National Review Online
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Three weeks ago, Elliott Abrams returned to government.
This was very good news for U.S. foreign policy. He is the State Department’s
special representative for Venezuela. And his presence on the public stage has
reignited passions about the Reagan administration’s record in Latin America.
Abrams was the assistant secretary of state for Latin
America in Reagan’s second term. During the first, he had been assistant
secretary for international organizations, and then for human rights. (Abrams
joined the administration when he was in his early 30s.)
Like many others he was caught up in the Iran-Contra
affair, and he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. (Two
misdemeanor counts.) He was pardoned by the first President Bush. There is a
story to be told about all this, which we will not get into here. Abrams told
it in a book, Undue Process: A Story of
How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes.
The second President Bush made Abrams part of his
national-security team, first in the area of democracy and human rights. Then
he gave Abrams a Middle East portfolio. Later, Abrams wrote a memoir, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and
the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In recent years, he has been a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In short, Elliott Abrams is one of the wisest, most
experienced foreign-policy heads in this country. He is also a steadfast
advocate of freedom, democracy, and human rights, or American values, if you
like.
Yesterday he appeared on Capitol Hill and encountered Ilhan
Omar. She is a freshman House member — a Democrat from Minnesota — who has had
a lively first month. We editorialized about her and anti-Semitism on Monday (here).
She called Mr. Abrams “Mr. Adams.” (Congratulations,
Elliott, you’re a Gentile!) She got a lot else wrong too. She swiped at Abrams
for the Iran-Contra affair — and refused to let him defend himself. She went on
to accuse him of being complicit in the rape, murder, and mayhem of Central
America — El Salvador, in particular.
To see this performance on C-SPAN, go here.
A great many hailed this performance, certainly on the
old anti-Reagan left. It was as though the Christic Institute and CISPES had
come back to life. Social media rang out with the old charges, the old smears,
the old libels. Not all of Abrams’s enemies are on the left, of course. David
Duke, of Klan fame, or infamy, chimed in with “Rep. Omar clashes with Zionist
war criminal.”
Look: When Reagan and his people took office in 1981,
dictatorship was the rule in Latin America (as in the world at large). A rare
exception was . . . Venezuela. Funny to think of at present, in a dark way. El
Salvador was in the grip of its civil war. In 1980, Archbishop Romero had been
murdered as he was celebrating mass. Groups on left and right, throughout Latin
America, murdered with abandon. These were “dirty wars,” in the phrase of the day.
Remember, too, that the 1980s were Cold War times. The
Soviets and their Cuban proxy were doing everything they could to Castroize the
region.
Reagan, with Vice President Bush, George Shultz, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Elliott Abrams, and stalwart others, worked energetically for
democratic transitions — in Latin America, yes, but in other parts of the world
too (e.g., South Korea). In El Salvador, the administration backed José
Napoleón Duarte, the Christian Democrat. He was opposed by the FMLN on the left
and ARENA on the right. Reagan’s policy was controversial on our own right.
Many conservatives backed ARENA, chief among them Jesse Helms.
In 1984, Salvadorans went to the polls, braving
terrorism, and, in a free election, chose Duarte. El Salvador, for all its
problems, has been democratic ever since. This is a “fabulous achievement,” as
Abrams tried to explain to the congresswoman.
Duarte made a state visit to Washington in 1987. Reagan
said, “President Duarte, having fought the brutality and repression of Left and
Right, has come to symbolize the struggle for democracy in this hemisphere.” He
also said, “If peace is to prevail, so must democracy.”
The Salvadoran president, for his part, did something
startling and memorable. He said, “I’ve seen through my life many times when
people with hate in their heart put fire to the American flag. This time,
permit me to go to your flag and, in the name of my people, give it a kiss.”
And so he did.
Before the Reaganites left office, the countries of Latin
America had democratized or were well on their way. Speaking at Moscow State
University in 1988, Reagan said, “The growth of democracy has become one of the
most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin America in the 1970s,
only a third of the population lived under democratic government; today over 90
percent does.”
In 2012, there was a Chilean film, No, about the 1988 plebiscite. This was the vote that saw the
dictator Pinochet out of office. Elliott Abrams wrote about the movie, here.
He describes a scene: Two men are talking about the upcoming plebiscite. They
are on either side of the question. The Pinochet man says that America is
supporting his guy, the “incumbent,”
the dictator. The other man says no: “Los gringos están con nosotros” (“The
gringos are with us”).
Yes, they were. Yes, we were. There were some rotten
choices to be made in Latin America, from the point of view of the U.S.
government, and there were often not many democrats on offer. But the
Reaganites’ record is honorable, even laudatory, and this silly, ignorant House
freshman, though she did not intend so, has given us the happy opportunity of
lauding them again.
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