyond songs, and go back to their villages, they will no longer be pathetic peasants but ‘left-wing terrorists,’ and they will meet the full force of the U.S.-backed military, while Western academies write lengthy tracts attempts to explain the strange rise of Communism.’ (290)
- ‘The peasants are used to seeing the trucks and material the U.S.
- ‘Only a few weeks after his letter to Somoza, President Carter ‘telephoned the royal palace [in Iran
- ‘Analysis of the systematic and pervasive character of U.S.
- ‘The sheer scope and intensity of the violence imposed on Indochina by the U.S.
- ‘As for the toll exacted among the South Vietnamese during the Diem period, there are no firm estimates. Bernard Fall reports figures, which he seems to regard as realistic, indicating a death toll of over 150,000 ‘Viet Cong’ from 1957 to April 1965 – that is, before the first North Vietnamese battalion was allegedly detected in the South. These South Vietnamese, in his words, had been fighting ‘under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases.’ These 150,000 (or whatever the actual numbers may be) have also never been counted among the victims of a pre-1965 ‘bloodbath.’ Rather, they were physically eliminated in a classic exercise of constructive violence, and are now being eliminated from the historical record in a no less classic exercise of a hegemonic system of ideology and propaganda.’ (304)
- ‘By the standards applied at the trials of Axis war criminals after World War II, the entire U.S. command and the civilian leadership would have been hanged for the execution of this policy of discriminating use of firepower.’ (317)
- ‘As the war ground to a bloody end, the Saigon system of counterrevolutionary ‘stabilization’ continued to function with new atrocities. The end product of ‘Vietnamization’ was a centralized, corrupt, and exceptionally brutal police state. It became the ultimate satellite – the pure negative, built on anti-Communism, violence, and external sustenance. The base of the Thieu regime was a huge foreign-organized and –financed military and police apparatus; the population under its control was increasingly brutalized and ‘pacified’ as enemy. With U.S. ‘know-how’ placed in the hands of the most fanatic and vicious elements of the dying order in South Vietnam, the modes and scope of torture and systematic police violence in the Thieu state reached new heights. Electrical and water torture, the ripping out of fingernails, enforced drinking of solutions of powdered lime, the driving of nails into prisoners’ bones (kneecaps or ankles), beatings ending in death, became standard operating procedure in the Thieu prisons.’ (328)
- ‘The evidence that was streaming in from all over the Thieu state indicated that it was probably the torture capital of the world.’ (329)
- ‘According to Jeffrey Race, before 1960 the South Vietnamese revolutionaries carried out an official policy of ‘non-violence’ which led to a serious decimation of their ranks, as violence was monopolized almost entirely by the U.S.-sponsored Diem regime. Race contends: ‘By adopting an almost entirely defensive role during this period and by allowing the government to be the first to employ violence, the Party – at great cost – allowed the government to pursue the conflict in increasingly violent terms, through its relentless reprisal against any opposition.’ ’ (338-339)
- ‘Moise concludes that ‘allowing for these uncertainties, it seems reasonable to estimate that the total number of people executed during the land reform was probably in the vicinity of 5,000, and almost certainly between 3,000 and 15,000, and that the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent victims, often described in anti-Communist propaganda, never took place.’ ’ (344)
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