US special envoy for Venezuela

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By Ray Sanchez, CNN
Updated 5:41 PM ET, Sat January 26, 2019

(CNN)The Trump administration's new special envoy on the Venezuelan political crisis is well known in Latin American circles -- from his guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair to his attempt to discredit accounts of the massacre of nearly 1,000 people by a US-trained military battalion in El Salvador.

Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative Republican insider, was named by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week to direct all aspects of the American campaign to replace Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/26/americas/elliott-abrams-venezuela-special-envoy-career/index.html

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1. Tortured truth on El Salvador

By Guy Gugliotta and Douglas Farah
March 21, 1993

... Abrams, as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, dismissed reports published in The Washington Post and the New York Times of massacres by Salvadoran army soldiers of hundreds of people in the village of El Mozote in December 1981.

... the Truth Commission's report is blunt and unequivocal in its assertions and heavily buttressed in most cases by new details that reflect extensive interviews both with victims' families and members of the armed forces ...

In El Mozote, where the identified victims exceeded 200, "the men were tortured and executed, then the women were executed and finally, the children," the report said. Soldiers killed one group of children, it added, by spraying machine-gun fire through the doors and windows of a tiny building where they were penned up.

During the 1982 hearing, Enders and Abrams said they had sent two military officers into the area to check the massacre reports. They said the investigators talked with nearby peasants but could not reach the village and concluded that the incident could not be confirmed. Enders cast doubt on the reports, noting that the total population of El Mozote was 300 people, and "there are manifestly a great many people still there" ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/03/21/12-years-of-tortured-truth-on-el-salvador/9432bb6f-fbd0-4b18-b254-29caa919dc98/?utm_term=.ae7f196e7333