My Take | The horrors that made the career of Joe Biden’s latest appointee
- The US president’s appointment of Elliott Abrams of the Iran-Contra scandal and El Mozote infamy says a lot about how much his administration cares about human rights
On December 11, 1981, a counter-insurgency unit of the El Salvadoran military junta carried out a massacre whose extreme cruelty was beyond belief. For an entire day, the Atlacatl Battalion raped, tortured, “slaughtered, decapitated, impaled and burned alive” about 900 villagers, wrote Yale University historian Greg Grandin in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic.
At El Mozote, an isolated hamlet in the west of the country, the victims of the massacre were men, women, the old and the young. Even farm animals were not spared. The day after, the same soldiers went to the nearby village of Los Toriles and committed more mass killings.
Those who visited El Mozote afterwards reported seeing “countless bits of bones – skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column” scattered across the field.
It was hell on earth that day for the victims whose screams would be met by deafening silence for the rest of the 1980s.
That conspiracy of silence was mostly the handy work of Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for human rights – of all job titles! – and his team at the US State Department and the US embassy in San Salvador, as they immediately went to work to deny the massacre and discredit initial news reports.
Their urgency was understandable because the US military helped with the formation and training of the Atlacatl Battalion, as it did with much of the Salvadoran Army. After all, Washington helped put the junta in power.
