{"id":1157319,"date":"2023-07-27T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealnews.com\/?p=300854"},"modified":"2023-07-27T13:45:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T13:45:00","slug":"elliott-abrams-has-left-bloody-footprints-across-the-globe-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/07\/27\/elliott-abrams-has-left-bloody-footprints-across-the-globe-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliott Abrams has left bloody footprints across the globe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Jacobin<\/figure>
\n

This story originally appeared in Jacobin<\/a> on July 26, 2023. It is shared here with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One bright sunny March morning in 1980,\u00a0Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero<\/a>\u00a0was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But after his friend Father Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadoran peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a \u201ctheology of liberation<\/a>,\u201d a perspective that espouses God\u2019s preference for the poor and oppressed. His visibility as archbishop elevated his voice and the credibility of his critique of the conditions faced by peasants in El Salvador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A month before his assassination, Archbishop Romero\u00a0wrote President Jimmy Carter<\/a>\u00a0requesting a halt to US military assistance to the right-wing Salvadoran government and its allied paramilitary death squads. Over 250,000 people attended Romero\u2019s funeral, echoing his demands for justice. Tragically, they were swimming against the historical current. A campaign of terror and murder, often orchestrated or at the very least condoned by the United States, continued across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wake of Romero\u2019s murder,\u00a0Elliott Abrams<\/a>, the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, said, \u201cAnybody who thinks you\u2019re going to find a cable that says that Roberto D\u2019Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool.\u201d In fact, two US embassy cables said precisely that, naming D\u2019Aubuisson as the one who ordered his personal bodyguard to carry out Romero\u2019s assassination. In denying the evidence, Abrams helped him get away with murder. With Abrams\u2019s support, US military assistance to the Salvadoran government was dramatically increased that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This month, President Biden\u00a0nominated<\/a>\u00a0Elliott Abrams to join the State Department Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Abrams\u2019s history is not secret: in 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar\u00a0grilled him<\/a>\u00a0before Congress. Abrams served for twelve years as part of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush \u00a0administrations. During that time, seventy-five thousand Salvadorians were killed. Abrams called US policy in El Salvador a \u201cfabulous achievement.\u201d Recounting the 1981 massacre at\u00a0El Mozote<\/a>,\u00a0Omar asked<\/a>, \u2018\u201cDo you think that massacre was a \u2018fabulous achievement\u2019 that happened under our watch?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the village of El Mozote, the army\u2019s Atl\u00e1catl Battalion herded women and children into a church convent and opened fire with US-supplied M16 automatic rifles before burning the building down. They committed\u00a0other atrocities<\/a>\u00a0as well, and by the end over nine hundred people were murdered. Of them, 140\u00a0were children<\/a>, their average age six. One survivor recalled seeing a dead mother and her dead baby lying in bed. On the walls, scrawled in blood, were the words: \u201cUn nino muerto, un guerrillero menos<\/em>\u201d: \u201cOne dead child is one less guerrilla.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elliott Abrams\u2019s Global Footprint<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The harm Abrams inflicted during his tenure isn\u2019t restricted to El Salvador. In Haiti, he helped\u00a0prop up dictator<\/a>\u00a0Jean-Claude Duvalier, who is\u00a0estimated to have killed<\/a>\u00a0as many as sixty thousand of his political opponents while in power. Abrams also defended the Guatemalan Montt regime, which oversaw the\u00a0mass murder, rape, and torture<\/a>\u00a0of scores of indigenous Ixil Mayan people in the 1980s. General Efra\u00edn R\u00edos Montt was\u00a0tried and convicted in 2013<\/a>\u00a0for genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Middle East, Abrams has proved a staunch supporter of Israel. Throughout his career, Abrams has used his platform to\u00a0portray<\/a>\u00a0illegal Israeli settlements as natural and innocuous, to\u00a0smear<\/a>\u00a0criticism of Israel by human rights groups as antisemitism, and to\u00a0welcome<\/a>\u00a0Evangelist Zionist\u00a0support<\/a>\u00a0for the state of Israel, despite that movement\u2019s belief in a biblical injunction to bring about Armageddon. Abrams has long\u00a0denied<\/a>\u00a0the oppression of Palestinians, and mocked the use of the term \u201capartheid.\u201d Following Israel\u2019s election in 2022 of a far-right extremist government, Abrams\u00a0dismissed<\/a>\u00a0the concerns of American Jewish leaders as \u201chysterics\u201d of a \u201cprivileged\u201d group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Far from a peace-oriented diplomat, Abrams did everything he could to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal, including encouraging Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Abrams was a major cheerleader of the\u00a0disastrous US invasion of Iraq<\/a>, including having written a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0in 1998 to President Clinton, encouraging him to depose Saddam Hussein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abrams also\u00a0championed<\/a>\u00a0the US overthrow of Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. As in Iraq, the US intervention encouraged by Abrams has not resulted in better conditions for the country. Instead, divisions have increased, and fighting has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. As Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) interior minister\u00a0Fathi Bashagha<\/a>\u00a0said, \u201cEvery day we are burying young people who should be helping us build Libya.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Justice Denied<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From his\u00a01991 conviction<\/a>\u00a0for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair to his\u00a02019\u00a0support<\/a>\u00a0for a Venezuelan coup, the list of Abrams\u2019s global crimes and misdeeds is too long to enumerate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steps have been taken over the past couple of decades to repair some of the damage done by Abrams and company in Latin America. In December 2011, the El Salvadoran government\u00a0apologized<\/a>\u00a0for the El Mozote\u00a0massacre<\/a>. In 2018, Oscar Romero was elevated to the status of saint. Romero \u201cleft the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the gospel,\u201d said Pope Francis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Justice is long overdue for Romero, the other Salvadorian faith leaders who were murdered in the 1980s, the children murdered in El Mazote, the Ixil Mayan women raped by death squads in Guatemala, and the people of Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere. Making sure that Abrams does not receive another appointment to another administration is the absolute least the United States government could do.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Real News Network<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Latin America to the Middle East, Elliott Abrams has advocated foreign policy responsible for untold violence and destabilization. Victims of those policies deserve justice. Instead, Joe Biden has rewarded Abrams with a top appointment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28702,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1775,4772,273,5582,55805],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28702"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1157320,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157319\/revisions\/1157320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}