by W. E. Gutman
Described as a “career diplomat devoid of convictions, only unflinching loyalty to the body politic,” Negroponte stands accused of concealing from Congress human rights abuses in Central America. While ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte directed the secret arming of Nicaragua's “Contra” rebels and is charged by human rights groups of overlooking a CIA-funded Honduran death squad -- the infamous Battalion 3-16 -- while at his post in Tegucigalpa.
Although Negroponte steadfastly denies any knowledge of the atrocities, declassified documents and disclosures by former death squad members cast doubt on his sincerity. A former embassy information officer who spoke on condition of anonymity told me that Negroponte, who professed to be a staunch advocate of human rights, was indeed involved in human rights, “but not quite the way he claimed.” The embassy official added that “dispatches about the human rights situation in Honduras [under Negroponte's watch] were so sanitized that cadres at the embassy in Tegucigalpa joked that they were written about Norway....”
José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch/Americas, called Negroponte “the ostrich ambassador: He never saw anything wrong. He never heard about any human rights violations. It was like he was living on a different planet.”
The hasty expulsion from the U.S. of several former death squad members had also raised thorny questions. The men, who’d been granted asylum in the U.S. and Canada in exchange for their discretion, were expelled to Honduras within days of Negroponte's nomination to the U.N. post.
One of them, General Luis Alonzo Discua Elvir, who served as Honduras' deputy ambassador to the U.N. until the State Department revoked his visa in 2001, went public with details of U.S. support for the death squad he co-founded.
At the time, Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. John Kerry, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, accused Negroponte of being “at the center of a clash over deep disagreements we had about the role the U.S. should play in Central America and, more importantly, the way -- often secretive or, at best, unclear -- in which policy was being conducted.”
Kerry had added that “new information suggests that the U.S. Embassy in Honduras knew more about human rights violations than was communicated to Congress and the public.”
In 1981, President Reagan sent Negroponte to Honduras, the “banana republic” Washington commandeered as a base for covert military operations against the leftist Sandinistas who controlled neighboring Nicaragua.
On several occasions Ambassador Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor in Honduras, had warned the State Department that violence against political opponents of the puppet Honduran government were on the rise. He first got the cold-shoulder treatment then was summoned to Washington and reprimanded by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders for reporting human rights abuses through official channels.
“He [Enders] was afraid it would leak and make it more difficult for us to continue our economic and security assistance to the contras,” said Binns, now retired. Binn's stint at ambassador lasted only a year, ending shortly after protesting the violence in Honduras.
At Negroponte's behest, U.S. military aid to Honduras ballooned from $4 million to $77.4 million. He also helped orchestrate a cabal now known as the “Iran-Contra Affair,” during which arms were funneled through Honduras to help the contras overthrow the constitutionally elected Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
Negroponte looked the other way when atrocities were committed in Central America. In light of stinging revelations of prisoner abuse at the hands of the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib Detention Center in Iraq and at the prison in Guantanamo, one wonders what kind of message the Bush administration was sending about human rights by posting Negroponte to represent the U.S in Baghdad. Worse, what kind of message did Mr. Bush send about his own moral values?
A man with skeletons in his political closet, Negroponte, a long-time protégé of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, [he can be seen seated behind Powell, a faint grin animating his face as the deluded Powell told the U.N. General Assembly that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction] spent 37 years in the Foreign Service. Like all has-beens, he is now a research fellow and a lecturer.
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It took six months of negotiations ably mediated by a mutual contact in Honduras to locate an SOA alumnus willing to talk. It took nearly as long to finalize the rules of engagement. Because the subject categorically denied ever receiving anything but “classic war college instruction,” it became obvious from the outset that ruminating on the errant CIA training manuals would be fruitless. And, since the more sinister exploits of SOA graduates had been copiously rendered by the media -- including by this writer -- I also reluctantly agreed not to dwell on any specific aspect of subject’s military career. It was that or nothing.
Lt. Col. (Ret.) Roberto Nuñez Montes first attended the Panama SOA campus in 1963 as a cadet. He returned in 1965 and took military intelligence courses. A former Military Intelligence Chief, Nuñez was cited by an America’s Watch Report as the alleged mastermind in 1987 of a raid on the household of a Honduran Congressional deputy. I knew nothing else about the man before we met. Intuition and conjecture in the face of history did little to help fill the blanks after we parted (though far more serious allegations against Nuñez would since surface).
What the taped interview (here stripped of small talk) lacks in incriminating detail is more than offset by Nuñez’s candor and ferocious convictions. His rhetoric is anchored in unbending soldierly doctrine: However abhorrent, atrocities in wartime are unavoidable, often justified. His arguments offer a stark insight into the military soul. His optic also adds a chilling dimension to the mood, legacy and contradictions spawned by lingering Cold War paranoia.
Q: Who were your instructors?
A: Officer-level classes were taught by Latin American SOA graduates.
Q: Did the SOA offer courses in human rights?
A: I don’t remember.
Q: Did some SOA graduates commit acts of barbarism?
A: Warring sides give different labels to the tactical components of a military operation.
Q: Military operation?
A: Yes. We were at war.
Q: Against your own people? Civilians? You weren’t defending against foreign invasion.
A: Civilians subverted by outside influences can destroy a nation.
Q: Old men, women, children?
A: All part of a communist insurgency.
Q: Are you calling clergy, teachers, students, journalists, peasants, and trade unionists, “communist insurgents,” thus justifying….
A: Yes -- communists! They threatened the public order and national security. Ours was a war fueled by outside ideological forces intent on subverting the whole region and....
Q: ... thus justifying the murder of priests and labor organizers because their vision of hope for the poor clashed with the interests of the plutocracy? Some were executed face down in the mud….
A: So what?
Q: … justifying the rape and slaughter of nuns who taught children how to read and write? Justifying the “disappearance” of thousands of civilians? Justifying the massacre of 900 peasants in El Mozote, and gunning down an archbishop and six Jesuit priests who championed the powerless against the powerful?
A: I don’t care if they were the Pope. War makes titles, status or celebrity quite irrelevant. They were communists. All the damned lot! They had to be neutralized.
Q: ... or throwing people out of helicopters several hundred feet above ground? Or using private houses as detention and torture chambers?
A: Yes, yes, yes! Madness! No one pretends that war is pretty. There was no other way. The main moral question is what was the right thing to do under the circumstance, not who did it, or how. Many good policies are promoted for morally dubious reasons and many bad policies are advanced with the best of intentions.
Q: Good intentions and an unshakable conviction in the morality of a cause do not mak
e such a cause moral, do they?
A: Philosophers must decide, not soldiers. Ultimately, we must ask to what extent the military actions of a debtor nation are driven by the policies and objectives of its creditor.
Q: Nations that depend on superpowers for their survival can never be free -- is that what you’re saying?
A: It’s one way of putting it.
Q: Is there democracy in Central America today?
A: No. What we have are amorphous societies run by improvisation, governments that have no national conscience, no doctrine, no vision, no plan. They have lost sight of the priorities. When everything is important, nothing gets done.
Nuñez saw fresh signs of conspiracy, “as vast and wicked” as the ones that set fire to the region in the 1980s. His was an imported and stubbornly articulated minority view, not just the nostalgic musings of an old warrior. He found comfort in the notion that the men whose orders he and fellow SOA alumni issued are at large, some chairing large corporations, others basking like sated iguanas, among fellow U.S. expatriates, their cozy retirement in Central America and the Caribbean subsidized by those they helped to positions of military or dictatorial power.
Nuñez also delights in the irony that the punishment called for by a small number of U.S. congressmen for convicted war criminals may never be meted out. In the tug-of-war of accusations and counter-accusations, prosecution of SOA alumni for war crimes, he believes, would “backfire and bring instant and unwelcome scrutiny” on the School, the CIA, the DEA the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, not to mention the Reagan and copycat Bush I and II administrations.
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Titled, “Janitor’s secret past: a death squad,” a Los Angeles Times article published on October 26, 2006 revealed the clandestine life and arrest in L.A. of a former SOA-trained Salvadoran army officer, Gonzalo Guevarra Cerritos, convicted of killing six Jesuits. The hypocrisy of U.S. authorities -- claiming that they were investigating human rights violations -- is troubling. Fact is the U.S. engineered these atrocities and, in some cases, participated in them. Guevarra is small fry and was probably paid off to shut up about the details of the murders, then offered sanctuary in some safe haven where thugs are retired with all the comforts of home.
So much for the “democratization” of Latin America.
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Last I heard, Col. Nuñez is still convinced that communists are hard at work in the Isthmus. He claims to see signs of conspiracy, “as vast and evil as the ones that set fire to the region in the 1980s.” His is a prevalent and forcefully articulated view, not merely the nostalgic musings of an aging soldier.
One of the paradoxes of democracy is that it tolerates in its midst the existence and propagation of antidemocratic ideas. It is that very trait, some argue, that gives democracy its unmatched vigor and nobility. It is also what makes it so appealing to individuals, groups, clans and dynasties that owe their supremacy to autocratic control, a system of governance steadfastly endorsed by U.S. policy and further bolstered by its military surrogates. Another incongruity impossible to explain, let alone expiate, is that in the name of freedom, democracy and human rights, the U.S. has sanctioned despotism, disappearances and death squads.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a retired U.S. intelligence analyst told me that, guided and backed by the CIA, SOA-trained cadres “systematically abetted the transplantation of military structures into, and facilitated the propagation of military power and objectives against, legitimately installed civilian governments or fledgling democratic institutions. These structures are so solidly entrenched, they wield so much power and enjoy such intimate and mutually compromising relations with the U.S., that it will be neither possible, nor profitable for the U.S. to dismantle them.”
What SOA supporters must grapple with, as its alumni’s reputation spreads like blood in bath water, is whether keeping the school open sends the wrong message, both in the U.S. and abroad -- namely that power struggles, particularly those engineered by others for reasons of geopolitical hegemony, sharpen plutocratic dominance, end in abuse and hasten the sacrifice of the innocent.
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Made public after my interview with Nuñez, the report of the independent Historical Clarification Commission acknowledges that the U.S. funded and trained the Guatemalan military during that country’s 36-year genocidal war against the indigenous Maya. The report challenges years of ardent denial by the U.S. that it advocated and sanctioned wholesale torture, kidnappings and executions of thousands of civilians. It confirms the CIA’s participation in a blood bath that resulted in the death of nearly 400,000 people -- a role the agency had heretofore zealously, if vainly refuted. The report concluded that U.S. support for right-wing governments in the Isthmus and the training of Central American military cadres [at the U.S. Army School of the Americas] played a pivotal role in “aggressive, racist and extremely cruel violations that resulted in the massive extermination of defenseless people.”
The Commission points fingers at military intelligence and blames with shameless effrontery “bellicose Central American government policies” for a decade of illegal detentions, torture, disappearances and extra-judicial executions. It fails to name the guilty or argue in favor of justice. It perfunctorily recommends reparations for the victims and advocates “reconciliation through truth.”
Moving beyond the horrors of war is salutary. Admitting (and apologizing for) U.S. backing of “military forces that engaged in violence and widespread repression,” as President Bill Clinton did before he left office, is praiseworthy. Arguing for “truth” in the abstract while shielding the guilty adds villainy to hypocrisy. Implicit in this artifice is that for the good of society, victims of barbarism should not only abstain from revisiting the past, they should in fact pretend that it never took place.
Oddly, nowhere was this doctrine more forcefully articulated than in Honduras. Whereas Guatemala is visibly struggling with its inglorious past, Honduras, a nation that gleefully collaborated with the U.S. and demonstrated great skill in meting out its own brand of “anti-communist” justice, continues to seek absolution by promoting collective amnesia.
“Let bygones be bygones,” Col. Nuñez pleaded. “The dead are buried and their killers are now old men. How long must we regurgitate the past?”
Poor choice of words from an old soldier to a Holocaust survivor whose family was denied the privilege of old age; fiendish reasoning from a former intelligence officer who calls for a return to military rule and equates any form of political dissent with “terrorism” and “communism.”
“You admit there were killers among you.”
“We had a job to do.”
“The war is over. You’re anxious to get on with your life, aren’t you? Why not cooperate and help bring the guilty to justice? If you don’t, Honduras will not only ‘regurgitate’ the past, it may well choke on it.”
“It’s not our job to cooperate. Let the courts handle the matter.”
“You know damn well the courts have no cojones.”
“That’s not my problem.”
Nuñez is right. With very few exceptions, Honduran tribunals, in the name of “reconciliation,” have either looked the other way, conducted pro forma hearings on cases that never went to trial, masterminded the defection of military thugs to safe havens abroad, or simply engineered their release on the grounds that they lacked “sufficient evidence.”
While human rights abuses by the Honduran military pale in comparison with their Colombian and Salvadoran counterparts, proportionately they exceed those of the Guatemalan armed forces. Grievous and as yet unpunished, they merit reexamination. SOA graduates implicated in various war crimes, as was Col. Nuñez, are still free and living the good life. They have bought their freedom from and are being shielded by an apathetic and mercenary judiciary accustomed to coddling the rich and the powerful.
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Some former death-squad members have since branched out into organized crime. Others have inv
ested in “legitimate” businesses. The proverbial “long arm of the law,” stunted and collusive, continues to short-change the victims. In so doing, it not only defiles justice, it adds fuel to the flames of national discontent.
There is no statute of limitation on war crimes. War criminals are prosecutable and punishable. So are the intellectual authors who sanction or orchestrate atrocities from the safety of their office. Asking survivors of violence to look the other way while their persecutors are still free is an affront to justice. It is also an invitation to further discord and social conflict in nations scarred by dynasties of thugs.
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Predictably, the SOA, which has trained, supplied and coddled the “internal security forces” of 17 Latin American and Caribbean Basin nations, and whose alumni continue to bask in the benevolent glow of immunity, has so far evaded what would be a fatal in vivo dissection. The world -- and U.S. taxpayers who have footed the bill for over half a century -- may have to wait for an actual postmortem to view and get a whiff of the SOA’s malodorous entrails. Now renamed, and with the hot winds of jingoism sweeping America, the school has yet been granted a new lease on life.
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The CIA, like some mythic deity, has behaved as if it is accountable to no one, as if self-empowerment (when no one looks) and impunity (when no one cares) are the just entitlements of zealots waging the good war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. Left to its own devices, “the company” has time and again justified corrupt means to amoral ends, all in the name of “national security.” Worse, instead of keeping watch against America’s real enemies, it has usurped power not its own and tried to manipulate and control American foreign policy. In defiance of U.S. law, hiding from public scrutiny like a vampire from the rising sun, it has manipulated Congress into granting it powers to wage economic warfare, sabotage, subversion and murder. It further cloaked itself in secrecy by forcing its operatives to sign irreversible non-disclosure oaths.