Elliott Abrams and Human Rights in Latin America

Mike Allison writes about how Elliott Abrams is mad that The New York Times is claiming Ronald Reagan (and by extension him) was indifferent to human rights in El Salvador in its obituary of Ambassador Deane Hinton. As Abrams writes:

And Ronald Reagan was a great president under whom there were remarkable advances for human rights in Latin American and around the world. Let’s leave it at that.

Mike puts that in the context of Efraín Ríos Montt, who Reagan believed was a committed democrat, going on trial for genocide in Guatemala.

Let's just get something out of the way. The notion that there were any advances, much less remarkable ones, for human rights in Latin America--or anywhere, really--under Reagan requires ignoring Mt. Everest-sized mountains of contrary evidence. And it should be noted that Abrams himself served in the State Department under Reagan in a human rights capacity, and his idea of promoting human rights was to attack human rights organizations. Those groups, meanwhile, could only respond that Abrams was so vicious that sometimes his attacks helped their cause. More recently, he was a vocal supporter of the coup in Honduras.