The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled hearings on the
nomination of John Negroponte as UN Ambassador tomorrow, Thursday,
Sep. 13, 11 a.m. EST. We need to flood the lines of the Foreign
Relations Committee (see phone numbers below). It is suggested that
each of us call a minimum of three times. Thanks, SOAWatch West.
SOA Watch West - Sept. 11, 2001
Spread the word to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that you've read
the article below!
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(A) Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Member of Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Phone 202-224-3553 (Ask for Shawn.)
No DC Fax Number available
(B) Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE)
Chair, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Phone 202-224-5042
Fax 202-224-0139
(C) Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
not a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Phone 202-224-3841
Fax 202-228-3954
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The New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14485)
September 20, 2001
Our Man in Honduras by Stephen Kinzer
When a country finds itself at the center of world history, it begins
attracting spies, mercenaries, war profiteers, journalists, prostitutes, and
fortune-seekers. Often they gravitate to a particular hotel. In Honduras,
which was shaken from its long slumber in the 1980s and turned into a violent
staging ground for cross-border war, the Maya was that hotel. Perched atop a
high hill near the central plaza in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, its tinted
windows giving it an air of mystery, the Maya attracted a variety of sinister
characters. Counterrevolutionaries hatched bloody plots over breakfast beside
the pool. You could buy a machine gun at the bar. Busloads of crew-cut
Americans would arrive from the airport at times when I knew there were no
commercial flights landing, spend the night, and then ship out before dawn;
they said they didn't know where they were going, and I believed them.
Friends told me that death squad torturers stopped in for steak before
setting off on their night's work. But in those days, much of what anyone
said in Honduras was a lie. That was certainly true at the Maya, and equally
so at the American embassy a couple of miles away.
The diplomat who presided over that embassy from 1981 to 1985, John Dimitri
Negroponte, was a great fabulist. He saw, or professed to see, a Honduras
almost Scandinavian in its tranquillity, a place where there were no
murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine
jails or cemeteries. Now that President Bush has nominated Negroponte to be
United States ambassador to the United Nations, his record in Honduras is
coming under new scrutiny. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a
hearing on his nomination soon, probably in September. With the chairmanship
of the committee now passed from Jesse Helms to Joseph Biden, this hearing
promises to be anything but routine. It will recall the polarizing drama of
Central America in the 1980s, a historical chapter that seemed closed but
that the Bush administration has chosen to reopen. It may even throw some
light onto places that have for two decades been as dark and scary as the
Maya Hotel bar at midnight.
Over the last few weeks, investigators for the Foreign Relations Committee
have been reading classified government documents written by or about
Negroponte. They have also conducted an extensive private interview with him.
At the committee hearing on his nomination, senators are likely to ask him
about what they suspect were false reports that he filed on human rights
conditions in Honduras, and about questionable sworn testimony he later gave
the committee.
"The material we reviewed pertains specifically to that time in Honduras and
to the question of the alleged and real human rights abuses that took place,"
said Norman Kurtz, a spokesman for Senator Biden. "The key question people
are asking is what John Negroponte knew at the time and to what extent did he
report back to the State Department. We are trying to have some of these
documents quickly reclassified so we can have them on the record at the time
of the hearing."
In Honduras Negroponte exercised US power in ways that still reverberate
throughout that small country. His most striking legacy, though, is the
Honduras of his imagination. Most people who lived or worked in Honduras
during the 1980s saw a nation spiraling into violence and infested by
paramilitary gangs that kidnapped and killed with impunity. Negroponte would
not acknowledge this. He realized that the Reagan policy in Central America
would lose support if truths about Honduras were known, so he refused to
accept them.
By nominating Negroponte as ambassador to the United Nations, the Bush
administration is sending at least two clear messages. The first is addressed
to the UN itself. During his years in Honduras, Negroponte acquired a
reputation, justified or not, as an old-fashioned imperialist. Sending him to
the UN serves notice that the Bush administration will not be bound by
diplomatic niceties as it conducts its foreign policy.
Negroponte's nomination is also part of a concerted effort to rehabilitate
those who planned and organized the Nicaraguan contra war of the 1980s. When
last heard from, these men were objects of public opprobrium and, in some
cases, criminal indictments. Bush administration officials believe that they
were shamefully mistreated and that they ought to be honored for their
much-maligned service. No one is more worthy in their eyes than Negroponte,
whose work made it possible for the United States to turn Honduras into a
staging area for the contra war.
"In this new administration, we have a lot of people who are a decade or two
older than the people who had the same jobs in the last administration," a
State Department official told me. "They remember the cold war. They want to
reward and elevate people who fought on our side, including people who
supported the contras. Negroponte is known as a guy who is devoted to
realpolitik, which is in many ways the opposite of what the UN stands for.
Giving him this job is a way of telling the UN: 'We hate you.'"
Honduras has fallen far from the world's attention, which may be a good
thing. During the 1980s it was the base for a marauding army of
anti-Sandinista fighters from neighboring Nicaragua, the platform for
American military maneuvers in which thousands of soldiers and paratroopers
staged mock invasions, and a dangerous place for dissidents. Guerrilla war
raged across all three of its borders. Jack Binns, the American ambassador
who arrived in 1980, was horrified by what he saw. In June 1981 he sent a
cable to Washington saying he was "deeply concerned at increasing evidence of
officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations" and warning that "repression
has built up a head of steam much faster than we had anticipated." That was
not what the Reagan administration wanted to hear. Binns fell from favor and
was soon recalled. John Negroponte became the new sheriff in town.
2.
Born in London to a well-to-do Greek family, Negroponte attended Exeter and
Yale, joined the foreign service straight out of college, and was dispatched
to Vietnam, where he served as a political officer at the American embassy.
Between 1971 and 1973 he was officer-in-charge for Vietnam on Henry
Kissinger's National Security Council, and he advised Kissinger during the
Paris peace talks. He developed a reputation as a hard-liner and broke
temporarily with Kissinger when he thought Kissinger was making too many
concessions to the North Vietnamese. In 1981, when the Reagan
administration's Sandinista-hunters needed a reliable man in Honduras to
replace Jack Binns, he was an obvious choice.
If Honduras is thought of at all, it is as a quintessential backwater, the
epitome of the banana republic. That stereotype is not entirely inaccurate,
nor is it necessarily negative. Being a backwater has not allowed Honduras to
escape the poverty and social inequality that afflicts most of Central
America. It has, however, brought a measure of domestic peace that is
remarkable on the isthmus. Honduras never had great massacres like the one
that shattered El Salvador in 1932, or bloody family dictatorships like the
one that dominated Nicaragua for nearly half a century, or waves of sustained
repression like those that have devastated Guatemala. During the twentieth
century, Hondurans managed to work out social arrangements that, while not
seriously addressing the needs of the poor majority, at least allowed that
majority to live and work in relative peace. The army played an important
part in national life, even ruling directly for several periods, including
one that lasted until 1982; but it treated the population with a measure of
respect. By Central American standards, these were precious and highly
important achievements.
During the early 1980s, the social peace to which Hondurans were accustomed
was shattered. Leftist revolutionaries had taken power in Nicaragua and were
gaining strength in El Salvador and Guatemala. The Reagan administration was
determined to turn back this tide by force, and chose Honduras as its
platform from which to do so. American military engineers built bases,
airstrips, and supply depots at key spots around the country. American troops
poured in for saber-rattling maneuvers whose main purpose was to intimidate
the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. American intelligence agents trained
Hondurans in techniques of surveillance and interrogation. Between 1980 and
1984, United States military aid to Honduras increased from $4 million to $77
million. Economic aid surpassed $200 million by 1985, making Honduras, with
its four million people, the eighth-largest recipient of American foreign aid.
After Congress cut off aid to the contras in late 1984, the Honduran
government also began to distance itself from the contra project, even
intercepting a shipment of arms intended for contra fighters. This alarmed
the White House. President Reagan telephoned his Honduran counterpart,
Roberto Suazo Córdova, and sent then Vice President George Bush to meet with
him. Honduras soon resumed its old policy of helping the contras. At the same
time, according to a US government document, the United States released aid
to Honduras that had been blocked, "expedited delivery of US military items
to Honduras," and expanded "several security programs underway for the
Honduran security forces."[1] Ambassador Negroponte, who was present at the
Bush-Suazo meeting, was asked about it at a 1989 Senate hearing. He said he
could not recall any direct mention of an arrangement under which the United
States increased its aid to Honduras in exchange for Honduras's commitment to
support the contras.
As the United States raised Honduras to the status of an important military
ally, cultivating its senior officers and pouring money into its modest army,
the military naturally became a more powerful force in Honduran society.
Almost overnight it found itself with unimaginable amounts of money and
resources, along with the blessing and active encouragement of the United
States. The delicate balance that had kept Honduras at relative peace for
generations was upset.
The personification of this change was General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, a
passionate anti-Communist who had been trained at the US Army School of the
Americas and in Argentina. He believed that Honduras should take the
Argentine approach to dealing with dissent, which consisted largely of
kidnapping suspects and torturing them to death in secret jails. His
fanaticism disturbed some of his comrades, but when American officials
decided to use Honduras as a base for the contra war, they found him an eager
ally. He was willing not only to turn over parts of Honduran territory to the
contras and allow them to function with impunity, but also to tolerate and
even direct the "disappearance" of Hondurans who protested.
There is no doubt that Marxist subversives were at work in Honduras. In the
summer of 1983 a band of ninety-six guerrillas entered Honduras from
Nicaragua with the declared intention of setting off a revolutionary war.
They were tracked with the help of American helicopters, and in a matter of
weeks their column was wiped out. The fate of many of the guerrillas,
however, remains unclear. Two whose bodies were never found, a former Green
Beret named David Arturo Baez Cruz and a Catholic priest, Reverend James
Carney, were American citizens. Relatives of both men say that Ambassador
Negroponte repeatedly stymied their efforts to find out what the United
States knows about their cases.
Although everyone agreed that subversives were at work in Honduras, there was
intense debate about how the authorities should deal with them, their
sympathizers, and outspoken leaders of labor, peasant, and student
organizations. American documents show that General Álvarez, who was chief of
the Honduran security police and then the country's top military commander,
favored the simple expedient of murder. Among the special units he created to
carry out this policy was Battalion 3-16 (or 316), which has become the most
infamous military unit in Honduran history. According to a heavily edited
version of a CIA report that was released in 1998, Brigade 3-16 emerged as an
independent entity "based on recommendations from the 'Strategic Military
Seminar' between the Honduran and the US military."[2] Some of its members
were flown to the United States for training by CIA specialists. One of them,
Florencio Caballero, has given a detailed account of the "horrible things" he
did to dissidents in secret jails; one of the few survivors, Inés Murillo,
has corroborated his account, describing an eighty-day ordeal that included
beatings, electric shocks, and sexual abuse.[3]
Although I and other news correspondents in Honduras did not know details
like this at the time, we all sensed the pall descending over the country.
Political activists lived in constant fear. Hardly a day passed without a
newspaper article about a kidnapping, assassination, or "disappearance"; by
one count, over three hundred such articles appeared in 1982 alone. Also in
that year, a former chief of Honduran military intelligence, Colonel Leonidas
Torres Arias, held a press conference in Mexico to denounce "a death squad
operating in Honduras led by armed forces chief General Gustavo Álvarez."
Ambassador Negroponte was not impressed. "I have a lot of difficulty taking
those kinds of accusations seriously," he told a Honduran reporter.
In a series of statements whose distance from reality seemed bizarre,
Negroponte insisted that the repressive violence everyone else saw in
Honduras was not happening. What is more, he publicly endorsed the officers
who were directing it. In October 1982 he wrote a letter to The Economist
protesting a dispatch it had published about the emergence of death squads in
Honduras. He called the dispatch "simply untrue," and asserted that Honduras
was blessed with "increasingly professional armed forces" and "liberal
democratic institutions including full freedom of expression."
That same year, the State Department's annual human rights report on
Honduras, prepared under Negroponte's direction, found "no evidence of
systematic violation of judicial procedures" and even praised General
Álvarez, who "recently issued a public statement denying that the government
used torture and specifically stated that torture was not to be used on
prisoners." Negroponte's 1983 report was equally positive. It found that "the
Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a
political or nonpolitical nature," that there were "no political prisoners in
Honduras," that "sanctity of the home is guaranteed by the Constitution and
generally observed," and that "freedom of speech and the press are respected."
In February 1984 Negroponte told Hedrick Smith, a reporter for The New York
Times, that he did not believe Honduran society was being militarized, and
added ritual praise of General Álvarez, who, he said, was "committed to the
constitutional process." Apparently he was the last person in Honduras who
believed that. Even Álvarez's fellow officers had come to fear him as an
out-of-control dictator-in-the-making, and in a surprisingly well-planned
coup on March 31, they arrested him and packed him off into exile. The
Pentagon, always ready to help an old friend, hired him as a consultant on
unconventional warfare, ultimately paying him more than $50,000 for his
undoubted expertise. In the late 1980s he began making trips back to Honduras
in what seemed like a bid to regain some of his former power. That was a
miscalculation; he was assassinated on a Tegucigalpa street in January 1989.
Several months after the assassination, Negroponte appeared before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, which was considering his nomination by
President Bush as ambassador to Mexico. When asked about Battalion 3-16, he
replied: "I have never seen any convincing substantiation that they were
involved in death-squad-type activities."
All that has been discovered in the last few years about General Álvarez and
Battalion 3-16 confirms what logical deduction told us during the 1980s. The
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asserted in 1988 that "there were
many kidnappings and disappearances in Honduras from 1981 to 1984 and that
those acts were attributable to the Armed Forces of Honduras." A long inquiry
by the Baltimore Sun in 1995 found that hundreds of Hondurans "were
kidnapped, tortured and killed in the 1980s by a secret army unit trained and
supported by the Central Intelligence Agency." The reporters who conducted
the inquiry based their conclusion in part on declassified documents that
"show the CIA and the US Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder
and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its
leaders."[4]
3.
The political climate in Honduras improved after the contra war ended, and in
1992 President Rafael Callejas named a prominent law professor, Leo
Valladares Lanza, as the country's first commissioner for human rights.
Valladares investigated the disappearances of the 1980s and early 1990s, and
produced a lengthy report called The Facts Speak for Themselves. It documents
the cases of 179 people who disappeared after being abducted, and assigns
responsibility for most of these crimes to Honduran police and security
agencies. Valladares concluded:
During this same period, despite the significant increases in foreign
assistance to Honduras, the State Department failed to recognize and respond
to credible reports of human rights violations in Honduras, particularly the
increasingly common phenomenon of disappearances.... The number of
disappearances increased dramatically between January 1982 and March 1984,
while General Álvarez was commander-in-chief of the armed forces. In this
period, there existed within the armed forces a deliberate policy of
kidnapping and forcibly disappearing persons suspected of having ties to the
Nicaraguan government, the Salvadoran guerrillas, and people simply
considered political or union leaders or peasant activists.[5]
Soon after Valladares completed his investigation, the CIA inspector general
made one of his own. The version of his report that was released in 1998 is
heavily censored but still goes far beyond what Negroponte has ever admitted.
It concludes that "the Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights
abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially
sanctioned." It also suggests that diplomats at Negroponte's embassy were
discouraged from reporting these abuses. One of these diplomats, whose name
is blotted out in the public version of the report, is quoted as saying that
"the embassy country team in Honduras wanted reports on subjects such as this
to be benign" because reporting about murders, executions, and corruption
"would reflect negatively on Honduras and not be beneficial in carrying out
US policy." In one edited section of the report that apparently deals with a
1983 atrocity, the inspector general concludes that Negroponte
was particularly sensitive regarding the issue and was concerned that earlier
CIA reporting on the same topic might create human rights problems for
Honduras. Based on the ambassador's reported concerns, ______ actively
discouraged ______ from following up the information reported by the ______
source.
The next two pages of the report are censored in their entirety.
A former commander of Battalion 3-16, General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, might
have made an informative witness at Negroponte's confirmation hearing, but
although he has lived in Florida for several years, he is suddenly
unavailable. He left the United States in February after his residence visa
was canceled. "I think you as journalists can draw your own conclusions," he
said upon returning to Honduras. When an American reporter asked about the
notorious battalion, he demurred, saying he wanted no more "problems with the
United States" because "your country is too powerful."
Around the same time that General Discua was deported, so was a second
veteran of the battalion, Juan Angel Hernández Lara; he spent an uneasy month
in Honduras, returned illegally to Florida, and was arrested and imprisoned
there. A third veteran, José Barrera, was deported from Canada in January.
But although these men are not talking, the effort to uncover their secrets
is continuing. This month Honduran investigators plan to begin searching for
human remains near the old base at Aguacate, which during the 1980s was a
bustling headquarters for American and Honduran troops. The Honduran official
who announced the search said: "Justice maintains the hope that sooner or
later, the matter of the disappeared will be resolved."
Negroponte had some trouble finding another diplomatic post after he left
Honduras in 1985, but he went on to have a successful career. For a time he
returned to a job he had held before, deputy assistant secretary of state for
oceans and fisheries affairs. Later he worked as Colin Powell's deputy on the
National Security Council. He was confirmed as ambassador to Mexico in 1989,
and he served there when the United States was negotiating the North American
Free Trade Agreement and giving help to the Mexican government in its fight
against Zapatista rebels. In 1993 President Clinton named him ambassador to
the Philippines. When he retired from the foreign service in 1997 to become
an executive at McGraw-Hill, he could claim the friendship of high officials
from both parties.
"He's professional, competent, creative, he has the right integrity, and he
serves the administration," former Secretary of State George Shultz told me
by telephone one day recently. "He has a sense of the distance between people
who get elected and people who serve." Shultz also said that Negroponte's
many contacts in Washington, built up over thirty-seven years in the foreign
service, would allow him to build support there for United Nations
initiatives: "In that job, it isn't only what you do in New York or on the
Security Council. It's what you do in Washington to build a base for what you
do."
Negroponte is not the only beneficiary of the Bush administration's drive to
rehabilitate former contra warriors. Roger Noriega, an aide to Senator Jesse
Helms who was a vigorous contra supporter, has been nominated as ambassador
to the Organization of American States. Elliott Abrams, who as undersecretary
of state in the Reagan administration was a principal architect of the contra
project and who later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of misleading
Congress over the Iran-contra affair, is working as a human rights specialist
at the National Security Council. And Otto Reich, a militant Cuban exile and
lobbyist for Bacardi and Lockheed-Martin, has been nominated to be assistant
secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, the post Abrams once held.
Reich's corporate connections and colorful statements, like one in which he
compared the Baltimore Orioles' baseball tour of Cuba to "playing soccer in
Auschwitz," make him a tempting target for senators. In many ways he is an
easier one than Negroponte.
Yet Negroponte's case is different from the others because the position to
which he has been nominated would make him a highly visible figure in world
affairs, a spokesman for the United States and its values. One of his first
tasks would be to try to regain the seat the United States recently lost on
the UN Human Rights Commission. Presumably he would have to argue that the
United States is a faithful defender of human rights, not one of those
hypocritical nations that observe principles only when it suits them.
News of the Negroponte nomination has jogged the memories of several people
who met him in Honduras. One of them, Juan Almendares, was rector of the
Autonomous University of Honduras and a critic of United States policy toward
his country. In a column published last month in the Honduran newspaper El
Tiempo, he recalled a frosty meeting with Negroponte in 1982 that left him
convinced Negroponte would try to prevent his reelection as rector that
year.[6] Almendares was reelected, but his victory was challenged in court.
Soon afterward a friend of his, Justice José Benjamin Cisne Reyes of the
Honduran Supreme Court, came to him with a remarkable story. The entire
Supreme Court had just been called before a triumvirate made up of Ambassador
Negroponte, General Álvarez, and President Suazo, who "pressured us to annul
your recent reelection as rector, giving the reason that you endanger the
security of the state." Judge Cisne said he would vote to commit "this
dishonest act" out of fear for his and Almendares's life. Other judges
evidently felt the same way. Almendares's reelection was annulled, and a
prominent critic of United State policy was thereby removed from public life.
Those who know Negroponte, including some of his critics, agree that he is
informed, perceptive, hard-working, and well versed in the ways of
Washington. He has obviously mastered a key diplomatic skill, the ability to
embrace the policy of the moment. That is a classic definition of loyalty. In
Central America during the 1980s, however, some United States ambassadors
interpreted loyalty differently. By reporting what they saw and refusing to
shape their cables to meet the political demands of the moment, they exposed
the reality of disturbing places like the Maya Hotel, in some cases at the
cost of their careers. When senators make their decision on Negroponte, they
will have to consider the responsibilities of diplomats, the meaning of duty,
and the limits of loyalty.
-August 21, 2001
Notes
[1] "US Government Stipulation on Quid Pro Quos with Other Governments as
Part of Contra Operations," filed April 6, 1989, at the trial of Colonel
Oliver North; quoted in The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History,
edited by Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne (New Press, 1993), p. 91.
[2] "The 316th MI Batallion," secret CIA cable dated February 18, 1995,
declassified October 22, 1998, as Document H4-4, approved for release
September 1998.
[3] "Report of Investigation: Selected Issues Related to CIA Activities in
Honduras in the 1980s" (96-0125-IG), August 27, 1997, declassified October
22, 1998, as Document H4-5; Caballero quoted in James LeMoyne, "Testifying to
Torture," The New York Times Magazine, June 5, 1988, pp. 45.
[4] Cited in judgment of July 29, 1988, Inter-American Court of Human Rights
(Ser. C) No. 4 (1988); Baltimore Sun, June 11, 1995, p. 1.
[5] The Facts Speak for Themselves: The Preliminary Report of the National
Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras (Center for
Justice and International Law/ Human Rights Watch, 1994), pp. 212, 225.
[6]El Tiempo, July 31, 2001
