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Bush UN Choice Faces a Fight - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum Bush UN Choice Faces a Fight
By Maggie Farley and Norman Kempster
Los Angeles Times
March 26, 2001
John D. Negroponte, President Bush's nominee for U.N. ambassador, is likely to face a fierce fight for confirmation over questions about his role in the Central American wars of the 1980s. While ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, Negroponte directed the secret arming of Nicaragua's Contra rebels and is accused by human rights groups of overlooking -- if not overseeing -- a CIA-backed Honduran death squad during his tenure.
Although Negroponte, a career diplomat, has in previous confirmation hearings denied knowledge of systematic human rights abuses, declassified documents and disclosures by former death squad members since his last testimony in 1993 have cast doubt on whether he was telling the whole truth before Congress. Human rights groups and Democratic Party opponents are preparing for a fight, making Negroponte the first Bush administration foreign policy appointee to kindle serious opposition from Congress.
His nomination is clouded further by the sudden deportations of several former members of the death squad, which was known as Battalion 3-16. The men, who had resided for years in the United States and Canada and could have provided evidence for the hearings, were returned to Honduras within a few weeks of Negroponte's nomination being announced. But one of them, Gen. Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, who was the deputy ambassador to the United Nations until Washington revoked his visa in February, went public this month with details of U.S. support for the rogue battalion. His comments could provide fodder for Negroponte's opponents on Capitol Hill.
Members of Congress who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Iran-Contra investigations said Negroponte must satisfy doubts about his past performance before he can be confirmed as the face for U.S. interests around the world. ``In the 1980s, John Negroponte was at the center of a clash over deep disagreements we had about the role the United States should be playing in Central America and, more importantly, the way -- often secretive or, at best, unclear -- that our policy was being conducted,'' said Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
``New information suggesting that the U.S. Embassy in Honduras knew more about human rights violations in Honduras than was communicated to the Congress and to the public,'' he said, ``needs to be probed carefully and thoroughly examined.''
Opposing Negroponte, a key Bush appointment, will be a politically risky task. Taking him on means challenging Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who is said to have handpicked him. Powell is a close friend of Negroponte and made him his deputy national security advisor in the Reagan administration after the diplomat's Honduran stint, presumably having found nothing disqualifying in his background at the time. And Negroponte has been confirmed twice as ambassador since then, to Mexico in 1989 and to the Philippines in 1993.
Negroponte, who spent 37 years as a foreign service officer, is largely well thought of in the diplomatic corps as a man who speaks five languages but knows when to keep silent. His friends say he is brilliant and urbane, and carries out orders with a cool and quiet efficiency. Colleagues describe him as a dedicated diplomat who did the bidding of whatever administration was in office at the time -- a quality his friends see as loyalty, and his critics as amorality.
In 1981, President Reagan sent Negroponte to Honduras, which had become Washington's base for covert military operations against the leftist Sandinistas who controlled Nicaragua next door. Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor in Honduras, had cabled Washington several times about an alarming increase in extrajudicial executions and torture of political opponents by the Honduran government. There was no response, he said, until the day he was summoned to Washington and told by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders to stop reporting human rights abuses through official channels.
``He was afraid it would leak and make it more difficult for us to continue our economic and security assistance,'' said Binns, now retired. ``And it would prejudice the Contra operation, though I didn't know it at the time.'' Binns' assignment lasted only a year, ending not long after that meeting. But before he left, he compiled a briefing book for Negroponte detailing the human rights problems. Negroponte took a different approach. Under his direction, U.S. military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million. He also helped orchestrate a secret deal later known as Iran-Contra to send arms through Honduras to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government.
In the background, a murky military unit called Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA, carried out the dirty work of making sure that communism didn't spread to Honduras -- a business that involved the torture and ``disappearing'' of at least 184 political opponents, according to a 1994 Honduran human rights report called ``The Facts Speak for Themselves.''
Negroponte testified later that he knew little about the battalion or systematic abuses, and was a champion of advancing human rights in Honduras. Embassy colleagues believe that he was personally involved, but not quite in the way he claimed. ``In Honduras, he told these guys [the death squad leaders] to cut it out, but he wasn't going to say that publicly,'' said a former official who didn't want his name used because of the sensitivity of the situation. ``This is the problem with most of Washington. You tell political bosses what they want to hear and don't let the truth get in the way of policy.''
Activists such as Honduran Human Rights Commissioner Leo Valladares have been pursuing the truth since the late 1980s, making hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents.
The U.S. government has released thousands of pages to him and other petitioners over the years, but the documents are heavily redacted, blacked-out page after blacked-out page. ``They gave me thousands of pages, but they didn't give me anything,'' Valladares said. ``I trust the U.S. Senate to look at the original documents. Perhaps they will help determine if there are other American citizens who can perform better than Negroponte because they don't have a past of knowing about human rights violations and keeping silent about them.''
Human rights groups are comparing notes and Senate staffers are delving into classified documents to prepare for the contentious confirmation hearing. Negroponte has declined all interviews before the hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.
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