by W. E. Gutman
In what would be one last burst of cheek, and now at an age when most men coddle their grandchildren or tend their herb garden, I turned over sealed documents detailing Candido’s murder to a member of Honduras’ National Congress who said, “We never met; I haven't heard a word you said,” handed back the documents as if they’d burned her hands and abruptly terminated the interview.
Wherever due process is inconsistently applied, where authorities show neither respect for justice nor the will to enforce it, where the privileged and the politically well-connected deem themselves above the law and the search for truth is rewarded with hostility, what you have -- even here, in lovely, secluded, deceptively tranquil Copán -- is a climate of controlled fear and a recipe for anguish and woe. I call this fascism.
Visitors to Copán come and go like the tide. They take with them memories that dull with each passing day. Copanecos stay and keep the myth alive. They must. They have no other choice.
HONDURAN ARMY ABUSES
NO SECRET TO CIA
Throughout the 1980’s, while the U.S. government was bucketing millions of dollars in military aid into Honduras, Honduran armed forces went on a rampage against its own citizens. So said the CIA after years of silence and duplicity.
According to newly declassified documents, internal investigations by the CIA reveal that although agency operatives in Honduras knew that the military operated a U.S.-funded right-wing assassination squad, the officers’ sloppy or evasive reports concerning human rights issues left senior CIA brass “unaware of their seriousness and magnitude.” Lies.
In fact, the CIA deliberately fed misleading information to Congress, downplaying Honduras’s involvement in abuses so as not to jeopardize that country’s U.S.-mandated support for rebels fighting against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime.
“CIA briefings [to Congress] in the early 1980’s underestimated Honduran involvement in abuses,” the report stated. By the mid-1980’s, the CIA provided more detailed information, but some of it was inaccurate.”
A redacted copy of the 211-page document of the Inspector General was released to Honduran Human Rights Commissioner, Leo Valladares, and was later made public by the Washington-based National Security Archive. The document was heavily redacted by the CIA, with large sections blacked out entirely.
The report states that the CIA had specific and detailed knowledge of widespread abuses but told Congress that transgressions by the Honduran armed forces were being exaggerated by their ideological foes. Predictably, the agency’s former station chief in Honduras denied that U.S. intelligence officers knew anything about the crimes perpetrated by Honduran death squads, or that they had failed to report what they knew about them. Hypocrisy turned to scabrous comedy when the station chief asserted that “the Honduran military was a very benign kind of military….”
CIA internal inquiries into the matter began in earnest in response to a series of investigative reports by this writer and others in various media in Baltimore, Atlanta, Boston and Miami, as well as in Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama. The articles asserted that the CIA trained and supported the Honduran military, including secret army intelligence units that were kidnapping, torturing and murdering thousands of suspected leftists -- among them students, teachers, clergy and union organizers.
At the time, the CIA station in Tegucigalpa served as a command center for the Nicaraguan war and grew to be the agency’s largest anywhere in the world. For officials who served at the U.S. Embassy, including John Negroponte, the overriding priority was to ensure that the Honduran government and its powerful, often independent military hierarchy continued to support the war effort. To that purpose, the intelligence branch of Honduras’s paramilitary security forces maintained a secret unit known as the Honduran anti-Communist Liberation Army. The unit’s role was to fight Honduran leftists, including a fledgling dissident army that was backed by both the Nicaraguan government and Salvadoran rebels. The unit’s operations “included surveillance, kidnapping, interrogations under duress, and execution of prisoners who were Honduran revolutionaries.”
Other military abuses have been linked to members of CIA-funded death squad Battalion 3-16, the brainchild of SOA-graduate, the late General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, which tortured and assassinated suspected political opponents. Nearly all the members of Battalion 3-16 were trained by the SOA, first in Panama, later at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Again, the CIA failed to investigate, and inform Congress that the Honduran military extra-judicially executed a large number of prisoners. One of them was American Jesuit priest, James G. Carney. The army officer who masterminded Carney's death, General Alvarez, was awarded the Legion of Merit by President Ronald Reagan, “for promoting democracy in Honduras.” Some of Carney's former colleagues believe the award is evidence that then U.S Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, authorized Carney's killing.
If deposed President Mel Zelaya is ever to account for the white-collar crimes he is accused of committing during his presidency, then scores of high-ranking Honduran military officers, most of them graduates of the infamous U.S. Army School of the Americas (some in blissful self-exile in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, others “retired” on their fincas in the wilds of Honduras) should also stand trial and pay for the horrific blood crimes they committed and the wretched drug-running schemes in which they were complicit. Among them:
* Nelson Willy Mejía Mejía, responsible for the “disappearance of 7,000 people. He was appointed Director-General of Immigration in the interim coup-led government of Roberto Micheletti.
* Napoleón Nassar Herrera, who became leader of the General Department of Criminal Investigation, high Commissioner of Police for the northwest region in the Manuel Zelaya government, and one of the Secretary of Security's spokespeople in the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti. According to Andrés Pavón of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras, “there are stacks of proof regarding the role Nassar and other former Intelligence Battalion 3-16 members played…. but that Nassar and the others were not convicted of any crimes because they received State protection and impunity before a compromised judicial system.”
During Ricardo Maduro’s presidency (2002-2006), Nassar was leader of the General Department of Criminal Investigation (DGIC). Under his command, agents from the DGIC put Feliciano Pineda, a community leader who’d been stabbed and wounded on his face, neck, back, sides and hands by paramilitaries into chains and imprisoned him in Gracias.
* Billy Fernando Joya Améndola, (known as Billy Joya) is a former military officer and member of Battalion 3-16. He was national security adviser in Manuel Zelaya’s government, a post he has retained. Billy Joya is one of the at least 18 members of Battalion 3-16 who trained at the SOA. Joya fled legal proceedings in Honduras when accused of torture and forced disappearances, and sought political asylum in Spain, which was rejected. Joya voluntarily returned to Honduras in December 1998 after receiving promises of special treatment. He was jailed but freed in August 2000 after a judge said there was not enough evidence to continue his detention.
* General Luis Alonzo Discua Elvir, who, after the State Department revoked his visa to the US, went public with details of US support for the death squad he co-founded and whose operations he commanded.
* Gen. Romeo Vasquez, who led the coup in which President Zelaya was ousted, now head of the scandal-ridden Hondutel communications conglomerate.
* Col. Marco Tulio Ayala Vindel, involved in the disappearance of Amado Espinoza and Adan Avilez Funes. Although the judge issued an arrest warrant, Ayala Vindel failed to appear before the court. Ayala Vindel was head of Battalion 3-16 in 1984.
* Capt. Pio Flores, whose house was used as a detention and torture center.
* Col. Amilcar Zelaya, from whose country home -- used as a detention, torture, and killing center for Battalion 3-16 -- muffled screams were regularly heard.
In this writer’s opinion, no “reconciliation,” can take place until deceas
ed SOA graduates and Battalion 3-16 members who are known to have committed human rights abuses and other crimes -- and their U.S. handlers -- are posthumously tried and convicted in public, and their names and deeds chronicled in detail in history books for future generations to contemplate.
Fat chance.
THE TOXIC NORMALITY OF CORRUPTION
In a recent editorial warning of Honduras’ “impending existential threat,” Honduras Weekly [the successor to the now-defunct Honduras This Week] was dead-on in its assertion that narcotrafficking, a lucrative worldwide enterprise, is the source of mounting violence in Honduras. It was less than precise, perhaps even a tad glib, in its haste to blame America’s insatiable addition to drugs for Honduras’ self-inflicted calamities. The commentary’s brevity, the dearth of specifics, may even have diverted attention from the climate of sleaze and collusion that underprops and empowers the drug trade -- from turncoat police to crooked lawyers and judges, to the highest echelons of Honduras’ political hierarchy. One brief chapter in a sordid narrative of collusion and crime can now be told.
Three years ago, I was subpoenaed by a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization judge in a case involving a petition for political asylum filed by a former Honduran narcotics detective. Six months earlier, I’d been contacted by his American attorney and asked whether I’d be willing to testify on his behalf as an expert witness. I agreed.
Enrique Granados (nor his real name) was a model cop, a shrewd detective and a rising star in the criminal division of the Public Ministry of Honduras. In 1996, he was promoted to detective by the Direccion de Lucha Contra El Narcotrafico (DLCN), an agency overseen by the DEA and the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. In 2000, according to Granados, the DLCN was suborned by criminal elements whose influence stretched from the Ministry of Security to the Honduran National Congress.
Acting on tips from informants, Granados did old-fashioned gumshoe work that led straight to his DLCN unit commander. According to affidavits submitted by Granados, in which the commander and other key players are named, Honduran court records revealed serious discrepancies in the fines that were being assessed against known drug traffickers. It was clear, Granados said in his deposition, that the commander was taking bribes. Granados reported his findings to his supervisor. Within days, and without explanation, he was transferred to the Customs Department at San Pedro Sula’s Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport.
“This was both a demotion and a warning,” Granados told me just before the hearing in correspondence forwarded by his attorney.
Six months into his new assignment, Granados found the evidence he’d been looking for. “Every 15 days,” Granados testified, “an unmarked truck drove to the airport’s loading docks and made a delivery. Invariably, the unit commander instructed stationed Customs officers to move to another location as the truck was being unloaded. The cargo: narcotics rerouted through the airport without detection and destined for shipment by land, air and sea to points north.”
Again, Granados confided in his supervisor. Asked to name his informants, Granados declined. Instead, skipping the chain of command, he requested a private audience with his unit chief and the DLCN director. The request was denied. Granados was transferred to a desk job.
“The atmosphere at work became increasingly stressful and hostile,” Granados recalled. “Unable to pursue my investigations, I told some of my fellow officers that I would go directly to the DEA.”
On vacation in Tegucigalpa, Granados was intercepted by “several individuals” who offered him $50,000 in exchange for his silence.
“They told me I was the only person who hadn’t yet been paid off. I was also warned that it would be ‘wise’ to accept their offer.” Granados, declined. Two days later, he received a letter informing him that, owing departmental cutbacks, his employment at the DLCN had been terminated. The next day, ads offering officer positions at the Customs Office ran in at least one newspaper.
“In 2002, driving through San Pedro Sula,” Granados testified at his hearing, “I realized I was being followed, then shot at. One of the pursuers was a fellow cop.” The name of that officer appears in Granados’ asylum request statement.
Fearing for his life, Granados took flight, first to the north coast, then to one of the Bay Islands. Back on the mainland, this time in Comayagua, he was pursued by a group of men, later identified as policemen, who fired at him but missed. Armed with the visitor’s visa his mother, a naturalized American citizen, had obtained for him, Granados fled Honduras and sought refuge in the U.S.
It was when Granados’ final visa extension expired and he faced deportation that his case came to the attention of a court-appointed immigration attorney and, later, of a U.S. Court of Appeals which promptly granted his motion for asylum on the evidence submitted on his behalf.
*
Corruptibility is the mother of all vices. Without it we’d live in a fantasy world of virtue, love and justice. It’s as powerful a drive as the procreative urge or the survival instinct. Because we’re human, we’re all susceptible to its siren song. Some of us can be suborned by praise; others prefer cold cash.
In some countries -- particularly among the poorest but by no means confined to them -- corruption is the bedrock in which business and governance are anchored. It’s become a habitualized, ritualized, institutionalized reflex. It’s part of the social fabric. People have become so inured to it from youth that they no longer recognize it for what it really is: the process of putrefaction by which nations decompose or lapse into insignificance.
There is a direct link between how people are empowered in their societies and their leaders’ propensity to lie, take bribes and engage in the wholesale sellout of their citizens. In crypto-autocratic nations such as Honduras, where wealth and political power are confined to small, all-powerful elites, people have a nominal voice, but no clout, especially where their vital interests -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- are abridged and further compromised by endemic poverty, crime, violence and the appalling indifference and incompetence of their leaders. El Querido Pueblo simply doesn’t count. Those who protest are either ignored, their grievances lost in the murky corridors of bureaucracy, or they risk harassment, persecution and even assassination.
“We’ve been reduced to turning our heads and looking the other way,” a Honduran judge working in the southern city of Choluteca told me on condition that I withhold his name. “We overlook corruption; we tacitly condone it because doing otherwise will have grave consequences. To be perceived as incorruptible is to stand out. In these parts, principled men don’t die of old age.”
One of the subtleties that prevent people from listening to their conscience is the stupefying realization that their elected officials, given their own venality and the tangled cabals in which they engage are so inextricably ensnared in shady activities that they couldn’t fix the problems they created even if they tried.
There are two types of corruption: corruption of opportunity and corruption of necessity. The first has existed since the Earth cooled. It will thrive as long as humans rule the planet. The second festers when, reduced to their primal state and unable to survive by any other means, decent people do bad things. The synchronism between the two is not coincidental. The poorer the nation, the wealthier the governing elite, the more capital is concentrated in the hands of a few, the greater the temptation and opportunity to be corrupted.
Corruption doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s a system of values and behaviors that straddle public and private spheres: the corrupted are always faced with a corruptor, often originating with those able to buy influence. It is also characteristic of the politics of so-called developing countries, like Honduras, that never seem to “develop” beyond a feudal society in which only plutocrats and criminals -- many of whom are one and the same -- continue to thrive.
Granados has kept in touch with this writer since his petition for safe haven in the U.S. was speedily granted three years ago by a U.
S. Court of Appeals. Although he takes no pleasure in it, what he says about his country is damning. What drives his disclosures, after several years of self-imposed silence and stealth, is what he calls, “the unexplored potentiality of hope” -- hope that Honduras may have reached critical mass.
“The country faces two choices; radical change or an inevitable tumble into chaos.”
Granados doesn’t mince words. “Honduras is a ‘narcostate’ run by ‘narcocrats’ whose power and influence reach beyond its borders.” Lethargy and a culture of corruption are only part of the problem, he says. Poverty, despair, lawlessness and the lure of easy money all help lengthen the tentacles of Honduras’ drug hydra. Granados blames the “ostrich-like attitude” of his countrymen for the dishonesty of their elected representatives.
“What we have is a collective conspiracy of silence. If they know something, they don’t talk. Or else they beat around the bush.”
In 2009, shortly before Granados’ asylum was granted, the French and U.S. ambassadors publicly declared that Honduras had become a major narcotrafficking hub. They also hinted that high-level officials in the government and police were complicit in a colossal scheme to profit from the trade -- an allegation Granados had vainly tried to make a decade earlier and which nearly cost him his life at the hands of fellow cops.
The ousted former President Mel Zelaya -- who naïvely claimed (or was it artful evasion?) that “if it isn’t reported, it didn’t happen” -- was enraged. He accused the French and U.S. envoys of deliberately sullying the image of Honduras and threatened to take “measures” against them. He called their comments offensive and intrusive. He took no action to verify their claims, however, thus lending further credence to anecdotal reports that he entertained known drug lords on his vast Olancho estate, and giving rise to various charges of corruption -- later dropped in a puzzling covenant with his successor, current President Porfirio Lobo.