[spectre] Brigads as well 1.

[Louise Desrenards]

Famous on Brigads of the death in Nicaragua, John Negroponte, CIA Director
Bush senior's
personnal man-weapon in seventies, then an ambassador in Honduras, is the
present as new ambassador of
America hope to stop "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" sent by
Mr Bush junior to Iraq people : 1.

--------------------------------------
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2004/04.20_Negroponte.htm

1730 M Street NW, Suite 1010, Washington, D.C.  20036
Phone:  202-216-9261  Fax:  202-223-6035
Email: coha at coha.org   Website: www.coha.org
Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western
Hemisphere
Memorandum to the Press 04.20Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Word Count: 5,008
ATTENTION
Senate Foreign Relations Committee is right now holding confirmation
hearings on John Negroponte to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq. COHA is here
re-releasing its memorandum issued last Thursday on Negroponte's
controversial stint as ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85.

Negroponte: Nominee for Baghdad Embassy, a Rogue for all Seasons

·        Negroponte pressed Powell to pressure Chile's and Mexico's
weak-willed leaders to discharge their U.N. ambassadors over Iraq votes.
·        Negroponte has a sordid human rights record in Honduras.
·        A Cruel Joke: Negroponte, the arch authoritarian, teaching
democracy to the Iraqis.
·        Life under Saddam somewhat prepares you for the Negroponte era.
·        Senate Foreign Relations Committee unlikely to closely scrutinize
Negroponte nomination.
·        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 "honorable" man.

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.

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
carrier" in the U.S.-backed Contra war against Nicaragua's leftist
Sandinistas.


Negroponte Arrives in Tegucigalpa
Negroponte replaced Jack Binns, who had been President Carter's 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.


Negroponte Doctors Human Rights Reports
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.


Negroponte Introduces the Hard Line
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.

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 "democracy" is 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 democracy's good name.  Negroponte's career has been one where in his
professional life he has shown a willingness to use authoritarian means to
professedly advance democracy.


Which Man is Negroponte?
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 Helms'
protégé, 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.

To Iraqis used to Saddam Hussein's inflexible rule, his cynicism and
indifference to the suffering of others, Negroponte's arrival in Baghdad
will require no prolonged adaptation to the rule or style of America's 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 one's nose for his Iraqi audience to stomach any
speech that he makes touting democracy.


Negroponte's Recent Past
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.

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.
Negroponte's complicity in efforts to obtain the discharge of Mexico's
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.

General Luis Alonso Discua Elivir, a former Honduran death squad commander
who claimed that he would "spill the beans" on 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 man's 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 Negroponte's 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.


Complicity with Death Squad Leaders
            During his ambassadorship in Honduras from 1981 to 1985,
Negroponte was known to have close working ties to that nation's 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
Honduras' military 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.

           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
war' veterans and the CIA (according to the Pulitzer prize-winning Baltimore
Sun series which in part examined Negroponte's controversial role in
Honduras), is widely suspected of "disappearing" over 180 suspected
"subversives" in the early 1980s.  At the time, any Honduran opposed to that
country's use as a staging ground for President Reagan's anti-Sandinista
campaign was generally considered a "subversive."


Promoting Human Rights to Save Face
            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.

            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
"disappeared" Reyes.  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.

Prompted by protests from university students and a rash of newspaper
publicity on Reyes at the time, it is unlikely that Negroponte's 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.

            Recently released declassified documents that had been requested
by the Senate for the Negroponte hearing were always on Negroponte's 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 Reagan's extremely controversial
policy of trying to suck Honduras into the Contra war in exchange for secret
bribes to a number of that country's 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.

            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, El Tiempo.  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.


Contra Connections
            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.

            During his stint in Tegucigalpa, Negroponte expanded the embassy
staff's 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. "proconsul" of 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.


Negroponte and the Boland Amendment
            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 country's 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 country's armed forces, for the
purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military
exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras."

            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."


By Whatever Means Necessary
            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 Negroponte's 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 military's 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.

            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.  In Search of Hidden
Truths, 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 Negroponte's 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, Negroponte's 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."

            Recently declassified cable traffic indicates a persistent
inclination on Negroponte's 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.
Negroponte's 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 Negroponte's embassy, and often, by the
ambassador himself.

            Further discrediting Negroponte's bona fides on the country's
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 Binns' superior 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.


Blatant Contradictions in Human Rights Reports
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 Negroponte's 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.  Relatives' requests 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 individual's release.  Negroponte's awareness of at
least a substantial number of these abductions is beyond dispute.


Honduras or Norway?
            Curiously enough, the aforementioned Reyes case did not even
deserve any mention in Negroponte's 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.


Promoting Democracy Only When Necessary
            Before being sent to Washington, the embassy's human rights
reports were being carefully edited to clearly correspond to Negroponte's
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
'distinguished' Foreign 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.

            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.


The Worst Man for the Job
            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 country's 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.


This analysis was prepared by Larry Birns and Jenna Wright, with archival
contributions by Jeremy Gans and Matthew Tschetter

Mr. Birns is the director of the Washington based Council on Hemispheric
Affairs, where the other authors are research fellows.

Issued 27 April, 2004

 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 www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices
by phone (202) 216-9261, fax (202) 223-6035, or email coha at coha.org.

--------------------------