testifying before a joint Senate-House Committee in Washington, DC, on June 2, 1987 [Lama Harris/AP Photo]

In his previous government roles, Abrams was known as a hawk on Latin America, with his critics pointing to his involvement in controversial US decisions in Central America, as well as his reported links to the 2002 failed coup attempt against the late Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez.

In 1991, he pleaded guilty to two counts of misleading Congress about the Reagan administration’s efforts to help the Nicaraguan guerrillas (known as the Contras) during a period when Congress had banned such aid. He was later pardoned by George HW Bush.

A decade earlier, he sought to discredit witness accounts of a massacre in the indigenous El Salvador community of El Mozote and surrounding villages, in whichSalvadoran troops rounded up men, women and children, gunned them down and set their homes on fire. Some 1,000 people were killed by soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion, who had recently been trained by the US. During the country’s 12-year civil war, the US also sent billions of dollars to the Salvadoran government.

According to Human Rights Watch, Abrams “artfully distorted several issues in order to discredit the public accounts of the massacre” during a Senate hearing on the massacre.

The rights organisation said this included his insistence that the casualty figures couldn’t have been as high because only 300 people were living in El Mozote at the time. His comments came despite witness accounts that said about 500 people were living in El Mozote and reports that the massacre