the entire system of patronage and cronyism initiated by Nhu’s Can Lao, once isolated to political circles in Saigon, would now permeate all the way down to the village level. As Lansdale pointed out, this change also gave communist propagandists “a highly effective argument to turn villagers against the Diem regime,” since now “everything that went wrong in a village could be blamed upon the Diem-appointed officials, whether they were responsible for it or not.”
