Missed this until a moment ago: Confirmed: Elliott Abrams's Defense of Mass Murder Was Based on Lies

[Judi Lynn]

The reporters who covered the El Mozote massacre were right all along.

By Eric Alterman
JANUARY 30, 2020

From the moment he won the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan began looking for somewhere to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Together with his advisers, he chose the Central American nation of El Salvador, where a civil war was raging between Marxist guerrillas and a military-led dictatorship.

To remain in power, the junta relied on “death squads” to kill not only its opponents but anyone who might even think of supporting its opponents, including nuns, priests, and children. The government claimed the death squads were independent, but in truth, they were just regular government soldiers, often (but not always) out of uniform. In order to justify US involvement in the war, Reagan had to defend the junta in the media. “We are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador,” Reagan lied in a 1981 news conference.

Congress, at the time, was much closer to the concerns of the public than now, and war remained deeply unpopular. Many Americans were not only appalled by the junta’s willingness to murder US-based nuns and churchwomen; they also feared US involvement in another anti-guerrilla war in which the country had no clear national interest. The bumper sticker “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam” spoke for these Americans as few slogans manage to do.

Although they had the country behind them, few Democrats were willing to risk taking the blame should El Salvador go communist, as Nicaragua appeared to be doing. To avoid responsibility, they devised a face-saving plan to demand that the Reagan administration undergo a process of “certification” to demonstrate that the Salvadorans were making progress in respecting human rights. In January 1982, just as the Reagan administration was preparing to make its very first certification, the White House found itself faced with reports of a massacre in the village of El Mozote, in the tiny, guerrilla-friendly canton of Morazan.

On the day before the first hearing, January 26, 1982, Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post simultaneously reported on an incident in which hundreds of unarmed civilians had been summarily murdered by uniformed Salvadoran soldiers. (Bonner put the number of victims between 722 and 926.) Neither reporter had seen the massacre take place, and both noted that their guides to the site had been associated with the guerrillas. Yet the journalists saw the corpses firsthand, and photographer Susan Meiselas documented many of them as well.

More:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230324133039/https://www.thenation.com/article/world/elliott-abrams-mozote/