Negroponte, godfather of bloody repression in Honduras

Jean Guy-Allard | March 3 2005

A former US ambassador to Tegucigalpa told how 32 Salvadoran women were thrown from a helicopter in mid-flight with the full knowledge of the current tsar of the empire’s intelligence.

IN an interview with Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson, two reporters from The Baltimore Sun daily, in 1996 Jack Binns – a former US ambassador in Honduras – told how 32 Salvadoran women, some of them with their children, were thrown from a helicopter in mid-flight in April 1981.

For Binns, it was clearly impossible that the massacre – carried out by a CIA-supervised battalion – could have taken place without the knowledge of his successor to the same diplomatic post. That man was John Negroponte, chosen by George W. Bush as the first tsar of intelligence for the most militarily powerful country in the world.

Some weeks ago, the US president appointed Congressman Porter Goss as the new head of the CIA, a former agent who confessed to The Washington Post of having actively participated in terrorist attacks on Cuba during the 1960s from the JM/WAVE station in Miami. Now, as the Numero Uno of US intelligence and responsible for informing the president daily on matters to that respect, Bush has selected another representative of imperial terror.

In Honduras, John Dimitri Negroponte left behind him the memory of being the godfather of the bloodiest campaign of repression ever unleashed on that country.

Arrested by the Honduran secret police on April 22, 1981 in the capital Tegucigalpa, the women and their children had fled terrified from their country, following the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, given that one of them had been his secretary.

After being savagely tortured, they were placed on board a Salvadoran army helicopter. Minutes after take off from Tegucigalpa airport, they were thrown out of the aircraft. The children were entrusted to Salvadoran soldiers and nothing more was ever heard of them.

With the presence of Negroponte, and subsequently new CIA chief Donald Winters, the terror rose to a spectacular peak with respect to repression directed at both insurgents and political adversaries of the country’s extreme right wing.

Years later, victims of the organs of repression told how their torturers smothered them using a rubber mask made from a car tire, nicknamed “the hood”, which prevented them from breathing through their mouths and noses. They also used ropes to tie the prisoners up from the roof and torture them. Women were systematically raped. Survivors told how electric current was used for these torture sessions, inflicting shocks on their genitals.

“MR. VIETNAM” OF THE US SECURITY COUNCIL

Son of a Greek millionaire, born in Britain and educated in Switzerland, Negroponte was a pupil at the elitist Yale University – that of the Bush family – and began his diplomatic career at the age of 25, distinguishing himself through his willingness to carry out the most underhand tasks.

A trustworthy bedfellow of the most right-wing circles, linked to the anti-Cuban mafia – he supported the drafting and implementation of the infamous Helms-Burton Act – for 37 years, Negroponte has been the vilest diplomatic mercenary of the Republican administrations.

His work during the four years that he was political advisor to the US embassy in Saigon in the middle of the war in Viet Nam was apparently so efficient that he became “Mr. Vietnam” for the National Security Council that attended to foreign relations during the era of ultra-right winger Henry Kissinger.

Later, he took part in the Paris peace accords when he fell out with Kissinger…accusing him of being too weak towards the Vietnamese.

Sent by Ronald Reagan to relief “liberal” ambassador Jack Binns, in Honduras Negroponte was responsible for openly encouraging repressive operations both in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

He transformed Honduras to such an extent that the US press nicknamed the country “USS Honduras” as if it were just another one of the Pentagon’s aircraft carriers.

A NUN IN HELL

Laetitia Bordes, a nun who worked in El Salvador for almost 20 years, published an open letter in 2001, relating the account of her meeting with John D. Negroponte in Tegucigalpa in May 1982 when she went to investigate the disappearance of the 32 Salvadoran women.

“John Negroponte listened to us whilst we explained the facts,” recalled the nun. “There were eyewitnesses to their capture and we had read all the documents that other delegations had collated. Negroponte categorically denied all knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US would interfere with the affairs of the Honduran government and we would have to discuss the matter with the Hondurans.”

Evidently, Negroponte totally lied.

In 1994, the Honduran Human Rights Commission published a report on the activities of military terrorists and directly accused John Negroponte of countless human rights violations.

It was only in 1995, finally, with the publication of The Baltimore Sun articles that Letitia Bordes discovered the fate of the Salvadoran women.

John Negroponte is one of the dinosaurs of the Reagan era, along with Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams, Roger Noriega and other, that George W. Bush has brought together to make up his administration.

This obsessive anti-communist, a buddy of the terrorists in Miami, will now have the task of coordinating the work of the country’s fifteen information and espionage agencies.

It now remains for Negroponte to pass the exam for Congress. He’ll do it with ease. His crimes in Honduras have been archived since 2001, when he was appointed ambassador to the UN, carried by the cyclone of right-wing madness created by the September 11 attacks.

George W. Bush can sleep peacefully.

Within a few days, the individual who deliberately falsified the State Department’s reports on human rights during the whole of his stay in Honduras, will be personally presented at 7am every morning, with the “intelligence” summary with which he will breakfast.