What Did Elliott Abrams Have to Do With the El Mozote Massacre?
In a testy exchange with Elliott Abrams on Wednesday, Representative Ilhan Omar resurrected the memory of El Salvador’s El Mozote massacre, one of the worst mass killings in modern Latin American history. Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, was all of two months old when the December 1981 massacre took place. Abrams, President Donald Trump’s new special envoy for Venezuela, was a senior State Department official in the Reagan administration, which was sending military and economic aid into El Salvador to defeat a leftist insurgency and stop what it saw as a wave of communism approaching the United States.
What happened in 1981? And what did Abrams have to do with it?
More than 900 peasants were murdered in and around several villages in the eastern province of Morazán. Most were old men, women,
