The 2001 Version of "Our Man in Honduras" -- John Negroponte

[magbana]

TOPIC: Some important history: the 2001 version of Our Man in Honduras
http://groups.google.com/group/Cuba-Inside-Out/t/418c034cf7094e83?hl=en
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Thurs, Jul 23 2009 4:35 pm
From: "Karen Lee Wald"

This is NOT the recently circulated article by the same name; it's one written in 2001 about the US' "man in Honduras", John Negroponte.......worth reading...


Our Man in Honduras
By Stephen Kinzer

New York Review of Books
Volume 48, Number 14
September 20, 2001

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14485

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 tranquility, 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.

s 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 States 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.