{"id":127119,"date":"2019-02-04T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=127119"},"modified":"2019-02-11T11:10:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T11:10:33","slug":"elliott-abrams-trumps-pick-to-bring-democracy-to-venezuela-has-spent-his-life-crushing-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/02\/elliott-abrams-trumps-pick-to-bring-democracy-to-venezuela-has-spent-his-life-crushing-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliott Abrams, Trump\u2019s Pick to Bring \u201cDemocracy\u201d to Venezuela, Has Spent His Life Crushing Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Elliott Abrams, left, listens to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talk about Venezuela at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 25, 2019. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

30 Jan 2019 – <\/em>On December 11, 1981 in El Salvador,\u00a0a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet.\u00a0The final death toll was over\u00a0800 people.<\/p>\n

The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told\u00a0the Senate, were \u201cnot credible,\u201d and the whole thing was being \u201csignificantly misused\u201d as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.<\/p>\n

This past Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named<\/a>\u00a0Abrams as America\u2019s special envoy for Venezuela. According to Pompeo, Abrams \u201cwill have responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy\u201d in\u00a0the oil-rich nation.<\/p>\n

The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America\u2019s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors \u2014 the brutality and the unctuousness \u2014 is Abrams\u2019s core competency.<\/p>\n

Abrams previously served in a multitude of positions in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, often with titles declaring their focus on morality. First, he was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs (in 1981); then the State Department \u201chuman rights\u201d position mentioned above\u00a0(1981-85); assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs (1985-89); senior director for democracy, human rights, and international operations for the National Security Council (2001-05); and finally, Bush\u2019s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy (2005-09).<\/p>\n

In these positions, Abrams participated in many of the most ghastly acts of U.S. foreign policy\u00a0from the past 40 years, all the while proclaiming how deeply he cared about the foreigners he and his friends were murdering. Looking back, it\u2019s uncanny to see how Abrams has almost always been there when U.S. actions were at their most sordid.<\/p>\n

Abrams, a graduate<\/u> of both Harvard College\u00a0and Harvard Law School, joined the Reagan administration in 1981, at age 33. He soon received a promotion due to a stroke of luck: Reagan wanted to name Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, but Lefever\u2019s nomination ran aground when two of his own brothers revealed<\/a>\u00a0that he believed African-Americans were \u201cinferior, intellectually speaking.\u201d A disappointed Reagan was forced to turn to Abrams as a second choice.<\/p>\n

A key Reagan administration concern at the time was Central America \u2014 in particular, the four adjoining nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. All had been dominated by tiny, cruel, white elites since their founding, with a century\u2019s worth of help from U.S. interventions. In each country, the ruling families saw their society\u2019s other inhabitants as human-shaped animals, who could be harnessed or killed as needed.<\/p>\n

But shortly before Reagan took office, Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua and a U.S. ally, had been overthrown by a socialist revolution. The Reaganites rationally saw this as a threat to the governments of Nicaragua\u2019s neighbors. Each country had large populations who similarly did not enjoy being worked to death on coffee plantations or watching their children die of easily treated diseases. Some would take up arms, and some would simply try to keep their heads down, but all, from the perspective of the cold warriors in the White House, were likely \u201ccommunists<\/a>\u201d taking orders from Moscow. They needed to be taught a lesson.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Relatives and villagers hold a funeral to bury the identified remains of 21 people killed in the 1981 El Mozote massacre, on Dec. 10, 2016.
Photo: Marvin Recinos\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

El Salvador<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0extermination of El Mozote was just a drop in the river of what happened in El Salvador during the 1980s. About 75,000 Salvadorans died during what\u2019s called a \u201ccivil war,\u201d although\u00a0almost all the killing was done by the government and its associated death squads.<\/p>\n

The numbers alone don\u2019t tell the whole story. El Salvador is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. The equivalent number of deaths in the U.S. would be almost\u00a05 million.\u00a0Moreover, the\u00a0Salvadoran regime continually engaged\u00a0in acts of barbarism so heinous that there is no contemporary equivalent, except perhaps ISIS. In one instance, a Catholic priest reported<\/a>\u00a0that a peasant woman briefly left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister. When she returned, she found that all five had been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their bodies were sitting around a table, with their hands placed on their heads in front of them, \u201cas though each body was stroking its own head.\u201d The hand of one, a toddler, apparently kept slipping off her small head, so it had been nailed onto it. At the center of the table was a large bowl full of blood.<\/p>\n

Criticism of U.S. policy at the time was not confined to the left. During this period, Charles Maechling Jr., who had led State Department planning for counterinsurgencies during the 1960s, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the U.S. was supporting \u201cMafia-like oligarchies\u201d in El Salvador and elsewhere and was directly complicit in \u201cthe methods of Heinrich Himmler\u2019s extermination squads.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abrams\u00a0was one of the\u00a0architects\u00a0of the Reagan administration\u2019s policy of\u00a0full-throated support\u00a0for the\u00a0Salvadoran government.\u00a0He had no qualms about any of it and no mercy for anyone who escaped the Salvadoran abattoir. In 1984, sounding exactly like Trump officials today, he explained that Salvadorans who were in the U.S.\u00a0illegally should not receive any kind of special status. \u201cSome groups argue that illegal aliens who are sent back to El Salvador meet persecution and often death,\u201d he told the House of Representatives<\/a>. \u201cObviously, we do not believe these claims or we would not deport these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even when out of office,\u00a010 years after the El Mozote massacre, Abrams expressed doubt that anything untoward had occurred there. In 1993, when a United Nations truth commission found that 95 percent of the acts of violence that had taken place in El Salvador since 1980 had been committed by Abrams\u2019s\u00a0friends in the Salvadoran government, he called<\/a>\u00a0what he and his colleagues in the Reagan administration had done a \u201cfabulous achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation sorts through bags of loose photographs from the National Police Archives on July 27, 2006, as they study police atrocities and murders committed during Guatemala\u2019s 30-year civil war.
Photo: Sarah L. Voisin\/The Washington Post\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Guatemala<\/strong><\/p>\n

The situation in Guatemala during the 1980s was much the same, as were Abrams\u2019s actions. After the U.S. engineered the overthrow of Guatemala\u2019s democratically elected president in 1954, the country had descended into a nightmare of revolving military dictatorships. Between 1960 and 1996, in another \u201ccivil war,\u201d 200,000 Guatemalans were killed \u2014 the equivalent of maybe 8 million people in America. A U.N. commission later found that the Guatemalan state was responsible for 93 percent of the human rights violations.<\/p>\n

Efra\u00edn R\u00edos Montt, who served as Guatemala\u2019s president in the early 1980s, was found guilty in 2013, by Guatemala\u2019s own justice system, of committing genocide against the country\u2019s indigenous Mayans. During R\u00edos Montt\u2019s administration, Abrams called for the lifting of an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Guatemala, claiming that R\u00edos Montt had \u201cbrought considerable progress.\u201d The U.S. had to support the Guatemalan government, Abrams argued, because \u201cif we take the attitude \u2018don\u2019t come to us until you\u2019re perfect, we\u2019re going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfect\u00a0<\/em>human rights record,\u2019 then we\u2019re going to be leaving in the lurch people there who are trying to make progress.\u201d One example of the people making an honest effort, according to Abrams, was R\u00edos Montt. Thanks to R\u00edos Montt, \u201cthere has been a tremendous change, especially in the attitude of the government toward the Indian population.\u201d (R\u00edos Montt\u2019s conviction was later set aside by Guatemala\u2019s highest civilian court, and he died before a new trial could finish.)<\/p>\n

Nicaragua<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abrams would become best known for his enthusiastic involvement with the Reagan administration\u2019s push to overthrow Nicaragua\u2019s revolutionary Sandinista government. He advocated\u00a0for a full invasion of Nicaragua in 1983, immediately after the successful U.S. attack on the teeny island nation of Grenada. When Congress cut off funds to the Contras, an anti-Sandinista guerrilla force created by the U.S., Abrams successfully persuaded the Sultan of Brunei to cough up $10 million for the cause. Unfortunately, Abrams, acting under the code name \u201cKenilworth,\u201d provided the Sultan with the wrong Swiss bank account number, so the money was wired\u00a0instead to a random lucky recipient.<\/p>\n

Abrams was questioned by Congress about his Contra-related activities<\/a>\u00a0and lied voluminously. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information. One was about the Sultan and his money, and another was about Abrams\u2019s knowledge of a Contra resupply C-123 plane that had been shot down in 1986. In a nice historical rhyme with his new job in the Trump administration, Abrams had previously attempted to obtain two C-123s for the Contras from the military of Venezuela.<\/p>\n

Abrams received a sentence of 100 hours of community service and perceived the whole affair as an injustice of cosmic proportions. He soon wrote a book in which he described his inner monologue about his prosecutors, which went: \u201cYou miserable, filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers!\u201d He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on\u00a0the latter\u2019s\u00a0way out the door after he lost the 1992 election.<\/p>\n

Panama<\/strong><\/p>\n

While it\u2019s been forgotten now, before America invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega in 1989, he was a close ally of the U.S. \u2014 despite the fact the Reagan administration knew<\/a>\u00a0he was a large-scale drug trafficker.<\/p>\n

In 1985, Hugo Spadafora, a popular figure in Panama and its one-time vice minister for health, believed he had obtained proof of Noriega\u2019s involvement in cocaine smuggling. He was on a bus on his way to Panama City to release it publicly when he was seized by Noriega\u2019s thugs.<\/p>\n

According to the book \u201cOverthrow\u201d by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, U.S. intelligence picked up Noriega giving his underlings the go-ahead to put Spadafora down like \u201ca rabid dog.\u201d They tortured Spadafora for a long night and then sawed off his head while he was still alive. When Spadafora\u2019s body was found, his stomach was full of blood he\u2019d swallowed.<\/p>\n

This was so horrific that it got people\u2019s attention. But Abrams leapt to Noriega\u2019s defense, blocking the U.S. ambassador to Panama from increasing pressure on the Panamanian leader. When Spadafora\u2019s brother persuaded North Carolina\u2019s hyper-conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms to hold hearings on Panama, Abrams told Helms that Noriega was \u201cbeing really helpful to us\u201d and was \u201creally not that big a problem. \u2026 The Panamanians have promised they are going to help us with the Contras. If you have the hearings, it\u2019ll alienate them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026 And That\u2019s Not All<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abrams also\u00a0engaged in malfeasance for no discernible reason, perhaps just to stay in shape. In 1986 a Colombian journalist named\u00a0Patricia Lara was invited to the U.S. to\u00a0attend a dinner honoring writers\u00a0who\u2019d advanced \u201cinter-American understanding and freedom of information.\u201d When Lara arrived at New York\u2019s Kennedy\u00a0airport, she was taken into custody, then put on a plane back home. Soon afterward, Abrams went on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d to claim<\/a> that Lara\u00a0was a member of the \u201cruling committees\u201d of M-19, a Colombian guerrilla movement. She also, according to Abrams,\u00a0was \u201dan active liaison\u201d between M-19 \u201dand the Cuban secret police.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the frequent right-wing paramilitary violence against Colombian reporters, this painted a target on Lara\u2019s back. There was no evidence then that Abrams\u2019s assertions\u00a0were true \u2014 Colombia\u2019s own conservative government denied it \u2014 and none has appeared since.<\/p>\n

Abrams\u2019s\u00a0never-ending, shameless deceptions wore down<\/a> American\u00a0reporters. \u201cThey said that black was white,\u201d Joanne Omang at the Washington Post later explained about Abrams and his White House colleague Robert McFarlane. \u201cAlthough I had used all my professional resources I had misled my readers.\u201d Omang was so exhausted by the experience that she quit her job trying to describe\u00a0the real world to try to write fiction.<\/p>\n

Post-conviction Abrams was seen as damaged goods who couldn\u2019t return to government. This underestimated him. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the one-time chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tangled fiercely with Abrams in 1989 over the proper U.S. policy toward Noriega once it become clear he was more trouble than he was worth. Crowe strongly opposed a bright idea<\/a>\u00a0that Abrams had come up with: that the U.S. should establish a government-in-exile on Panamanian soil, which would require thousands of U.S. troops to guard. This was deeply boneheaded, Crowe said, but it didn\u2019t matter. Crowe presciently issued a warning<\/a> about Abrams: \u201cThis snake\u2019s hard to kill.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Nancy Brinker, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Condoleezza Rice, and Stephen Hadley in the Oval Office as then-President George W. Bush meets with the leader of the Lebanese Parliament on Oct. 4, 2007.
Photo: Dennis Brack,Pool\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

To the surprise of Washington\u2019s more naive\u00a0insiders, Abrams was back in business soon after George W. Bush entered the White House. It might have been difficult to get Senate approval for someone who had deceived Congress, so Bush put him in a slot at the National Security Council \u2014\u00a0where no legislative branch approval was needed. Just like 20 years before, Abrams was handed a portfolio involving \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201chuman rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Venezuela<\/strong><\/p>\n

By the beginning of 2002, Venezuela\u2019s president, Hugo Chavez, had become deeply irritating to the Bush White House, which was filled with veterans of the battles of the 1980s. That April, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Chavez was pushed out of power in a coup. Whether and how the U.S. was involved is not yet known, and probably won\u2019t be for decades until the relevant documents are declassified. But based on the previous 100 years, it would be surprising indeed if America didn\u2019t play any behind-the-scenes role. For what it\u2019s worth, the London Observer reported<\/a>\u00a0at the time that \u201cthe crucial figure around the coup was Abrams\u201d and he \u201cgave a nod\u201d to the plotters. In any case, Chavez had enough popular support that he was able to regroup and return to office within days.<\/p>\n

Iran<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abrams apparently did play a key role<\/a>\u00a0in squelching a peace proposal from Iran in 2003, just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The plan arrived by fax, and should have gone to Abrams, and then to Condoleezza Rice, at the time Bush\u2019s national security adviser. Instead it somehow never made it to Rice\u2019s desk. When later asked about this, Abrams\u2019s spokesperson replied that he \u201chad no memory of any such fax.\u201d (Abrams, like so many people who thrive at the highest level of politics, has a terrible memory for anything political. In 1984, he told Ted Koppel that he couldn\u2019t recall for sure whether the U.S. had investigated reports of massacres in El Salvador. In 1986, when asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee if he\u2019d discussed fundraising for the contras with anyone on the NSC\u2019s staff, he likewise couldn\u2019t remember.)<\/p>\n

Israel and Palestine<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abrams was also at the center of another attempt to thwart the outcome of a democratic election, in 2006. Bush had pushed for legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza in order to give Fatah, the highly corrupt Palestinian organization headed by Yasser Arafat\u2019s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, some badly needed legitimacy. To everyone\u2019s surprise, Fatah\u2019s rival Hamas won, giving it the right to form a government.<\/p>\n

This unpleasant outburst of democracy was not acceptable to the Bush administration, in particular Rice and Abrams. They hatched a plan to form a Fatah militia to take over the Gaza Strip, and crush Hamas in its home territory. As reported by Vanity Fair<\/a>, this involved a great deal of torture and executions. But Hamas stole a march on Fatah with their own ultra-violence. David Wurmser, a neoconservative who worked for Dick Cheney at the time, told Vanity Fair, \u201cIt looks to me that what happened wasn\u2019t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.\u201d Yet ever since, these events have been turned upside down in the U.S. media, with Hamas\u00a0<\/em>being presented as the aggressors.<\/p>\n

While the U.S. plan was not a total success, it also was not a total failure from the perspective of America and Israel. The Palestinian civil war split the West Bank and Gaza into two entities, with rival governments in both. For the past 13 years, there\u2019s been little sign of the political unity necessary for Palestinians to get a decent life for themselves.<\/p>\n

Abrams then left office with Bush\u2019s exit. But now he\u2019s back for a third rotation through the corridors of power \u2013 with the same kinds of schemes he\u2019s executed the first two times.<\/p>\n

Looking back at Abrams\u2019s lifetime of lies and savagery, it\u2019s hard to imagine what he could say to justify it. But he\u00a0does have a defense for\u00a0everything he\u2019s done \u2014 and it\u2019s a good one.<\/p>\n

The year was 1995. A young Elliott Abrams taught us how to laugh. Maniacally. When Allan Nairn brought up his involvement in the mass murder and torture of indigenous people in Guatemala. pic.twitter.com\/N2nfDQAUrf<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Allen Haim (@senor_pez) January 25, 2019<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1995, Abrams appeared on \u201cThe Charlie Rose Show\u201d with Allan Nairn, one of the most knowledgable American reporters about U.S. foreign policy. Nairn\u00a0noted that George H.W. Bush had once discussed putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity. This was a good\u00a0idea, said Nairn, but \u201cif you\u2019re serious, you have to be even-handed\u201d \u2014 which would mean also prosecuting officials\u00a0like Abrams.<\/p>\n

Abrams chuckled at the ludicrousness of such a concept. That would require, he said, \u201cputting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abrams was largely\u00a0right. The distressing\u00a0reality is that Abrams is no rogue outlier, but a respected, honored member of the center right of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. His first jobs before joining the Reagan administration were working for two Democratic senators, Henry\u00a0Jackson and Daniel Moynihan.\u00a0He\u00a0was\u00a0a senior fellow at the centrist Council on Foreign Relations. He\u2019s been a member of the\u00a0U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and now is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. He\u2019s taught\u00a0the next generation of foreign policy officials at\u00a0Georgetown University\u2019s School of Foreign Service.\u00a0He didn\u2019t somehow fool Reagan and George W. Bush \u2014 they wanted exactly what Abrams provided.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0no matter the gruesome particulars of Abrams\u2019s career, the important thing to remember \u2014 as the U.S. eagle tightens\u00a0its razor-sharp talons around yet another Latin American country \u2014 is that\u00a0Abrams isn\u2019t that exceptional. He\u2019s mostly\u00a0a cog in a machine. It\u2019s the machine that\u2019s the problem, not its malevolent parts.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jon Schwarz<\/a> – jon.schwarz@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Jan 2019 – The choice of Abrams sends a clear message: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while proclaiming our love for human rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":127120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,53,57,197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","category-militarism","category-special-feature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}