http://www.progressive.org/webex05/wx021805.phpexcerpt:
In 1995, the Baltimore Sun ran a prizewinning series on Battalion 316. It concluded that Negroponte knew about the tortures and murders and covered them up. Under his direct supervision, the embassy prepared reports to Congress that never mentioned the brutality of the Honduran military, the Sun reported. This omission allowed Honduras to keep getting U.S. funding.
“I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras,” Negroponte testified before Congress in 2001.
Oscar Reyes begs to differ. He was living in Honduras at the time. “On July 8, 1982, some military people went to our home, ransacked it, detained us, and brought us to the torture house,” he told me last year. “There were a lot of people being tortured that night. You could hear the screaming. They used electrical shock on my body and my genitals, and they hanged me by my hands and were hitting me almost all night long. Then they put me in front of a tree and gave me a fake execution. . . . On my wife, they used electrical shock in her vagina. It was so bad that she had permanent damage to her ovaries, and she had to have a hysterectomy.” (See “America’s Amnesia,” The Progressive, July 2004.)
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http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/09/allen2509.htmlexcerpt:
As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte abetted and covered up human rights crimes. He was a zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador. The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras. U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by 1984. So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground.
The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when,
John Negroponte on
CNN's Cold War.
according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. As Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson wrote in the series, Battalion 316 used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." Members of Battalion 316 were trained in surveillance and interrogation at a secret location in the United States and by the CIA at bases in Honduras. Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces who personally directed Battalion 316, also trained in the United States at the School of the Americas.
Negroponte tried to distance himself from the pattern of abuses, even after a flood of declassified documents exposed the extent of U.S. involvement with Battalion 316. In a segment of the 1998 CNN mini-series Cold War, Negroponte said that "some of the retrospective effort to try and suggest that we were supportive of, or condoned the actions of, human rights violators is really revisionistic."
By the time Negroponte was appointed ambassador by President Reagan in 1981, human rights activists in Honduras were vocally denouncing abuses. Former Honduran congressman Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga pleaded with Negroponte and other U.S. officials to stop the abuses committed by the U.S.-controlled military. "Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence," Diaz told the Sun. "They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed."
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-negroponte5,0,2446240.storyOriginally published December 15, 1995
John D. Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the early 1980s, when the Honduran military kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of people, said this week that he worked diligently behind the scenes to prevent the abuses.
"When allegations of abuses were brought to our attention, we in turn raised those matters with the government," said Mr. Negroponte, now ambassador to the Philippines.
He said he intervened personally to obtain the release of a young woman tortured for more than 11 weeks as a suspected subversive.
In telephone interviews and a letter faxed from Manila, Mr. Negroponte said he did not conceal human rights abuses by a military establishment vital to the Reagan administration's war against communism in Latin America.
His role and that of other U.S. officials were detailed by The Sun in a four-part June series that documented kidnapping, torture and murder by a CIA-trained Honduran military unit known as Battalion 316.
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