Washington, February 20 (RHC)-- U.S. Special Representative to Venezuela Elliott Abrams has threatened to take "measures" against teleSUR. Abrams said: "I don't have any announcements to make with respect to teleSUR but we are looking very carefully at it because we have had many reports that teleSUR is not actually a news source.”
Just over a year ago, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Abrams to handle President Donald Trump’s regime change ambitions in Venezuela, days after opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido declared himself the president of the South American country on January 23rd last year. Yet Abrams' role in coups, regime changes and interventionism in the region goes back decades.
The 72-year-old served under George W. Bush’s administration. During his time, Abrams played a role in the 2002 failed coup attempt against Chavez in Venezuela. Although he is especially infamous for his work under Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, where he served as assistant secretary of state.
In the wake of the Reagan’s election, the hawkish, neoconservative politician was among a group of advisers that believed the Nixon and Carter governments -- who were responsible for the killing of three million people in Vietnam and Laos -- were too friendly with the communists.
Advocating for an active U.S. role in the world and operating with total impunity over the years, he is the chief figure behind the most atrocious massacres and crimes in Latin America during that time. The Reagan administration with Abrams as the point man for the policy in Central America brutally intervened in countries where revolutionary movements were about to defeat dictatorships.
In Guatemala, some villages were sealed off so that surveillance could take place over communities, while other villages were razed and all the inhabitants assassinated. Abrams has also defended Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who conducted a campaign in which thousands of people from the country's Indigenous communities, were either massacred or disappeared. He even said that Rios Montt -- who was later convicted of genocide -- "brought considerable progress" for human rights in the country.
In Nicaragua, counterrevolutionary mercenary forces -- the Contras -- were funded to terrorize and kill anyone that would back the Sandinista revolution. Abrams was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran after the Islamic movement overthrew the U.S.-backed government. The U.S. administration had hoped to continue funding the Contras in Nicaragua, despite the fact that additional funding had been barred by Congress.
He was found guilty of illegally withholding information from Congress during the subsequent investigation but was later given a pardon from President George H.W. Bush.
The war criminal was also involved in the creation of death squads in El Salvador. A decade ago, he tried to undermine witness accounts of a massacre in the indigenous El Salvador community of El Mozote and surrounding villages, in which the U.S. trained Salvadoran troops rounded up men, women, and children shot them down and set their homes on fire.
