John Dimitri Negroponte Contra Aide

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One of the primary responsibilities of George W. Bush's new ambassador to the United Nations will be to berate countries like China, Burma, and Afghanistan for their violations of human rights. That's what America's U.N. ambassadors do.

Which is why, when the Bush administration announced its choice for U.N. ambassador this week, human rights activists did a collective double take. For although John Dimitri Negroponte has a reputation for doggedly defending U.S. interests overseas, he has at least as strong a reputation for making sure human rights don't get in the way. Midway through a foreign service career that began in the mid-'60s in Vietnam and continued through a stint in Mexico in the '90s, Negroponte served as ambassador to Honduras. It was the early '80s, and the Honduran government was killing and "disappearing" political opponents by the dozens. Most close observers, including some who served within the U.S. embassy, insist America knew about the abuses. And they accuse Negroponte of turning a blind eye. Says one human rights lawyer, "A guy like that is not going to be a very credible spokesperson for American principles on human rights."

Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. The Reagan administration had chosen the small, impoverished country as its base for covert military operations against the Communist Sandinistas who ruled neighboring Nicaragua. And Negroponte, a staunch anti-Communist who had proved his credentials on the streets of Saigon, was chosen to orchestrate the effort, building up military positions inside Honduras and training Nicaragua's anti-government Contra rebels just inside Honduras's borders. Under Negroponte's direction, military aid to Honduras rose dramatically, from $4 million to $77.4 million. To keep the aid flowing, the American embassy in Tegucigalpa needed to reassure Congress annually that Honduras was respecting the human rights of its citizens. Accordingly, Negroponte's embassy presented annual reports to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee promising, as the 1983 report put it, that the "Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature" and that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras."

But there were. In the late '80s the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, found the Honduran government guilty of "engaging in a practice and policy of systematic and gross human rights violations including disappearances, extrajudicial execution, and torture," says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch. In fact, those abuses had deeply disturbed Negroponte's predecessor, a Carter appointee named Jack Binns, who served from October 1980 until October 1981. "I reported these abuses repeatedly," says Binns, "and urged that we take action to try and turn it around." In one cable to Washington after Reagan took office, Binns warned that General Gustavo Alvarez, chief of the Honduran armed forces, was considering modeling Honduras's response to suspected subversives on the infamous "dirty war" waged by the Argentine military in the late '70s. "Alvarez stressed theme that democracies and West are soft, perhaps too soft to resist Communist subversion," wrote Binns. "The Argentines, he said, had met the threat effectively, identifying--and taking care of--the subversives.... When it comes to subversion, would opt for tough, vigorous and Extra-Legal Action."

http://www.globalpolicy.org/unitedstates/unpolicy/gen2001/0308negr.htm