Negroponte ignored human rights

[struggle4progress]

Posted on Mon, Feb. 21, 2005

<snip> In the 1980s, during the height of the U.S.-backed contra war against the government of Nicaragua, he held a controversial post: ambassador to Honduras, whose government was engaging in state-sponsored extrajudicial kidnappings and murder.

Negroponte was no distant, aloof diplomat, unaware of the gritty realities around him. He and his wife took such a keen interest in the plight of the country's poor, they adopted five Honduran children. But the ambassador also guided the close relationship with the Honduran government as the Reagan administration poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the country to build military bases like the one at El Aguacate, where the U.S. military and CIA agents trained contra rebels, and scores of dissidents were allegedly tortured and murdered.

In 2001, investigators exhumed 185 bodies at the site. Negroponte, the hands-on manager, worked closely with top American and Honduran officials at El Aguacate. He also met frequently with Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, head of the most notorious Honduran military unit, "Battalion 3-16." The general was trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., and in Argentina, where he was inspired to fight Honduran opposition by "disappearing" suspects and killing them in secret prisons. CIA documents reveal that he and other battalion members trained in the United States continued to receive support even though their activities were known to the embassy. As ambassador, Negroponte consistently denied any knowledge of abuses by the Honduran government, calling such reports "Communist propaganda" and praising Honduras in a letter to The Economist for its "professional armed forces" and "liberal democratic institutions."

He defended Alvarez Martinezas as a committed democrat and dismissed accusations against the general as not serious. At the same time, he ordered aides to delete references to torture in material for annual State Department human rights reports. Instead, he claimed that there were no political prisoners in the country and no evidence of abuses.

Veterans and victims of Battalion 3-16 living in the United States and Costa Rica told their horror stories to Baltimore Sun reporters in 1995. They might also have testified during Negroponte's confirmation hearings as U.N. ambassador in 2001, but two ex-members of Battalion 3-16 were suddenly deported from Florida to Honduras shortly before the Bush administration announced Negroponte's nomination. At those hearings, Sen. Christopher Dodd, a longtime expert on Central America, said that declassified documents showed "Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government-perpetuated human rights abuses" than he stated to members of Congress or included in the embassy reports required by law. <snip>

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/opinion/10937349.htm

[GetTheRightVote]

1. I do not know how these people live with themselves.

Really I do not.

:kick: