Noam Chomsky on the El Salvador genocide of 1980 and John Negroponte

[Cleita]

This comes from a series of interviews of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian that he chronicles in his book, “Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post-9/11 World”.

Tell me about the painting that hangs in your office. It’s rather gruesome.

It’s a picture of the angel of death standing over the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980. Romero was assassinated only a few days after he had written a letter to President Jimmy Carter pleading with him not to send aid to the military junta in El Salvador, which would be used to crush people struggling for their elementary human rights. The aid was sent, and Romero was assassinated. Then Ronald Reagan took over. The kindest thing you can say about Reagan is that he may not have known what the policies of his administration were, but I’ll pretend he did. The Reagan years were a period of devastation and disaster in El Salvador. Maybe seventy thousand people were slaughtered. The decade began with the assassination of the archbishop. It ended, rather symbolically, with the murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, by an elite battalion, trained, armed and run by the United States, which had a long, bloody trail of murders and massacres behind it. The painting shows the priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, who were also murdered. Just about everyone from south of the Rio Grande who comes to visit the office recognizes the image. Almost no one from north of the Rio Grande does.

When enemies commit crimes, they’re crimes. In fact, we can exaggerate and lie about them with complete impunity. When we commit crimes, they didn’t happen. And you see that very strikingly in the cult of Reagan worship, which was created through a massive propaganda campaign. Reagan’s regime was one of murder, brutality, and violence, which devastated a number of countries and probably left two hundred thousand people dead in Latin America, with hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows. But this can’t be mentioned here. It didn’t happen.

The person responsible for one component of this terror, the Contra war in Nicaragua, was the person known as the “proconsul” of Honduras, John Negroponte. Negroponte was U. S. ambassador to Honduras, which served as a base for the terrorist army attacking Nicaragua. He had two tasks as proconsul. First, to lie to Congress about atrocities carried out by the Honduran security services so that the military aid could continue to flow to Honduras. And second, to supervise the camps in which the mercenary army was being trained, armed, and organized to carry out the atrocities, atrocities for which it was condemned by the World Court. Now Negroponte is the pro-consul of Iraq. The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, had an article pointing out that Negroponte is going to Iraq as a “modern pro-consul” and that he learned his trade in Honduras in the early 1980s. In Honduras, I might add, he was in charge of the biggest CIA station in the world. He is now in charge of the biggest embassy in the world. But all of this didn’t happen and it doesn’t matter, because we did it. And that’s a sufficient reason for effacing it from history.

And today John Negroponte is the Director of National Intelligence.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050217-2.html