Tell the President and your Senators: Elliott Abrams, Death Squad Advocate, is No Diplomat

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

To President Biden: Please withdraw your nomination of Elliott Abrams for the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. His support of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala during the Reagan Administration makes him unsuitable to represent public diplomacy in the twenty-first century. There are other candidates you can, and should, nominate to this bipartisan position.

To your Senators: I’ve asked President Biden to withdraw his nomination of Elliott Abrams for the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. San Francisco is a sanctuary city for refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala, so Mr. Abrams’s support of death squads in those countries during the Reagan administration makes him unsuitable to be involved in American diplomacy today. If he does not withdraw the nomination, you should oppose it.

Background

President Biden likes to promote bipartisanship in government, in response to the public sentiment that Congress is too divided. He highlights achievements in bipartisan legislation such as the successful Infrastructure and Jobs Act with hundreds of projects rolling out nationwide. These bills drew on shared values of both parties to repair our long-neglected infrastructure and strengthen it as the climate emergency worsens all around us.

There should never be bipartisan cooperation when it comes to threats to human rights. Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration have fought to resist Republican efforts to roll back hard-won civil and human rights in the US. Democrats have also fought to protect immigrants’ rights and want to do more.

Critics, human rights advocates, and all those who value democratic principles agree that Abrams's nomination is indefensible. His legacy of deception and brutal policies tarnishes any commitment by President Biden to human rights and global diplomacy. This man has no business being seated on President Biden’s Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

Many of the immigrants rushing to the United States in this century are fleeing the ongoing consequences of the Reagan administration’s support for vicious authoritarian governments in Central America and their death squads. Elliott Abrams was the point man for those campaigns and a key player in the Iran-Contra scandals, summarized here by David Corn in the Nation:

When Congress, by fair vote, decided in the 1980s that the United States should not assist the contras fighting the socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the Reagan White House concocted several imaginative ways to pull an end-run around democracy. This mainly entailed outsourcing the job to a small band of private sector covert operators and to foreign governments, which were privately requested or pressured by the Reaganites to support the secret contra support operation. The “Iran” side of the scandal came from President Ronald Reagan’s covert efforts to sell weapons to Iran to obtain the release of American hostages held by terrorist groups supposedly under the control of Tehran–at a time when the White House was publicly declaring it would not negotiate with terrorists. The two clandestine projects merged when cash generated from the weapons transactions with Iran was diverted to the contra operation.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, reminds us that Abrams’s "most notorious [act of] public diplomacy is downplaying the 1981 El Mozote massacre of 1,000 people by U.S.-trained-and-equipped Salvadoran military units." In an Atlantic profile of Abrams in 2019, former New York Times El Salvador correspondent Raymond Bonner wrote that:

In El Salvador, the Reagan administration, with Abrams as point man, routinely defended the Salvadoran government in the face of evidence that its regular army, and allied right-wing death squads, were operating with impunity, killing peasants, students, union leaders, and anyone considered anti-government or pro-guerrilla. Abrams went so far as to defend one of the death squads' most notorious leaders, Roberto D'Aubuisson, who was responsible for the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass, in March 1980.

This is a vivid subject for San Francisco residents. We protested the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero. In 1985 then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein signed legislation designating San Francisco as a sanctuary city for immigrants seeking asylum from El Salvador and Guatemala, and in 1989 San Francisco voters passed the Sanctuary City Ordinance extending the policy to all immigrants.

During the Reagan administration, Roberto D'Aubuisson was being feted as a celebrity by the American conservative movement. “From there, Abrams kept popping up every time there was a Republican administration in need of a proven public liar willing to support the death squads du jour. He fronted for Efrain Rios Montt, the genocidal leader of Guatemala,” Charles P. Pierce reported in Esquire magazine.

Elliott Abrams was thoroughly embroiled in the Central American part of the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1986 he appeared before a Congressional inquiry. Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating Iran-Contra, was prepared to indict him for several felonies. His charges were reduced to misdemeanors, and he pled guilty to lying to Congress in 1991. In December of 1992, President George H.W. Bush pardoned almost everyone involved in Iran-Contra, including Abrams.

We thought we’d heard the last of him for a while, but he keeps turning up like a bad penny. Pierce again:

President George W. Bush used him as a cog in the mendacity machine behind the drive to war in Iraq. When [Trump] was elected in 2016, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to make Abrams his deputy, but Abrams had been critical of the former president* during the campaign, which killed his chances. But Tillerson's successor, Mike Pompeo, found a place for Abrams as special envoy to Venezuela, which was a fancy way of saying "regime change engineer." Then Pompeo added Iran to his portfolio, which was distressing.

We hope President Biden and the Senate will listen to reason and allow Elliott Abrams to fade into the history books once and for all.

Because the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy can only have four out of seven members from the same political party, Biden must appoint a non-Democrat to the commission. But, as Mother Jones puts it, “why go with an apologist for war criminals?”