Elliott
Abrams, who is steering Trump’s Venezuela policy, has a long track
record of war crimes. Yet a number of liberal commentators are
rushing to his defense.
by
Paul Heideman
Part
3 - The Reagan years
Abrams
first came to major prominence in the Reagan administration, where,
in late 1981, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Human
Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. However, Abrams was not the
administration’s first choice. Reagan had previously nominated the
conservative political thinker Ernest W. Lefever, but his nomination
had not gone smoothly. In 1979, Lefever had testified before the
House that all human rights standards should be repealed. Questioned
about this statement in 1981, he admitted that he had “goofed.”
His nomination was finally sunk, however, when two of his brothers
claimed that Lefever believed black people to be genetically
inferior. This was too big a goof even for the Reagan administration,
and in October, Abrams’ nomination was announced.
Abrams
started his career at the State Department with a lot to do. The day
before he came on board, U.S.-trained forces had committed a massacre
in the town of El Mozote, El Salvador, torturing, raping and
slaughtering over 800 civilians. The killing was performed by the
Altacatl Battalion, assembled and trained at Fort Bragg, and later
described by the New York Times as having been “the pride
of the United States military team in San Salvador.”
The El
Mozote massacre was but one moment in the Central American civil wars
of the 1980s, when in country after country, poor peasants confronted
their countries’ traditional military and economic elites, who
responded with savage, American-backed violence. Abrams played a key
role in directing American support for these regimes as well as
running interference when evidence of their atrocities became too
obvious for the corporate media to ignore. The main sites of action
were as follows:
El
Salvador
In 1979,
amid mounting protests against an undemocratic government, El
Salvador’s military leaders dispensed with the fig leaf of civilian
rule and installed a military junta to crush the rising left-wing
insurgency. The result was a civil war in which some 80,000 people
died in a country with a population of less than 5 million. Later, a
United Nations investigation estimated that 85 percent of civilian
killings in the war were perpetrated by the military and its death
squads. Atrocities such as El Mozote were commonplace. Less than a
year later, the military killed over 200 civilians at El Calabozo.
One of
Elliott Abrams’ main jobs was to deny, distract from, or excuse
these atrocities. When news of El Mozote reached the United States,
Abrams testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
there was reason for doubt, claiming “We find … that it is an
event that happened in mid-December [but it] is then publicized when
the certification comes forward to the committee.” Even a
decade later, after irrefutable evidence had accumulated about the
scale of the horror in El Mozote, Abrams still tried to obfuscate the
truth, protesting, “If it had really been a massacre and not a
firefight, why didn't we hear about it right off from the F.M.L.N.? I
mean, we didn't start hearing about it until a month later.”
When
questioned by Rep. Omar last week, Abrams defended his record in El
Salvador, proclaiming, “From the day that President Duarte was
elected in a free election to this day, El Salvador has been a
democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.” Indeed, in 1984,
José Napoleón Duarte became president after elections in which
parties of the left could not campaign for fear of assassination. He
defeated death squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson. Though Washington
supported Duarte in that election, Abrams had previously defended
D’Aubuisson, contending that he was not an extremist and claiming
that “anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that
says Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop [Oscar Romero] is
a fool,” when in fact, cables showing precisely that had
arrived in Washington from the U.S. embassy almost immediately after
the assassination.
Nonetheless,
d’Aubuisson was indeed an embarrassment to the United States as it
attempted to defend Salvadoran oligarchs. Along with his extravagant
brutality in El Salvador, he was also far too undisciplined in
talking to the press, telling some European reporters, “You
Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were
responsible for the spread of communism, and you began to kill them.”
This kind of language was an embarrassment, and so Washington judged
that Duarte would be a more effective point man for coordinating the
war on the Salvadoran peasantry. Duarte’s verbal promises to
restrain the excesses of the military, for Abrams and company,
counted as a win for human rights, even as his “moderation”
provided a fig leaf that would allow the U.S. government to continue
backing the Salvadoran military until the Left had been sufficiently
exterminated that “normal” politics could resume.
Despite
Abrams’ theatrics, the truth of the American intervention in El
Salvador was told in rather plainer terms by the liberal New
Republic in 1984, which explained that “there are higher
American priorities than Salvadoran human rights,” and that
“military aid must go forth regardless of how many are murdered,
lest the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas win.”
Nicaragua
To El
Salvador’s southeast, Nicaragua was also going through a political
transformation in the early 1980s. In 1979, the Sandinista National
Liberation Front overthrew the notoriously corrupt U.S.-backed
dictator Anastasio Somoza. The coalition government the Sandinistas
created immediately undertook vigorous campaigns in the areas of
literacy and healthcare, expanding social service access to the
Nicaraguan poor to an unprecedented degree. The government also
provided aid to the peasant revolutionaries in El Salvador, and
quickly established a close alliance with the Soviet Union and Cuba.
This the
Reagan administration could not abide. Shortly after coming into
office, Reagan officials invited anti-Sandinista exiles to a meeting
in Honduras, where the administration forced anti-Somoza opponents of
the government to submit to the leadership of elements of the
dictator’s hated National Guard. Troops were immediately assembled
across the border in Honduras, with U.S. aid helping to put
everything in motion. The anti-Sandinista army, popularly known as
the Contras, soon accosted government targets, with special attention
reserved for government social service locations, like schools and
hospitals. Soon, evidence of Contra atrocities began to accumulate.
In 1982,
this evidence was so abundant that the U.S. Congress become convinced
that funding for the Contras needed to be cut off. Abrams,
fulminating over the tying of the United States’ hands in its
battle against communism, immediately began looking for ways to
overcome the ban on funding. One avenue came through soliciting funds
from the Sultan of Brunei, whom Abrams convinced to donate $10
million to stopping communism in Nicaragua. But Oliver North’s
secretary at the time fudged the transaction by copying the wrong
numbers for the Swiss bank account to which the funds would be
transferred, and the money ended up in the hands of an unusually
virtuous Swiss businessman, who returned it, with interest.
For the
rest of the 1980s, Abrams essentially ran interference for Oliver
North and the other Iran-Contra spooks. For this role, he was
eventually indicted, and plead guilty to withholding information from
Congress in 1991. At a time when the drug war was in full swing, and
draconian sentences were all the rage, Abrams was sentenced to 100
hours of community service. President George H.W. Bush then pardoned
him, completing Abrams’ official redemption.
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