Hillary, Honduras, and the Murder of My Friend Berta

[Judi Lynn]

81. How did you never acknowledge what Honduras has been to the US all these years,

contrary to what the people of Honduras, the victims, wanted, anyway?

[center] ________[/center]
Our Man in Honduras
Stephen Kinzer

September 20, 2001 Issue

When a country finds itself at the center of world history, it begins attracting spies, mercenaries, war profiteers, journalists, prostitutes, and fortune-seekers. Often they gravitate to a particular hotel. In Honduras, which was shaken from its long slumber in the 1980s and turned into a violent staging ground for cross-border war, the Maya was that hotel. Perched atop a high hill near the central plaza in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, its tinted windows giving it an air of mystery, the Maya attracted a variety of sinister characters. Counterrevolutionaries hatched bloody plots over breakfast beside the pool. You could buy a machine gun at the bar. Busloads of crew-cut Americans would arrive from the airport at times when I knew there were no commercial flights landing, spend the night, and then ship out before dawn; they said they didn’t know where they were going, and I believed them. Friends told me that death squad torturers stopped in for steak before setting off on their night’s work. But in those days, much of what anyone said in Honduras was a lie. That was certainly true at the Maya, and equally so at the American embassy a couple of miles away.

The diplomat who presided over that embassy from 1981 to 1985, John Dimitri Negroponte, was a great fabulist. He saw, or professed to see, a Honduras almost Scandinavian in its tranquillity, a place where there were no murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine jails or cemeteries. Now that President Bush has nominated Negroponte to be United States ambassador to the United Nations, his record in Honduras is coming under new scrutiny. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing on his nomination soon, probably in September. With the chairmanship of the committee now passed from Jesse Helms to Joseph Biden, this hearing promises to be anything but routine. It will recall the polarizing drama of Central America in the 1980s, a historical chapter that seemed closed but that the Bush administration has chosen to reopen. It may even throw some light onto places that have for two decades been as dark and scary as the Maya Hotel bar at midnight.

Over the last few weeks, investigators for the Foreign Relations Committee have been reading classified government documents written by or about Negroponte. They have also conducted an extensive private interview with him. At the committee hearing on his nomination, senators are likely to ask him about what they suspect were false reports that he filed on human rights conditions in Honduras, and about questionable sworn testimony he later gave the committee.

. . .

n Honduras Negroponte exercised US power in ways that still reverberate throughout that small country. His most striking legacy, though, is the Honduras of his imagination. Most people who lived or worked in Honduras during the 1980s saw a nation spiraling into violence and infested by paramilitary gangs that kidnapped and killed with impunity. Negroponte would not acknowledge this. He realized that the Reagan policy in Central America would lose support if truths about Honduras were known, so he refused to accept them.

By nominating Negroponte as ambassador to the United Nations, the Bush administration is sending at least two clear messages. The first is addressed to the UN itself. During his years in Honduras, Negroponte acquired a reputation, justified or not, as an old-fashioned imperialist. Sending him to the UN serves notice that the Bush administration will not be bound by diplomatic niceties as it conducts its foreign policy.

Negroponte’s nomination is also part of a concerted effort to rehabilitate those who planned and organized the Nicaraguan contra war of the 1980s. When last heard from, these men were objects of public opprobrium and, in some cases, criminal indictments. Bush administration officials believe that they were shamefully mistreated and that they ought to be honored for their much-maligned service. No one is more worthy in their eyes than Negroponte, whose work made it possible for the United States to turn Honduras into a staging area for the contra war.

More:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/09/20/our-man-in-honduras/