Looking backward keeps injustice from repeating itself
By Manuel E. Yepe
HAVANA – Elliott Abrams, a former high-ranking official at the U.S. State Department during the 1980s, testified in late January that the Reagan administration knew that Argentina’s military junta was systematically stealing babies from murdered or jailed oppositionists and giving them to right-wing families that served the regime unconditionally.
The information appears in an article titled “Elliott Abrams’ Dark History in Latin America,” by Cyril Mychalejko, editor of the digital publication UpsideDownWorld.org, based in Vermont.
According to Abrams, at a meeting he held in Washington in December 1982 with the junta’s ambassador, he told the diplomat that the dictatorship could “improve its image” by promoting a joint effort with the Catholic Church to return the children to their legitimate families.
The contents of that meeting was recorded in a memo written by Abrams that was declassified by the State Department in 2002 and is now a key piece of evidence against several functionaries of the then-ruling junta.
"While the disappeared were dead, these children were alive, and this was, in a sense, the gravest humanitarian problem," Abrams read from his cable via videoconference testimony to a federal court in Buenos Aires.
But this didn’t deter the State Department at the time from granting Argentina certification indicating that the country’s human rights record was improving.
The relations between Abrams, the Reagan administration and the Argentine junta were not adversarial or critical but very cordial, the article said. In 1978, before being elected president, Ronald Reagan wrote an article in The Miami News attacking the criticism expressed by President Jimmy Carter toward the human rights violations being committed in Argentina.
Reagan argued that the junta had “set out to restore order” and that too much was being made over the imprisonment of “a few innocents.”
One of Reagan’s first acts as president was to overturn military aid restrictions to Argentina put in place by Carter as punishment for the human rights situation under the military regime. Reagan’s government funded the Argentine death squads that trained the Nicaraguan contras in Honduras and the Honduran paramilitary forces.
Argentina was not the only Latin American country that suffered Abrams’ atrocities. The article recalls his ties to Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, who, after graduating from the School of the Americas, ruled Guatemala as a close ally of Washington in 1982-83.
Ríos Montt seized power through a military coup and is considered responsible for 1,771 deaths, 1,400 violations of human rights and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.
The article maintains that in December 1982, Reagan traveled to Guatemala to praise dictator Ríos Montt for his efforts and dedication to democracy and social justice. Shortly after Reagan’s visit, the army massacred 251 men, women and children in the town of Las Dos Erres.
Aided by Abrams, Reagan sponsored and concealed multiple human rights violations in El Salvador, where a 12-year civil war killed 70,000 people, 90 percent of whom were considered the responsibility of the government backed by Reagan, as well as the paramilitaries.
In 1993, when the U.S. Congress planned to investigate the role of the Reagan administration in human rights abuses in El Salvador, Abrams described that administration’s record in that country as a “fabulous achievement” and described the Congressional probe as “a reprehensible McCarthyite charge.”
According to Mychalejko, "the U.S. media is missing an excellent opportunity to use Abrams’ career as a vehicle to examine and reflect on the United States’ bloody and barbaric history in the hemisphere."
It is due to this willful ignorance and institutionalized impunity that diplomats such as Abrams can continue to resurface in Washington as a National Security Council member to President George W. Bush and now as an informal adviser to President Barack Obama.
Back in 2009, in response to a question about whether he would apologize for the CIA’s role in Chile’s 1973 military coup, Obama said that he was “interested in going forward, not looking backward.”
For history not to repeat itself, the president and U.S. citizens need to reflect on these matters and look back to history so justice can move forward, concludes Cyril Mychalejko’s analysis.
Manuel E. Yepe Menéndez is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He is a professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana.
