In the mid-1960s, a young man from a well-to-do New York family began attending the Little Red School House, a private high school that practiced progressive educational policies and was in favor with some of the city’s most artistic and left-leaning luminaries. It championed humanitarian values, cooperation, internationalism, and a society build around egalitarianism and the elevation of human rights. It is safe to say that its lessons did not stick with Elliott Abrams.
Also in the mid-1960s, a large number of working-class citizens of Central American countries began to organize against the oppression, poverty, and cruelty they encountered every day of their lives. Their immiseration was caused largely due by their bosses, who were landowners — all white, all wealthy, all owners of plantations on which these people worked for hundreds of years — who kept them in a state almost indistinguishable from slavery.
Less than twenty years later, the young man — by then graduated from Harvard and beginning a career with the United States government that continues to this day — and the peasant organizers of Central America would find their destinies intertwined. Although none of them would ever meet him, the people of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua would find themselves on the receiving end of policies devised by Abrams and enforced by the right-wing governments of their homelands, all of which where supported by American policy. The end result of this interaction would be wealth, power, and influence for Abrams; it would be murder, rape, imprisonment, and misery for the peasants and workers.
It is hard to describe the kind of butchery that took place in these countries at Abrams’ behest. The viciousness and horror visited on them by the police and militaries of these countries, all of which were trained, funded, and equipped with American tax dollars, is almost unspeakable. Used to absolute power, they responded with as much bloodlust as they could muster at the challenge of these organizers and activists; unused to having their supreme authority questioned, they reacted with a savagery that might have made a gentlemanly SS officer blush with shame.
Spending too much time describing these massacres would be pointless. They are a matter of historical record for anyone who cares to study them, which few people do in this country where we do not like to look too closely at the human toll of our economic imperialism. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people were killed. Entire villages were wiped out; entire regions had their young male populations devastated (the so-called “El Salvador option”, which Abrams would later advocate for during America’s invasion of Iraq). Women — and young girls — were raped and brutalized as a matter of course. Children were killed and their bodies mutilated as a warning to their families and friends. Some of the descriptions of the violence inflicted against these people is almost comical; it is so unrecognizable and inhumane as to take on the aura of invention. But it all happened; there are too many still-living witnesses to these monstrosities to deny it. It was, quite simply, human extermination on a mass scale, and one of the most shameful episodes of America’s grimy post-war history. Backed by American might, the authorities of these countries engaged in a campaign of unrelenting terror against their own people, leaving only enough alive to perform the manual labor they needed to power their exploitative economies.
While all of this was carried out under the cover of the Cold War, it should not be thought that these people were rabid Stalinists, deluded by Soviet propaganda and attempting a coup in order to inflict their own mass murder campaigns on their ideological enemies. Most of the activists and organizers were homegrown, and had little to no contact with communist governments. They were peasants and laborers going back generations, even centuries, most descended from the native populations and dominated by white overseers who had inflicted suffering and death on them since the New World was first colonized. They had no money, no resources, no power, no representation, and no hope other than their own solidarity and unity of ever seeing a life for themselves or their children that was distinguished by anything but grinding toil, extreme deprivation, and unending torment. For the high crime of fighting to make the most minimal improvement in their lives, they were slaughtered by the thousands; it was their own people who did the killing, and it was Elliott Abrams who greased the guns and sharpened the knives.
Of course, he did plenty of work at home, too. He arranged for illegal fundraising when Congress cut off aid for his favored brutes, having found their activities too unwholesome for domestic consumption. He provided the killers with the tools of their trade, smuggling in guns and ammunition and explosives by the caseload, often under the guise of ‘humanitarian aid’. He provided cover stories for this senseless madness, attempting through distortion and sheer fabrication to tie these peasants’ struggles for simple human dignity to a global communist plot engineered by the Kremlin. And he did his hatchet work on anyone on the American press who dared report on these indescribable crimes; reporters who were too curious about the operations of U.S.-backed death squads, or who were too critical of our cozy relationship with Central American dictators, would find themselves threatened, their access to government officials cut off, their bosses suddenly unwilling to let them pursue a story any further.
Many of the people who were targeted by these death squads are long gone, murdered and dumped into anonymous holes in the dirt. Even the dictators and their henchmen are gone. But Elliott Abrams, with his crooked hatchet smirk and his devil’s eyebrows, is still with us. It was his distance from the bloodshed he authored that allowed him to whip it into such a froth; it was his cosseting by money and power that kept him from ever once having to confront the repercussions of his actions. At no point — none — did the actions of any leftist government in Central America, no matter what their flaws, come close to reproducing the terrors that their right-wing counterparts inflicted on their own people with Abrams’ help, but now, he’s back again, and predictably, he has been called upon at the ripe old age of 71 to do what it is he’s been doing since he was in his thirties: destroy a democratic movement in a Spanish-speaking country with fabricated justifications and maximum violence, and reaffirm the power of that country’s wealthy and powerful elite.
Abrams was just named by Donald Trump as the United States’ “special representative” for Venezuela, the oil-rich South American nation that has recently fallen into the unacceptable position of deciding to use its resources to help its own people rather than to enrich the already-fat bank accounts of foreign and domestic millionaires. There has been a bipartisan effort to destroy the popular government of Venezuela since it first took power in 1999; a 2002 coup, backed by the United States, was a disastrous failure, and as is our habit, we have been out for revenge ever since. We have circulated lies about the democratically elected leadership with our usual enthusiasm (there are too many to address, but a nice refutation can be found here), and the effort to destroy another country that has made impressive gains in alleviating the poverty and misery of its own people has enjoyed bipartisan support. (In one of the most sickening reversals of common sense imaginable, some Democrats have accused leftist senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has refused to endorse this “regime change”, of playing into the hands of the very Republican warmongers who came up with the idea in the first place.)
President Trump has decided the process can’t wait any longer, so he’s appointed Abrams — who is as expert at decimating the population of Central American countries as his mentor Henry Kissinger was at obliterating Southeast Asian ones — to finish the job. Since the Democrats, our putative opposition party, have shown little to no opposition to this flagrantly undemocratic coup, it is likely he will succeed. There will, of course, be massive violence, bloodshed, and retaliation; already, the so-called ‘rebels’ (who are, let us never forget, ‘rebelling’ against democracy, economic justice, and the alleviation of poverty and misery inflicted on Venezuela’s population since the colonial era) have caused far more death and disorder than Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro ever dreamed, and the chances that post-coup Venezuela will be an improvement for its people over current conditions are sub-zero. Elliott Abrams, one of the worst human beings alive, will put another notch on his belt to indicate the murder of another peoples’ movement in defense of wealth, and he will die rich and untroubled.
I don’t expect many Americans will care about this. Republicans already want to see Venezuela reconquered and humiliated, and Democrats have bought into neoliberal realpolitik to such an extent that they will tut-tut Maduro and insist on the moral correctness of regime change right up until American kids start coming home in body bags. Since we seem to have learned nothing from the 1980s, and indeed seem to have forgotten what little we did learn in the first place, I don’t imagine anything can be done about it. But like Carmela Soprano was warned by her therapist, we can’t say we weren’t told.