People's Democracy

PENDING US congressional approval, the White House’s next ambassador to the UN will be a gray eminence of that country’s bloody central America policy during the 80s.

In his obsession to destroy the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) of El Salavador, President Ronald Reagan had named John D Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.

Negroponte engineered a dark tragedy of extraordinary proportions, which resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and two million civilian refugees, who mostly fled to the United States as a consequence of the armed conflict in the region. In Nicaragua alone, the war wreaked damages worth more than

$ 17 billion USD to the country’s infrastructure and economy, according to a ruling in favor of Nicaragua handed down by international Court of Justice at the Hague. Significantly, the White House has never respected that ruling.

At the end of the decade, the Sandinistas peacefully turned over power, after losing democratic elections in which Washington’s favorite candidate, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, was the victor. The FMLN reached a peace agreement with the Salavadoran government and is now the second most important political party in that country.

Negroponte, the United States’ Machiavellian ambassador to Honduras during the contras’ bloody and infamous proxy war led by Ronald Reagan against Nicaragua and against the FMLN insurrection in EI Salvador in the 80s, has now been nominated US ambassador to the United Nations by president George W Bush.

Negroponte, with 37 years of diplomatic service was ambassador to Mexico in 1989 and occupied the same position in the Phillippines in 1993.

General Colin L Powell, national security director during the Reagan administration and current secretary of state, nominated his personal friend Negroponte for the position of assistant director of the National Security Council.

ROMAN PROCONSUL

When Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras, he behaved like an arrogant Roman Proconsul for Central America. His principle responsibility was to direct secret operations to arm the contra rebels in the White House’s merciless war, with the objective of defeating the Sandinista government and the FMLN and, in the process, take control of Honduras as if he were the de facto president of that Central American country.

Honduras was reduced to the rank of a US military colony, used as a base of operations to launch contra attacks, which devastated Nicaragua and EI Salvador. During Negroponte’s time as ambassador, US military aid to Honduras increased from 4 million dollars to 77.4 million dollars USD.

Practically overnight, Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Americas, was transformed into one of the most militarized countries in the hemisphere, without a visible or invisible enemy.

Honduras militarization also brought with it, under Negroponte’s auspices, the systematic violation of the human rights of Hondurans suspected by the US puppet government of being communists or communist sympathizers.

Negroponte was instrumental in creating Battalion 3-16, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and better known as the fearful death squad, responsible for the disappearance of no less than 184 political opponents of the Honduran government.

Since the beginning of this year, there has been a series of "coincidences" in the United States which appear to be designed to remove any obstacle to Negroponte’s confirmation as UN ambassador. Jose Barrera, one of the Battalion’s chief interrogators, was expelled from Canada on February 20.

Meanwhile, Honduran General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, one of the founding members of the Battalion 3-16 para-military group who had been named by Honduras as a high-ranking diplomat at the UN in 1996, lost his position in New York one month ago. Discua, whose appointment to the UN was presumably to allow him diplomatic immunity protecting him from possible accusations of crimes and violations against human rights while he was leader of Battalion 3-16, suddenly went out of favor among his buddies in Washington.

Discua rarely fulfilled the responsibilities of the UN post. He preferred to spend his days in Miami, where he owns a lot of property and where for various years he was the target of constant accusations of human rights violations by Honduran and US organisations. After having ignored the accusations, the protests suddenly took effect: in February three weeks before Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador to the UN, Colin Powell’s State deaprtment revoked Discua’s diplomatic visa, alleging that he had not fulfilled his diplomatic duties at the UN. Discua found himslef forced to return to Honduras at the end of the month.

Days after his return to Honduras, Discua told the Honduran newspaper La Prensa that in 1983 the White House had sent him to the United States to organise Batallion 3-16 and to work with the anti-Sandinista contra forces. According to Berta Oliva di Nativi, the director of a group representing the families of the disappeared, Discua is sending "an explicit message to the Untied States: if it continues to do him damage, he will reveal Washington’s role in the creation of Battalion 3-16 and what happened during that period." This could delay the nomination of Negroponte, Discua’s chief supervisor at the time of the Death Squadron, and whose activities he himself later denied in official declarations related to congressional investigations. According to Negroponte, the embassy he directed never knew anything about the human rights violations committed by the battalion.

However since his expulsion to Honduras, Discua has been talking openly on Honduran radio and television, implicating the White Hosue in the Death Squadron’s operations.

There is no doubt, however, that Negroponte has more lives than a cat. When the Iran-Contra scandal almost brought down Ronald Reagan’s government for selling arms to Iran in order to supply funds to the contras breaking two US congressional bans – Negroponte, who directed those operations along with Colonel Oliver North from the National Security Offices located on the ground floor of the White House, emerged unscathed, backed by none other than his boss, General Colin Powell.

Once more Negroponte, has the formidable support of his former buddy, now Secretary of State in the Bush administration. According to reliable sources, Powell personally selected Negroponte for the post of UN Ambassador. It’s a case of one hand washing the other.

The nomination has to be approved by U S Congress. It’s possible that there will be oppostion from the Democratic Party, although those opposed to this nomination would probably be incapable of counteracting the power of Powell, the chief hawk on Bush’s team. John E Kerry, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one of those opposed. Kerry recently stated that there is fresh information suggesting that the US ambassador to Honduras knew more than he informed Congress and the public about human rights violations.

Kerry went on to say that in the 80’s John Negroponte was at the centre of a profound head-on clash concerning the role that the United States should have in Central America and even more significantly, on the often secret manner in which US foreign policy was conducted. All of that will be reduced to rhetoric and redundancy once Negroponte receives congressional approval.

If his nomination is okayed, the Bush government will be creating an paradox in regard to the US mission at the U N. - a fanatical anticommunist hawk in a position of exceptional influence, precisely when the cold war has passed into history. In other words, an insensitive dinosaur whom his friends have labeled a loyal American and his critics in Washington call "amoral."

For Cuba, Negroponte’s probable approval means that the US stance in relation to the island will continue unchanged. For Nicaragua, where it is thought that Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista party will be the favorite in the end-of-year presidential elections, it would constitute a return to the 80s, a period during which Ortega and Negroponte were bitter enemies. The Bush administration is moving forward by backtracking 20 years. The more life changes, the less things change for Central America and the Caribbean.