U.S. Policy in El Salvador

In response to “History Has Vindicated Elliott Abrams,” Column Right, Nov. 17:

In his transparent attempt to sanitize the reputation of Elliott Abrams, the best George Weigel can do is give us reactionary rhetoric for substance and misinformation for fact. For all his effort to canonize Abrams as defender of the poor in El Salvador, Weigel’s contribution only serves to remind those of us who have actually accompanied the Salvadoran people in their struggle for peace and justice that Abrams and company are almost single-handedly responsible for the 12-year, $6-billion, Reagan-Bush human rights disaster there.

Though he can’t state it for the record because the facts clearly won’t support it, Weigel’s rhetoric strongly implies that Abrams is somehow responsible for free, untrammeled elections throughout Central America. Baloney! In El Salvador alone, over 75,000 souls have been sacrificed at the altar of doctrinaire rigidity and arrogance. The fact is that the Reagan/Bush brain trust, probably at the instance of Abrams, has supported just one party in El Salvador. It is the Arena Party. Arena is controlled by the henchmen of El Salvador’s internationally known reigning monarch of terror, Roberto D’Aubuisson, father of death squads whose horrifying work I have observed as a member of three human rights investigative delegations, in 1987, ’88 and ’89.

The Salvadoran people know only too well that there has never been, nor will there ever be, a truly free election in their long-suffering nation until the U.S. moves beyond the Abrams legacy by ceasing its practice of always arming the despot in Central America. A good way to begin would be for Congress to finally take responsibility for its sins of omission by immediately stopping all further military-related aid to El Salvador in any form.

DON W. LEWIS, San Marino