Negroponte: Man With a Message

[Chris Alger]

Here's the guy Bush is going to nominate as ambassador to drive home the point that the U.S. will no longer aid, abet or tolerate torture, murder and other human rights violations in "liberated" Iraq.

From Conn Hallinan, Negroponte and the "War Against Terrorism", San Francisco Examiner, October 20, 2001:

Twenty years ago, Negroponte was financing and supporting terrorist death squads in Honduras and providing "safe haven" for the Contras, who used sabotage and murder in their efforts to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

When Negroponte took over as US Ambassador to Honduras in 1981, the outgoing Carter Administration appointee, Jack Binns, warned him that human rights abuses were on the rise. Negroponte not only ignored him, he oversaw a jump in US military aid from $3.9 million in 1981 to $77.4 million in 1984. At the time, Honduras had no internal or external enemies, but was serving as the major launch pad for the US backed Contra attacks. Locals dubbed the country the "USS Honduras."

At the time Negroponte was denying human rights violations in Honduras, the military's notorious Battalion 3-16, a secret unit trained by the CIA, and headed by Gen. Gustavo Alverez Martinez, a graduate of the US's School of the Americas, was kidnapping and murdering opponents of the government. Some 184 murders have been documented by human rights organizations, including American Jesuit priest Joseph Carney. According to a 1995 series in the Baltimore Sun exposing the US role in training the Battalion, the unit used electric shock and suffocation as its favored interrogation technique, murdering prisoners afterwards.

Honduran Congressman Efrain Diaz Aarrivillaga told the Sun he took up the issue of Battalion 3-16 with Negroponte, but said the Ambassador's 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."

Jose Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch/America, calls Negroponte the "ostrich ambassador," who "never saw anything wrong. He never heard about any serious rights violations. It was like he was living in another country."

From another article:

"Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnaped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress. In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive."

[GWB]

You picked a biased article to quote. The author calls our 1980's foreign policy:
[ QUOTE ]
...the Reagan Administration's jihad in Central America.

[/ QUOTE ]His words, he was not quoting anybody.


How many millions of people in Central American countries are living in freedom today because of our anti-totalitarian policies in the 1980's?

W

[andyfox]

A lot less than died because of it. You're seriously going to defend our policy in Central America in the 1980s? Those totalitarians in Nicaragua had free elections which resulted in their being voted out of office. In El Salvador, we justified the murder of nuns. In Guatemala, we saw nothing wrong with supporting brutal thugs because we had been doing it for thirty years. We trained the torturers and our president said they were the moral equivalent of the founding fathers.

Shame on you. Negroponte is a disgusting person, a hideous and vile appointment that shows we won't allow human rights to get in our way in Iraq. Shame on you.

[Cyrus]

Negroponte's philanthropic and liberating work actually spun off a veritable web of freedom fighters in the region. When the news hit the stands (and the airwaves) in America that those freedom fighters were rapists and murderers, there was deafening silence from the part of the Reagan administration. When it surfaced that they were not above kidnapping, raping and butchering a group of unfortunate American nuns, the reaction was the biggest smokescreen effort of the decade.

Truly, Negroponte is a man on a mission. And his misison is to see as many murders done in his watch as possible, not unlike a sociopath cowboy in a B-western. He truly has a score to settle with his demons. Negroponte needs psychiatric help - but is the amabassador of the United States to the world, instead. How fitting.

[Chris Alger]

[GWB]

[ QUOTE ]
A lot less than died because of it. You're seriously going to defend our policy in Central America in the 1980s? Those totalitarians in Nicaragua had free elections which resulted in their being voted out of office. In El Salvador, we justified the murder of nuns. In Guatemala, we saw nothing wrong with supporting brutal thugs because we had been doing it for thirty years. We trained the torturers and our president said they were the moral equivalent of the founding fathers.

Shame on you. Negroponte is a disgusting person, a hideous and vile appointment that shows we won't allow human rights to get in our way in Iraq. Shame on you.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is the key disconnect between liberals and conservatives. Liberals look at events in history as individual crimes, a murder here, a terrorist act here, etc. Conservatives keep their eyes on the big picture. How are the millions of people who must live in these countries best served = by being subjugated to Totalitarians?

Reagan's policies in toto saved millions of people from dictatorship. The elections in Nicaraugua would never have happened without Reagan's pressure, the freedoms in other Central American countries too.

Reagan understood where and how to apply pressure for the benefit of nearly a billion people worldwide (in Europe and around the world) who were under the communist thumb. At a minimum he helped them achieve freedom a decade or two earlier than otherwise.

Contrast this with Carter, who allowed terrorists to take over Iran and screw up the Middleeast to this day, and allowed Central America to get into the situation that Reagan had to rescue it from.

Keep your eyes on the big picture. Any individual murder is unfortunate, but by the time they happened, the general welfare of millions had been abandoned by Carter et.al. and Reagan choose to focus on the welfare of the millions of people first. It was the right decision, and the world is better for it.

[nicky g]

The Sandanistas were freely elected and freely deposed by free elections. Reagan tred to impose unelected murderers on the country who killed thousands of civilians. Same story in Chile a decade earlier, and countless other places. That the rightwing consistently portrays the overthrow of elected governments who had made no attempt to illegally consolidate their powers as protection against "totalitarianism" leads me to believe that 1984's predictions were a lot less off than many believe.

"Contrast this with Carter, who allowed terrorists to take over Iran and screw up the Middleeast to this day"

And who did these guys take over from? A freely elected regime? No, A US backed dictatorship that had taken power from guess what, yet another freely elected government.

[John Cole]

"Contrast this with Carter, who allowed terrorists to take over Iran and screw up the Middleeast to this day, and allowed Central America to get into the situation that Reagan had to rescue it from."

Perhaps you've forgotten Reagan's response to the bombing of the Beirut barracks: "We're outta here."

[GWB]

[ QUOTE ]
"Contrast this with Carter, who allowed terrorists to take over Iran and screw up the Middleeast to this day"

And who did these guys take over from? A freely elected regime? No, A US backed dictatorship that had taken power from guess what, yet another freely elected government.

[/ QUOTE ]
I never said Iran was a democracy, but for Carter to allow a run-of-the-mill dictator who left the vast majority of the people unmolested (he did go after a few of his political opponents), with a regime that has subjugated everybody with Islamic fanaticism (especially women) was unforgiveable.

And then they started to spread terrorism worldwide. Carter's actions led directly to the Iraq situation today - how different that would be if we maintained a stable pro-Western regime in Iran.

[nicky g]

"allow a run-of-the-mill dictator who left the vast majority of the people unmolested (he did go after a few of his political opponents)"

LOL. A few. The Shah's regime tortured and murdered tens of thousands of political opponents, not a few. Its secret police agency SAVAk was notorious for being one of the most brutal torturers in the world. The people it left alone were the walthy elite and international oil companies. Iran and the world would have been best off if the US had never overthrown the democratialy elected Mossadeq government in the first place. Carter was right not to meddle further in a region where Western tinkering and support for dictators has led to disaster after disaster.