On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

These estimates understate the lethal consequences of U.S. intervention in the Third World. When we try to assess the crimes of the Pol Pot regime, we rightly consider not only actual killing, but also the effect of harsh and brutal policies that led to death from malnutrition, the conditions of life and labor, lack of health facilities, and so on. No similar estimate has been attempted of the impact of U.S. policies in the Third World, and I will not try to speculate here on the scale of these much larger atrocities. Quite often in areas of predominant U.S. influence such as Latin America, there has been statistical growth in the course of “economic miracles” while much of the population starves as croplands are devoted to exports for the benefit of U.S. agribusiness and local elites. The U.S. is the world’s largest food importer, primarily from the Third World, while its massive food exports go primarily to advanced industrial societies, or for such projects as producing beef for export to U.S. markets, replacing local subsistence agriculture. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress gave a major impetus to these destructive—indeed, if we were honest, murderous—developments, a topic to which I will return in the third lecture, along with the relation between these models of development and the terror-and-torture states that are their natural concomitant.