Moments after John Dimitri Negroponte strode into the Senate on April 19, and sat down before members of the Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearings to a diplomatic posting that the chairman identified as “one of the most consequential in American history,” a heckler in the gallery, an impassioned human rights activist, shouted at the nominee: “What about death squad 3-16, Mr. Negroponte!” and then, addressing the senators, he persisted, before security officers escorted him out, “Ask him about that death squad in Honduras that he supported.”
The reference is to the time, from 1981 to 1985, when Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras, where he supervised the construction of Al Aguacate air base — an air base where the US-trained Nicaraguan Contras and which was used as a secret detention and torture center during the
In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses of men thought to had been killed and buried at the site. Critics have now established that Battalion 3-16, a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces trained by the CIA, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people. Negroponte clearly not only knew about these human rights violations, but collaborated with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.
This in addition to his responsibility, as the New York Times reported, for “carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government.”
When he was in Honduras, and for years afterward, Negroponte refused to acknowledge abuses were ever committed there, claiming, as he had done in a letter to the Economist in 1982, that it was “simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.”
All of which does not jive with a 1997 CIA Inspector General investigation that concluded: “The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned” and linked to “death squad activities.”
To say that Negroponte did not know about it is to say that he was either an incompetent or a liar.
“There are two streams of analysis about John Negroponte,” says Larry Birms, who, as director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a human rights group, has tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to derail Negroponte’s career over the years. “One is that he is a distinguished career diplomatic officer. The other is that he is a rogue, a jackanape, a bounder of the worst type.”
From early on in his career as a “diplomatic officer” — Negroponte has been with the US Foreign Service since 1960 — he established a reputation as an extremist hawk, cold warrior and reactionary, contemptuous of the national sensibility of Third World folk, and often seen as having views to the right of even a man like Henry Kissinger.
In the early 1970s, Negroponte, who was at the Paris peace talks shuttling between the US and North Vietnamese delegations, expressed strong misgivings to Kissinger that Hanoi had won the “concession” of keeping some of its troops in the South. “He felt Kissinger had abandoned the people of South Vietnam,” said Richard Holbrook of Negroponte’s position. “He stood up to Kissinger.”
When President Bush announced Negroponte’s appointment as ambassador to the UN in 2001, it was met with widespread protest. Not only did the administration refuse to back down, however, it went so far as to silence potential witnesses.
On March 25, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden “deportation” from the US of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony at Negroponte’s hearings.
On learning of his nomination, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch in New York commented: “When John Negroponte was ambassador, he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed....”
And who, from our part of the world, could forget Negroponte, as UN ambassador from September 2001 to June 2004, as he delivered those strident presentations at the Security Council condemning “Palestinian terrorism” and voting down every resolution critical of Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories?
Soon after the hastily arranged ceremony last Monday, where the United States accelerated the planned transfer of political power to an interim Iraqi government by two days, John Dimitri Negroponte was en route to Baghdad to serve as America’s ambassador to Iraq.
Thought you might wanna know.
