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<font size=3><br>
<i>1730 M Street NW, Suite 1010, Washington, D.C.
20036 Phone: 202-216-9261 Fax:
202-223-6035 <br>
Email: <a href="mailto:coha@coha.org">coha@coha.org</a>
Website: <a href="http://www.coha.org">www.coha.org</a> <br><br>
</i>Council On Hemispheric Affairs<br><br>
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the
Western Hemisphere<br><br>
<b>Memorandum to the Press 04.20<br><br>
Tuesday, April 27, 2004<br><br>
Word Count: 5,008<br><br>
</font><font size=6><u>ATTENTION<br><br>
</u></font><font size=3>Senate Foreign Relations Committee is right now
holding confirmation hearings on John Negroponte to be U.S. ambassador to
Iraq.<br><br>
COHA is here re-releasing its memorandum issued last Thursday on
Negroponte's controversial stint as ambassador to Honduras,
1981-85.<br><br>
<br><br>
Negroponte: Nominee for Baghdad Embassy, a Rogue for all
Seasons<br><br>
<br><br>
</b>· <b>Negroponte pressed
Powell to pressure Chile's and Mexico's weak-willed leaders to discharge
their U.N. ambassadors over Iraq votes.<br><br>
</b>· <b>Negroponte has a
sordid human rights record in Honduras.<br><br>
</b>· <b>A Cruel Joke:
Negroponte, the arch authoritarian, teaching democracy to the
Iraqis.<br><br>
</b>· <b>Life under Saddam
somewhat prepares you for the Negroponte era.<br><br>
</b>· <b>Senate Foreign
Relations Committee unlikely to closely scrutinize Negroponte
nomination.<br><br>
</b>· <b>Like the earlier
nominations of Otto Reich, John Bolton and Roger Noriega, Secretary of
State Colin Powell will have no trouble in describing this villain as an
honorableman.<br><br>
<br><br>
</b>President Bush confirmed recent rumors by announcing on Monday that
John D. Negroponte was being nominated to become this country's
ambassador to Iraq, a post that he would assume on June 30, when
sovereignty ostensibly will be transferred to Iraqi authorities.
But the Negroponte nomination must be seen as a profoundly troubling one
since the same nagging questions which were present during the summer of
2001, when Negroponte was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the UN,
continue to persist. Enough time apparently has passed since a
number of accusations first surfaced concerning Negroponte's profound
moral derelictions (which at least date back to the time that he served
as U.S. ambassador to Honduras (1981-85)), for these again to be
thoroughly aired. But if the past is any precedent, Negroponte will
sail through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the full Senate
as if he was a Happy Warrior rather than the immoral reprobate that his
record undeniably portrays him as being. Since then, Washington's
ability to slip into political amnesia regarding his reprehensible
actions in Honduras will now once again be at play. <br><br>
<br><br>
The central fact to the Negroponte story is that he misled Congress when
some of its members attempted to question him about his complicity in
helping to cover up his knowledge and direct personal involvement in the
training, equipping and distracting attention from the heinous acts of
Battalion 316, the Honduran death squad which at the time of Negroponte's
residence in Honduras was responsible for the murder of almost 200
Honduran dissidents opposed to their country being used as an unsinkable
aircraft carrierin the U.S.-backed Contra war against Nicaragua's leftist
Sandinistas. <br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Negroponte Arrives in Tegucigalpa<br><br>
</b>Negroponte replaced Jack Binns, who had been President Carters
ambassador to Honduras during 1980-81, after Binns had spoken out against
mounting evidence of major human rights violations occurring in that
country against political dissidents who dared to speak out against the
growing involvement of Honduras in the secret Contra war against
Sandinista Nicaragua. He made references to activities that were
being carried out by a shady operation which came to be known as
Battalion 316. A big part of this story is the flawed annual human
rights reports, prepared every year by U.S. embassies around the world,
which had to be presented to Congress under terms of the Foreign
Assistance Act. When it came to Honduras, this report was
significantly expurgated, first in Tegucigalpa by Negroponte, and then
once again after it reached Washington by then Assistant Secretary of
State for Humanitarian Affairs, the infamous Elliot Abrams. Abrams,
an obsessive cold warrior, had as little sympathy for human rights issues
in Honduras as he was in favor of them when it came to Cuba. This
operation subverted the law, and Abrams eventually confessed to his role
in the Iran-Contra war, but was later pardoned by the first President
Bush. This dominated Honduran realities during the early 1980s,
which were to further deteriorate during Negroponte's ambassadorial
stint. The new ambassador's mission was to ensure that the steady
stream of U.S. aid to Honduras, aimed at preventing the spread of
Communism by Sandinista Nicaragua, was to continue at any cost.
Years later, in 1995, a former junior political officer, who had worked
in the embassy under Negroponte, came forth with serious accusations
concerning the human rights lapses of the Honduran army in the annual
human rights report he was required to draft during the Negroponte
era. This report was meant to be sent to Congress, but he claimed
the charges had been eliminated or transformed by others by the time that
the report had reached its ultimate destination.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Negroponte Doctors Human Rights Reports<br><br>
</b>There is no question that Negroponte and the rest of the senior
embassy personnel must have known about the disappearances and tortures
of Honduran leftists since some of the most widely-distributed newspapers
in the country carried at least 318 stories about such military abuses in
1982 alone. Negroponte also had direct contact with General Gustavo
Alvarez Martinez, by then the chief of the Honduran armed forces and the
secret head of Battalion 316. Negroponte himself has insisted that
on occasion he requested the release of a torture victim when the story
was close to breaking in the U.S. press. This happened in the 1982
case of the arrest and torture of journalist Oscar Reyes and his wife,
Gloria. Clearly, Negroponte and the embassy knew enough about these
cases to act appropriately on occasion and when compelled by
circumstances to do so. <br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Negroponte Introduces the Hard Line<br><br>
</b>The replacement of Binns by Negroponte reflected a shifting foreign
policy strategy for Central America, witnessed by the introduction of the
Reagan administration's hard-line policy and its implementation by Elliot
Abrams; regarding Honduras, it was represented by the zealotry of the
ambassador in Tegucigalpa, John Negroponte.<br><br>
<br><br>
Negroponte's objective in Honduras was eerily familiar to the Bush
administration's present goal in Iraq. The U.S. government, again,
is attempting to implement a democratic format in a country that has not
yet chosen to do it on its own, and not necessarily by democratic
means. To implement this complex task will inevitably create a less
than ideal situation for the ambassador to fulfill his
instructions. But given Negroponte's well-practiced M.O. of dark
box chicanery, the spread of false information and outright lying, it is
doubtful that he will be any less controversial or contrived in his task
of successfully introducing democracy in Iraq than he was in Honduras,
perhaps because democracyis not exactly his stigmata. John
Negroponte is preeminently an-ends-justifies-the-means operator. He
repeatedly in the past has proven that he is willing to employ practices
which seem to be the antitheses of the definition of democratic, in
democracys good name. Negropontes career has been one where in his
professional life he has shown a willingness to use authoritarian means
to professedly advance democracy. <br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Which Man is Negroponte?<br><br>
</b>To his admirers, Negroponte is a distinguished career senior foreign
service officer who has served his country well in a number of important
posts. To his detractors, Negroponte is a blunt, self-serving
opportunist who aggressively (to a point well past overkill) took on what
he perceived as being the ideological ethos of whatever administration he
was serving at the time, even if it meant stretching credulity, ethics
and personal honesty to the breaking point. Perhaps a more accurate
assessment of his performance is that he misused his authority and
egregiously flouted decent standards of professional behavior, while
scarcely looking backwards. Rather than a paragon of democratic
virtues, Negroponte is a man who has to be seen as the anti-Christ of
democracy, repeatedly dragging its noble cause through offal.
Negroponte's nomination, along with the earlier appointments of Cold War
stalwarts such as Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams, as well as Senator
Helmsprotégé, Roger Noriega, to key hemispheric posts by President Bush,
represents a throwback to an era when human rights and democratic
processes were routinely suffered in the name of halting purported
efforts by Moscow to expand Communism throughout the
hemisphere.<br><br>
<br><br>
To Iraqis used to Saddam Husseins inflexible rule, his cynicism and
indifference to the suffering of others, Negropontes arrival in Baghdad
will require no prolonged adaptation to the rule or style of Americas new
pro-consul in the country. They will have exchanged one man on
horseback for another. For those who are familiar with his
professional history, it will take a clothespin on ones nose for his
Iraqi audience to stomach any speech that he makes touting
democracy.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Negroponte's Recent Past<br><br>
</b>After Negroponte had been nominated for the U.N. Ambassadorship, he
was scheduled for a potentially withering cross-examination by his
detractors on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his actions in
Honduras, as part of his confirmation hearings that were being conducted
for that post. But he was spared any further scrutiny by the
occurrence of 9/11 and the overpowering feeling in the Senate that the
U.S. must quickly fill the existing UN vacancy, by a peremptory
vote. Thus, rather than be submitted to exacting querying, the
process then turned out to be little better than a pro-forma
interrogation.<br><br>
<br><br>
This scenario is sure to be replicated when it comes to the Iraq
post. The nomination is another in a series of disturbing foreign
relations moves by the Bush administration and the Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, which has had its ramifications when it comes to Latin
America. After all, Negroponte played a key role when it came to
manipulating a string of weak leaders in Mexico and Chile in order to
persuade them to fire their respective ambassadors to the UN because they
opposed Negroponte's position on Iraq. Negropontes complicity in
efforts to obtain the discharge of Mexicos ambassador Adolfo Abullar
Zinnser and Chile's Juan Gabriel Valdes scarcely differed from his
purported perjured testimony in which he covered up the full extent of
his knowledge of the human rights abuses committed by the Honduran
military during his stay in that country, and his testimony over the
details of his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. He also
admitted to the illicit diversion of U.S. aid to Honduras for the Contra
forces, which normally should have disbarred any attempt to let him into
a higher posting. Unfortunately, the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and its chairman can be counted on to do themselves little
honor by trivializing their advice and consent responsibility when it
comes to sending off this appointee to Baghdad.<br><br>
<br><br>
General Luis Alonso Discua Elivir, a former Honduran death squad
commander who claimed that he would spill the beanson Negroponte unless
his family was allowed to remain in this country, had his U.S. visa
revoked in 2001. It would be perhaps of interest to hear this mans
testimony and have Negroponte respond to the huge amount of material
implicating him in playing a sedulously deceitful role after being posted
to Honduras. Despite an abundance of reporters, scholars and former
governmental officials who have publicly raised questions about
Negropontes record, no public witnesses were invited to try to establish
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Negroponte was not
qualified for his appointment to the UN post. Therefore, what
should have been an occasion of close scrutiny over serious charges of
malfeasance in office, will instead be afforded no better than a cursory
screening which will be more of a celebration than an
examination.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
<b>Complicity with Death Squad Leaders<br><br>
</b>
During his ambassadorship in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was
known to have close working ties to that nations most egregious local
abuses of human rights. One of the most notable of these unsavory
characters was then-Colonel Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, at the time
Hondurasmilitary chief and the de facto strongman of the country.
Promoted to general, Alvarez was later assassinated after returning from
the U.S., where he had sought refuge from his senior military colleagues,
who purportedly later had him murdered after he had refused to share with
them the alleged large bribes that he had received via the U.S.
embassy. This largesse was a reward for facilitating the conversion
of his country into a base to wage the Contra war against the incumbent
leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.<br><br>
<br><br>
Alvarez was
perhaps most infamous for his close connections to the death squad that
became know as Battalion 316. This Alvarez-created unit, which
received training in torture techniques from Argentine dirty warveterans
and the CIA (according to the Pulitzer prize-winning <i>Baltimore Sun</i>
series which in part examined Negropontes controversial role in
Honduras), is widely suspected of disappearingover 180 suspected
subversivesin the early 1980s. At the time, any Honduran opposed to
that countrys use as a staging ground for President Reagans
anti-Sandinista campaign was generally considered a subversive.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Promoting Human Rights to Save Face<br><br>
</b>In
response to recurrent journalist inquiries, as well as in formal
proceedings, Negroponte repeatedly has denied or minimized any knowledge
of charges that the Honduran military was behind the death squads and
that such a force as Battalion 316 even existed. Negroponte's
attempts to dismiss the role of death squads have been undermined by his
later boasts that, quite to the contrary, he personally intervened in a
number of instances to secure the release of politically sensitive
detainees being held by Honduran authorities. Even if one grants
this claim, such behavior on Negroponte's part was the exception rather
than the rule, and perhaps is an indication of how he could have saved
many more lives, if he had used his plenary position in Honduras to be a
true advocate of human rights and human decency.<br><br>
<br><br>
One
such apparently rare occasion in which he professedly intervened involved
journalist Oscar Reyes, who was abducted after writing numerous articles
critical of the Honduran military. Former U.S. embassy spokesman
Cresencio Arcos has verified that in July of 1983, Negroponte approached
General Alvarez about his apprehensions over the just
disappearedReyes. It should be recalled that Arcos himself, as the
embassy press officer, has been repeatedly accused by scholars studying
Honduras during that epoch, of knowingly distributing false information
to U.S. journalists stationed in Honduras at the time, and that he had
entered into a familial relationship with a politically important
Honduran family, allegedly not keeping his personal life entirely
separate from his official responsibilities. <br><br>
<br><br>
Prompted by protests from university students and a rash of newspaper
publicity on Reyes at the time, it is unlikely that Negropontes request
for the journalist's release was principally motivated by abiding human
rights concerns. Rather, the impetus for such singular concern in
this case almost certainly was the fear that widespread coverage of the
Reyes kidnapping could eventually make headlines in U.S. newspapers and
bring unwanted publicity to his ambassadorship and the skullduggery in
which it was involved.<br><br>
<br><br>
Recently released declassified documents that had been requested by the
Senate for the Negroponte hearing were always on Negropontes mind because
they repeatedly articulated a concern over any bad publicity that could
becloud his reputation. An undesirable outcome of this kind would
have hardened opposition to President Reagans extremely controversial
policy of trying to suck Honduras into the Contra war in exchange for
secret bribes to a number of that countrys political and military
officers, as well as hundreds of millions in U.S. funds being allocated
for economic and military assistance programs to the Honduran
regime.<br><br>
<br><br>
Another high-profile case in which Negroponte claims to have intervened
was the disappearance of a suspected leftist, Inés Murillo. A
number of reports at the time stated that a U.S. Embassy (or perhaps a
CIA) official had visited the Honduran torture facility known as INDUMIL,
where Murillo was being held and tortured. The daughter of a
prominent local family, Murillo's parents were relentless in trying to
locate their daughter, even taking out a full-page advertisement in the
Honduran newspaper, <i>El Tiempo</i>. Negroponte professedly
vocalized concern over Murillo's status, again fearing bad press
coverage, and brought up the matter when meeting with Honduran
officials. Four days later, Murillo was, in effect, narrowly saved
from a certain death when she was publicly sentenced to two years in
prison.<br><br>
<br><br>
<b> <br><br>
Contra Connections<br><br>
</b>Starting in the early 1980s, Hondurans had become the primary U.S.
support base for the Contra war. The Honduran Army provided
facilities and logistical support in a swath of territory adjacent to
Nicaragua which became known as Contraland.Honduran channels were also
used to funnel U.S. funds to the Contras, without disclosing their
source, at a time when such funding to the rebels was prohibited by
Congress, but was still flowing from other U.S. funding sources,
including the CIA.<br><br>
<br><br>
During
his stint in Tegucigalpa, Negroponte expanded the embassy staffs size
ten-fold and it came to house one of the largest CIA deployments in all
of Latin America. The same scenario inevitably will be the case in
Baghdad once Negroponte initiates his ambassadorship, and presides over
what is being touted as the largest U.S. overseas diplomatic mission in
the world, with anywhere from one to three thousand personnel being
employed there. Hondurans frequently referred to Negroponte as the
U.S. proconsulof the country, as his arrogant and stealthy style of
operating was more like that of an intelligence officer than a
traditional diplomat, redolent of his days as a young agent in
Vietnam. Utilizing this persona, he was able to guarantee the
cooperation of a Honduran base for the Contra rebel army through his
domination of compromised local officials and institutions.
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><h1><b>Negroponte and the Boland
Amendment</b></h1><font size=3>
Negroponte also played a primary role in organizing such pro-Contra
projects as a regional U.S. counterinsurgency training center at Puerto
Castilla and the construction of the controversial $7.5 million highway
to Puerto Lempira, which passed through a virgin strand of mahogany trees
towards the countrys eastern coast. Such a road would facilitate
the flow of supplies to the U.S.-directed Nicaraguan right-wing
contras. In spite of U.S. AID regulations stipulating that such a
U.S.-funded project must have an environmental impact study conducted
before construction could commence, Negroponte huffily overruled such
legal niceties and resorting to expletives, ordered the road to be built
in spite of the illegalities involved and the protests of an AID official
who had been sent from Washington to argue his case. Support of
Honduran aid to the Contras at the time also violated Congressional
prohibitions, such as the 1982 Boland amendment, which banned the use of
U.S. funds for military equipment, military training or advice, or other
support for military activities, to any group or individual not part of a
countrys armed forces, for the purpose of overthrowing the government of
Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and
Honduras.<br><br>
<br><br>
In
exchange for General Alvarez's total collusion in support of Contra
operations in Honduras, Washington offered full political and economic
support to that country's corrupt military. U.S. military aid to
Honduras swelled from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by
1984. Between 1981 and 1986, more than 60,000 U.S. soldiers and
members of the National Guard traversed Honduras in over 50 military
exercises meant not so much to intimidate the Sandinistas as to covertly
transfer arms to the Contras. Cynically enough, upon recommendation
by Negroponte and others, the Reagan administration obscenely awarded
Alvarez the Legion of Merit in 1983 for encouraging democracy.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>By Whatever Means Necessary<br><br>
</b>
John Negroponte was sent to Tegucigalpa with the mission of keeping U.S.
aid flowing into Honduras for the Contras by whatever means
necessary. Under Negropontes direct guidance, the U.S. Embassy in
Tegucigalpa turned a blind eye to glaring evidence of systematic human
rights abuses by Honduran officials. Recently declassified State
Department papers also reveal the lengths that Negroponte would go to in
order to protect the victimizer, rather than the victims, of human rights
abuses. In 1982 alone, there were over 300 newspaper articles in
the Honduran press reporting the illegal detention of university students
and the abduction of union leaders. Colonel Leonidas Torres Arias,
a disgruntled former intelligence chief of the Honduran armed forces,
stated in a 1982 news conference that Battalion 316 was indeed a death
squad, citing three of its victims by name. Efrain Diaz
Arrivillaga, a Honduran congressional delegate, also said that when he
spoke about the militarys abuses at the time to Negroponte, he was met
with an attitude&of tolerance and silence. In addition,
organizations such as the Committee of the Relatives of the Disappeared
visited the U.S. embassy to complain that the Honduran military was
holding suspected dissidents in clandestine jails such as INDUMIL, to a
totally unmoved Negroponte.<br><br>
<br><br>
Recent
reports have further established that Negroponte was very well aware of
human rights abuses in Honduras, and any doubts he had about individual
cases were politically motivated rather than the product of genuine
caution or any high evidential standard. <i>In Search of Hidden
Truths</i>, co-authored by the Honduran Human Rights Commissioner,
documents recently-declassified reports which provide solid evidence that
the U.S. was minutely aware of human rights abuses committed by the
Honduran military in the 1980s, in spite of Negropontes persistent claims
to the contrary. In addition, declassified State Department
documents also establish that in October of 1984, after General Alvarez
had been deposed by the Honduran armed forces, Negropontes embassy was
finally willing to acknowledge that, responsibility for a number of the
alleged disappearances between 1981 and March 1984 can be assigned either
directly or indirectly to Alvarez himself.<br><br>
<br><br>
Recently declassified cable traffic indicates a persistent inclination on
Negropontes behalf to wholeheartedly believe rather pitiable excuses
offered by General Alvarez to explain any human rights abuses. For
example, in a 1983 letter, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-America
Affairs Craig Johnstone conveyed to Negroponte that a number of
guerrillas had been captured and executed by elements of the Honduran
armed forces. Negropontes response was to accept General Alvarez's
lame excuse that the six detainees were shot dead while trying to
escape. However, when dealing with protests coming from human
rights activists and political dissidents, the exact opposite was true
when it came to assessing the quality of the information concerning
allegations by Honduran human rights groups, such as CODEH, on violations
by the armed forces. These were routinely met with skepticism if
not total denial by Negropontes embassy, and often, by the ambassador
himself.<br><br>
<br><br>
Further discrediting Negroponte's bona fides on the countrys human rights
situation are statements by Jack Binns, his immediate predecessor as
ambassador to Honduras from 1980 to 1981. At the time, Binns warned
State Department officials of what he described as increasing evidence of
officially sponsored and/or sanctioned assassinations of political and
criminal targets. Binns also has stated that there was no way for
Negroponte not to know the grim facts of life in Honduras. Thomas
Enders, then Binnssuperior as Assistant Secretary of State, has admitted
that he told Binns not to report human rights abuses through official
channels in order to keep U.S. aid flowing in Honduras by any
means. Enders confessed his transgressions at a later date,
something that Negroponte has failed to do, let alone even
consider.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Blatant Contradictions in Human Rights Reports<br><br>
</b>Instances of disappearances, harassment and abductions of political
dissidents all escalated under Negroponte, yet the annual Human Rights
Reports prepared by the ambassadorial staff for the State Department's
Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs were masterpieces of cunning redaction or
invention, consistently downplaying human rights abuses and denying that
any evidence existed of systematic violations by manipulating language
and statistics. For example, the 1982 report prepared for the State
Department by Negropontes staff asserted, Legal guarantees exist against
arbitrary arrest or imprisonment, and against torture or degrading
treatment. Habeas Corpus is guaranteed by the Constitution,
Honduran law provides for arraignment within 24 hours of arrest.
This appears to be the standard practice. All of this is absolute
rubbish, and is not even true today, let alone in the early 1980s.
In fact, Honduran judicial procedures are routinely given the worst
ratings by Transparency International. In reality, extra-legal
abductions by the military were rampant at the time and widely reported
as well. In addition, as was acknowledged in declassified State
Department documents at the time, the judicial system was (and still is)
almost entirely corrupt. Relativesrequests for information or
visitation rights for imprisoned family members were met with
stonewalling, as court and military officials asserted that there was no
record of the individual being detained, and thus no assistance was given
in locating them. The U.S. embassy was often asked to help find
relatives or use its influence to gain the individuals release.
Negropontes awareness of at least a substantial number of these
abductions is beyond dispute.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Honduras or Norway?<br><br>
</b>
Curiously enough, the aforementioned Reyes case did not even deserve any
mention in Negropontes 1982 Human Rights Report, despite widespread media
coverage and his self-professed personal involvement. However, the
following was included in the report: No incidence of official
interference with the media has been recorded for several years. It
was difficult even for embassy staff in Honduras to take the human rights
reports seriously, as they appeared to be in such blatant denial of what
U.S. officials were witnessing in Honduras on a daily basis. Rick
Chidester, then a U.S. embassy aide in Honduras, has been quoted as
jocosely wondering at the time whether they actually had not just
prepared the human rights report on Norway.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Promoting Democracy Only When Necessary<br><br>
</b>
Before being sent to Washington, the embassys human rights reports were
being carefully edited to clearly correspond to Negropontes own
ideological sentiments and mission rather than to objective facts.
One must realize that Negroponte did not look upon the report as being
routine, but rather as a potentially explosive document whose revelations
must be contained. What is certain is that Negroponte
hypocritically set an incredibly high standard of proof for the inclusion
of evidence of any wrongdoing by Honduran authorities, but repeatedly
questioned the legitimacy of various human rights leaders in the country,
which was certainly not in conformance with existing State Department
practices. Someone with such a distinguishedForeign Service career
as is routinely claimed for Negroponte by those whose capacity for
righteous indignation such as former Assistant Secretary of State Bernard
Aronson and U.N. ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick is quite low, if it
existed at all. They would surely have known that in spite of their
fulsome praise for Negroponte, such embassy reports are not intended to
be exclusively based on facts and be admissible in court, but rather are
also meant to include anecdotal information from ordinary citizens and
the media concerning human rights abuses, which were myriad in Honduras
at the time, and of which Aronson and Kirkpatrick have been aware.
Negroponte broke with this practice by requiring that all testimonies be
in the form of public affidavits. This criterion could only be met
at great risk to the personal safety of those who wanted to come forward
and reveal the truth behind the human rights violations occurring at the
time, but were fearful of doing so.<br><br>
<br><br>
The
juxtaposition of the Human Rights Reports for Honduras and Nicaragua
provides a striking contrast of exactly what purpose the documents
served. While the embassy-produced Human Rights Reports for
Honduras were characteristically incredulous over allegations of abuses
by the military, in Sandinista Nicaragua the reports were manipulated to
have the U.S. public believe that atrocities committed by the Sandinista
government were of a gross nature and a daily event, which was far from
the truth. The Embassy reports provided by Negroponte's office
appeared to state whatever was necessary in order to assuage the concerns
of the Democratic majority in Congress as to what was happening in the
area, disregarding the murderous realities that average Hondurans
confronted on a daily basis. The skewering of human rights reports
thus appear to have been an exceedingly serious instrument in the
Negroponte Embassy's arsenal, aimed at promoting his full-time efforts to
abet the overthrow of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and were not at all
intended to strengthen democratic institutions by actually reporting on
human rights violations, or saving lives in that country. There is
ample reason to believe that charges of complicity in the murder of a
Chilean constitutionalist general, that were leveled against Henry
Kissinger in a U.S. court, could very well have been duplicated against
Negroponte in a civil proceeding involving his own lawless
behavior.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>The Worst Man for the Job<br><br>
</b>
Negroponte's mental and moral flaws in the area of human rights should be
prompting serious concerns over the disservice that his appointment would
do to the diminished standing of this countrys already tattered
reputation over its troubled Iraq policy. As a would-be harbinger
of democracy to Iraq, it would be little more than a cruel joke to
pretend that this man had a bone of democratic rectitude to him.
Given Negroponte's tawdry record in Honduras, some observers contend that
the original Negroponte nomination to the UN offered one more example of
Secretary Powell's lack of standards when it comes to State Department
policy, and that his testimonials of the honorable nature of such
nominees, as was equally true of his nomination of Otto Reich, John
Bolton and Roger Noriega, whom Colin Powell defended as honorable men,are
totally at variance with reality. The nomination of such a tainted
figure as Negroponte to one of the most prominent posts available today
to a U.S. diplomat should represent an insult to the international
community, as well as a hollow affront to the memory of the victims of
the Central American wars of the 1980s, and can only result in a further
diminution of the reputation of this country for civic rectitude at a
very difficult moment in its history.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b><i>This analysis was prepared by Larry Birns and Jenna Wright, with
archival contributions by Jeremy Gans and Matthew Tschetter<br><br>
<br><br>
</b>Mr. Birns is the director of the Washington based Council on
Hemispheric Affairs, where the other authors are research
fellows.<br><br>
<br><br>
</i><b>Issued 27 April, 2004<br><br>
</b><i> <br><br>
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an
independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and
information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as
being one of the nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policy
makers.For more information, please see our web page at
<a href="http://www.coha.org/" eudora="autourl"><u>www.coha.org</a>;</u>
or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 216-9261, fax (202) 223-6035, or email <u>coha@coha.org</u>.<br><br>
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