Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

How Elliot Abrams Brought Democracy to El Salvador

the venezuelan flag

Russian military personnel have now boldly moved into Venezuela, a decision which, had it been taken in the 1980’s, would have elicited an unprecedented level of hysteria and resistance. Today, the only action the United States has yet to muster is a demand by President Trump that the Russians “get out.”

The United States has plans for Venezuela. As articulated by Special Envoy Elliot Abrams, who would have likely played a role in this hypothetical hysteria and resistance, the US plans to “restore democracy” to the ravaged socialist country. How? We’ve been told time and again that “all options are on the table.” While this is a loaded phrase, so is the word “democracy.”

Last February, Abrams was questioned on his role as Assistant Secretary of State in El Salvador’s bloody civil war and subsequent democratic election of President Jose Napoleon Duarte. His response: “From the day that President Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.” Now that we know what Abram’s idea of a successful democracy promotion program looks like, we can explore its history and implications in order to uncover what may be in store for Venezuela.

In 1980, Jose Duarte took control of a military junta that was ruling Venezuela. Declaring that “the masses were with the guerrillas,” Duarte’s introduction preceded an increase in “extrajudicial executions” and “mass executions in rural areas” according to the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador. US Ambassador to El Salvador Frank Devine reported that “mutilated bodies were appearing on roadsides” and “the extreme right was arming itself and preparing for a confrontation in which it clearly expected to ally itself with the military.”

One of the most gruesome incidents of this time period involved the murder of four American churchwomen, dubbed by the New York Times as “one of the most notorious crimes by the Salvadoran armed forces in that era.” Carried out under orders of Colonel Carlos Vides Casanova of the Salvadoran National Guard, the Catholic nuns were kidnapped from the San Salvador airport, raped, murdered, and thrown into a ditch. Secretary of State Alexander Haig responded to the killing by telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “Perhaps the vehicle that the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock…and there’d been an exchange of fire.” The UN Truth Commission argued that the nuns hadn’t engaged in a firefight with the military, but rather, “were taken to an isolated spot where they were shot dead at close range” which was “planned prior to their arrival at the airport.”

Likely due to their nationality, the execution of the four nuns caused much more of a stir than the regular attacks on the Salvadoran population. The year of the 1984 election saw nearly 2,000 civilians killed by death squads or the military, down from over 6,000 a year prior. During the first round of elections, international observers reported that “assassinations and intimidation by both parties continued throughout the election campaign.”

The levels of violence is, in part, the reason why no candidate to the political left of Duarte was allowed to campaign. Election observers from Britain believed that leftist parties “could not have presented candidates in the election because of the very high risk of assassination,” leaving one to wonder what could have happened had Marxist guerrillas been able to run a peaceful political campaign.

Perhaps most importantly, both Duarte and his opponent Roberto d’Aubuisson opposed negotiations with the rebels as a way to resolve the conflict, despite the fact that“reporters and observers were unanimous in 1982 that the main thing the public wanted out of the election was peace.” Election observer Pratap C. Chitnis writes “there was now almost universal skepticism that a victory for either candidate would produce peace.”

With over $2 million in financial backing from the United States, Duarte won the presidential election by eight points, transitioning from unelected military junta leader to elected president. Chitnis reports on the aftermath:

I asked relatives of the disappeared and brutally murdered, ‘Do you think things will be better now that President Duarte has been elected?’ ‘It was under President Duarte that these things happened in the first place’, they replied. In other words, the most important test for Salvadoreans, who have good reason from their past to be cynical about elections, is not the validity of their democratic process, but whether or not those in positions of power are willing and able to tackle the fundamental problems of the country.

After the election, the answer to this question (which was no) became clear. Immediately after being elected, Duarte appointed Colonel Carlos Vides Casanova, who ordered the killing of the American nuns, as his defense minister. Less than two months later, a US-trained Salvadoran military unit killed 80 unarmed civilians in what became known as the “Los Llanitos Massacre”. Many of the victims were raped and tortured, and a number of the corpses were missing limbs or heads. At least eighteen children were among the dead. A month later, a nearly identical incident occurred along the banks of the Gualsinga River, in which the military killed fifty civilians.

These episodes continued all the way through to the last year of Duarte’s presidency, in which Salvadoran soldiers killed six Jesuit priests, their housekeepers, and a university student who witnessed the killings. A 1987 public opinion poll found that 62% of the population felt that, since the election, the situation has either gotten worse, or that “nothing has changed.” Only 10% felt that they were living in a free democracy. The bar for what constitutes a “fabulous achievement” is thus quite low.

El Salvador is not Venezuela. The problems of the latter are largely economic, and there exists no fear of death squads or massacres by warring militants. However, Elliot Abram’s blueprint for a successful democracy leaves a lot to be desired, and plenty for Venezuelans to be worried about. Toppling a government without any concern for the ensuing human cost of such a destabilization is a recipe for disaster, regardless of whether the next government is technically considered a “democracy.”

Elliot Abrams, who has denied just about every one of the aforementioned human rights abuses in El Salvador, said in a 1998 interview that “While it was important to us to promote the cause of human rights in Central America it was more important to prevent a communist takeover in El Salvador.” The population of Venezuela likely has a different set of priorities, which helps explain their skepticism towards foreign intervention (especially by the United States). A 2018 poll of Venezuelans found that while 63% supported a “negotiated settlement to remove Maduro,” 54% opposed doing so via “foreign intervention.”

If the concerns of the Venezuelan people are to be considered, their opinions must be recognized. They deserve better than Maduro, and they deserve better than Elliot Abrams.

Photo: Anyul Rivas