The Earlier Strategy

General Hector Gramajo, Army Vice Chief of Staff and director of the Army General Staff from 1982-3, takes credit for his innovations in a 1991 interview with anthropologist Jennifer Schirmer: "We aren't renouncing the use of force. If we have to use it, we have to use it, but in a more sophisticated manner. You needn't kill everyone to complete the job. [You can use] more sophisticated means: we aren't going to return to the large-scale massacres. We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent."
General Hector Gramajo was on a fellowship to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government at the time. As Noam Chomsky has noted, this isn't unreasonalble, "given Kennedy's decisive contributions to the vocation of counterinsurgency (one of the technical terms for international terrorism conducted by the powerful)."

Spring 1991 Harvard International Review