'Death Squads': 3 Complimentary Articles
ARTICLE 1
'The Salvador Option'
Negroponte Revisiting The 'Failed' Past, as is This Administrations Norm
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The
Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing."
Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the
time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively
debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation.
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own
intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)
Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.
Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA
civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly,
could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be
among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj.
Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Jan. 8, 2005
With Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
ARTICLE 2
Chavez Joins Colombia Arrest Row
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez says he is convinced a Colombian guerrilla leader was kidnapped in his country.
He accused the Colombian police of lying when they say Rodrigo Granda was captured in a Colombian border town.
Mr Granda, described as the unofficial foreign minister of the Farc rebels, apparently disappeared on 13 December.
He turned up in police custody in Colombia two days later, and claimed he had been seized while he was staying in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
President Chavez says he smelt a rat from the beginning.
Now he says phone records appear to provide conclusive evidence that Mr Granda was kidnapped in Caracas and smuggled across the border to Colombia's Cucuta town.
According to President Chavez, a call was registered to Mr Granda's mobile phone in central Caracas just minutes before the reported kidnapping incident.
Another call was recorded some hours later from the Venezuelan side of the frontier.
'Violating sovereignty'
"There is no doubt, the Colombian police are lying. When they say Granda was captured in Cucuta, the Colombian police are lying," President Chavez said.
He suggested they had probably also been lying to the Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe.
Mr Uribe on Thursday dismissed the Farc leader's claims that he had been kidnapped in Venezuela.
Mr Chavez said his government is investigating reports that members of the Venezuelan security forces may have taken part in the alleged kidnapping alongside Colombian intelligence agents.
He vowed to take up energetically any violation of Venezuelan sovereignty.
"This is a serious situation... if the Colombian police really did violate Venezuelan sovereignty it will of course have an impact on our bilateral relations," he said.
But he insisted that rogue elements in both countries should not be allow to undermine the recent improvement in relations between the two countries.
Iain Bruce
BBC News, Caracas
ARTICLE 3
Former Death Squad Man to Run Iraq
George Bush has chosen a replacement for Paul Bremer as governor-in-chief in Iraq. It is John Negroponte, the mastermind behind the death squads of Central America. Negroponte could give lessons to the most brutal dictatorships in the world on how to organise death squads, assassinate opponents and terrorise popular movements into submission.
He did all that during the US's dirty war in Central America in the 1980s when he was "ambassador" to Honduras. Now he is to become "ambassador" to Iraq in June. Don't let the innocent-sounding title fool you. He'll not be sorting out lost passports and traveller's cheques. Negroponte will lead the spies, "counter-insurgency squads", and the real political power in Iraq from the US "embassy".
Bush now admits that huge concentrations of US troops will remain in Iraq for many years. Even if the phoney "handover" to a US-picked puppet regime goes ahead on 30 June, US corporations will dominate the economy.The Pentagon will unleash repression from 14 military bases. The profits from Iraq's vast natural resources will flow to Bush's friends in the oil industry. Astride it all will be Negroponte, ruling from Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace.
It was under the diplomatic cover of "ambassador" that Negroponte organised right wing death squads in Central America. They left tens of thousands of people dead in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as they murdered to prop up pro-US dictatorships under President Ronald Reagan. The internationally respected New York Times credits John Negroponte with "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua" during his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
He oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. Much of that money was funnelled to the death squads in neighbouring Nicaragua and El Salvador. In early 1984 two US mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua. Documents show that Negroponte connected the two with a contact in the Honduran military.
Other documents uncovered a scheme of Negroponte and the then vice-president George Bush Sr to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government. Negroponte concealed murder, kidnapping and torture by a CIA equipped and trained Honduran military unit, Battalion 3-16. According to the Baltimore Sun the unit "used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."
The death squads in the tiny country of El Salvador murdered 40,000 in one year alone. They included archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down while he performed mass. Negroponte personally covered up the murder of 32 Salvadorean nuns who fled to Honduras in 1981. His friends in the death squads tortured them then crammed them into helicopters from which they were tossed to their deaths. Everything that Saddam Hussein's regime stood accused of was unleashed by Negroponte. Human rights organisations lost count of the rapes and tortures. They reported how the Contras would cut off women's breasts in Nicaragua. Negroponte had learnt his trade in Vietnam. There the Pentagon used chemical weapons which continue to poison the soil today.
At the US embassy in Vietnam he coordinated pro-US death squads from 1964 to 1968. They, along with indiscriminate military force, were the US's response to a popular independence movement. From 1969 he was aide to Henry Kissinger, who oversaw the saturation bombing of Vietnam and the extension of the war into neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. Incredibly, Negroponte was so hawkish that Kissinger sacked him in 1973 when it became clear the US would have to negotiate with the Vietnamese liberation movement. But Bush has rehabilitated the monster.
"The idea that someone hand in glove with the Contras should take over as effectively the colonial administrator in Iraq would be astonishing were it not for what we have come to expect from Bush's White House," says Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition. It will inflame the already growing resistance in Iraq."
There is only one way to stop the Bush gang bringing the slaughter of Central America and Vietnam to Iraq and the wider Middle East. It is, in the words of veteran peace campaigner Bruce Kent, for "all foreign soldiers to leave Iraq" and to give the country back to its people. Twenty years ago every member of the New Labour cabinet opposed Negroponte's murder gangs. Now they and their supporters are on the same side as the godfather of the death squads against the Iraqi people.
Kevin Ovenden | 21.04.2004 21:11 | London
SEE ALSO, http://www.newsmakingnews.com/death_squads.htm
'The Salvador Option'
Negroponte Revisiting The 'Failed' Past, as is This Administrations Norm
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The
Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing."
Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the
time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively
debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation.
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own
intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)
Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.
Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA
civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly,
could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be
among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj.
Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Jan. 8, 2005
With Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
ARTICLE 2
Chavez Joins Colombia Arrest Row
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez says he is convinced a Colombian guerrilla leader was kidnapped in his country.
He accused the Colombian police of lying when they say Rodrigo Granda was captured in a Colombian border town.
Mr Granda, described as the unofficial foreign minister of the Farc rebels, apparently disappeared on 13 December.
He turned up in police custody in Colombia two days later, and claimed he had been seized while he was staying in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
President Chavez says he smelt a rat from the beginning.
Now he says phone records appear to provide conclusive evidence that Mr Granda was kidnapped in Caracas and smuggled across the border to Colombia's Cucuta town.
According to President Chavez, a call was registered to Mr Granda's mobile phone in central Caracas just minutes before the reported kidnapping incident.
Another call was recorded some hours later from the Venezuelan side of the frontier.
'Violating sovereignty'
"There is no doubt, the Colombian police are lying. When they say Granda was captured in Cucuta, the Colombian police are lying," President Chavez said.
He suggested they had probably also been lying to the Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe.
Mr Uribe on Thursday dismissed the Farc leader's claims that he had been kidnapped in Venezuela.
Mr Chavez said his government is investigating reports that members of the Venezuelan security forces may have taken part in the alleged kidnapping alongside Colombian intelligence agents.
He vowed to take up energetically any violation of Venezuelan sovereignty.
"This is a serious situation... if the Colombian police really did violate Venezuelan sovereignty it will of course have an impact on our bilateral relations," he said.
But he insisted that rogue elements in both countries should not be allow to undermine the recent improvement in relations between the two countries.
Iain Bruce
BBC News, Caracas
ARTICLE 3
Former Death Squad Man to Run Iraq
George Bush has chosen a replacement for Paul Bremer as governor-in-chief in Iraq. It is John Negroponte, the mastermind behind the death squads of Central America. Negroponte could give lessons to the most brutal dictatorships in the world on how to organise death squads, assassinate opponents and terrorise popular movements into submission.
He did all that during the US's dirty war in Central America in the 1980s when he was "ambassador" to Honduras. Now he is to become "ambassador" to Iraq in June. Don't let the innocent-sounding title fool you. He'll not be sorting out lost passports and traveller's cheques. Negroponte will lead the spies, "counter-insurgency squads", and the real political power in Iraq from the US "embassy".
Bush now admits that huge concentrations of US troops will remain in Iraq for many years. Even if the phoney "handover" to a US-picked puppet regime goes ahead on 30 June, US corporations will dominate the economy.The Pentagon will unleash repression from 14 military bases. The profits from Iraq's vast natural resources will flow to Bush's friends in the oil industry. Astride it all will be Negroponte, ruling from Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace.
It was under the diplomatic cover of "ambassador" that Negroponte organised right wing death squads in Central America. They left tens of thousands of people dead in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as they murdered to prop up pro-US dictatorships under President Ronald Reagan. The internationally respected New York Times credits John Negroponte with "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua" during his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
He oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. Much of that money was funnelled to the death squads in neighbouring Nicaragua and El Salvador. In early 1984 two US mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua. Documents show that Negroponte connected the two with a contact in the Honduran military.
Other documents uncovered a scheme of Negroponte and the then vice-president George Bush Sr to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government. Negroponte concealed murder, kidnapping and torture by a CIA equipped and trained Honduran military unit, Battalion 3-16. According to the Baltimore Sun the unit "used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."
The death squads in the tiny country of El Salvador murdered 40,000 in one year alone. They included archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down while he performed mass. Negroponte personally covered up the murder of 32 Salvadorean nuns who fled to Honduras in 1981. His friends in the death squads tortured them then crammed them into helicopters from which they were tossed to their deaths. Everything that Saddam Hussein's regime stood accused of was unleashed by Negroponte. Human rights organisations lost count of the rapes and tortures. They reported how the Contras would cut off women's breasts in Nicaragua. Negroponte had learnt his trade in Vietnam. There the Pentagon used chemical weapons which continue to poison the soil today.
At the US embassy in Vietnam he coordinated pro-US death squads from 1964 to 1968. They, along with indiscriminate military force, were the US's response to a popular independence movement. From 1969 he was aide to Henry Kissinger, who oversaw the saturation bombing of Vietnam and the extension of the war into neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. Incredibly, Negroponte was so hawkish that Kissinger sacked him in 1973 when it became clear the US would have to negotiate with the Vietnamese liberation movement. But Bush has rehabilitated the monster.
"The idea that someone hand in glove with the Contras should take over as effectively the colonial administrator in Iraq would be astonishing were it not for what we have come to expect from Bush's White House," says Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition. It will inflame the already growing resistance in Iraq."
There is only one way to stop the Bush gang bringing the slaughter of Central America and Vietnam to Iraq and the wider Middle East. It is, in the words of veteran peace campaigner Bruce Kent, for "all foreign soldiers to leave Iraq" and to give the country back to its people. Twenty years ago every member of the New Labour cabinet opposed Negroponte's murder gangs. Now they and their supporters are on the same side as the godfather of the death squads against the Iraqi people.
Kevin Ovenden | 21.04.2004 21:11 | London
SEE ALSO, http://www.newsmakingnews.com/death_squads.htm
posted by R7 | 1/10/2005 02:14:00 AM
1 Comments:
NEW RIPPLES IN AN EVIL STORY, 7/01
by Sister Laetitia Bordes, s.h.
John D. Negroponte, President Bush's nominee as the next ambassador to the United Nations? My ears perked up. I turned up the volume on the radio. I began listening more attentively. Yes, I had heard correctly. Bush was nominating Negroponte, the man who gave the CIA backed Honduran death squads open field when he was ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
My mind went back to May 1982 and I saw myself facing Negroponte in his office at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. I had gone to Honduras on a fact-finding delegation. We were looking for answers. Thirty-two women had fled the death squads of El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 to take refuge in Honduras. One of them had been Romero's secretary. Some months after their arrival, these women were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared. Our delegation was in Honduras to find out what had happened to these women.
John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. There had been eyewitnesses to the capture and we were well read on the documentation that previous delegations had gathered. Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US Embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government and it would be to our advantage to discuss the matter with the latter. Facts, however, reveal quite the contrary. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.
John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country. The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.
In 1994, the Honduran Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents.
It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations. Yet, back in his office that day in 1982, John Negroponte assured us that he had no idea what had happened to the women we were looking for. I had to wait 13 years to find out. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in1996 Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor as US ambassador in Honduras, told how a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women we had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981 and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, before being placed in helicopters of the Salvadoran military. After take off from the airport in Tegucigalpa, the victims were thrown out of the helicopters. Binns told the Baltimore Sun that the North American authorities were well aware of what had happened and that it was a grave violation of human rights. But it was seen as part of Ronald Reagan's counterinsurgency policy.
Now in 2001, I'm seeing new ripples in this story.
Since President Bush made it known that he intended to nominate John Negroponte, other people have suddenly been "disappearing", so to speak. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times on March 25 Maggie Farley and Norman Kempster reported on the sudden deportation of several former Honduran death squad members from the United States. These men could have provided shattering testimony against Negroponte in the forthcoming Senate hearings. One of these recent deportees just happens to be General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In February, Washington revoked the visa of Discua who was Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Since then, Discua has gone public with details of US support of Battalion 3-16.
Given the history of John Negroponte in Central America, it is indeed horrifying to think that he should be chosen to represent our country at the United Nations, an organization founded to ensure that the human rights of all people receive the highest respect. How many of our Senators, I wonder, let alone the US public, know who John Negroponte really is?
Sister Laetitia Bordes, s.h. 282 Shoreview Avenue Pacifica, CA 94044 Tel. (650) 359-6635 e-mail lbordes@jps.net
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