Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointment

Yesterday the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on President Bush's nominee for US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte and reports from Capitol Hill indicate that he is now on a fast-track for Senate confirmation. The vote could come as early as Friday.
If confirmed Negroponte will head up the largest US embassy in the world, with more than 3,000 employees and over 500 CIA officers. Despite what some would call Negroponte's infamous history in Central America as US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, he has come up against almost no Congressional opposition, even from Senate democrats who once criticized him for supporting widespread human rights abuses.

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

Despite Negroponte's history, Democrats have not offered any organized resistance to his nomination. In fact some observers described yesterday's hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a love fest. Sen. Chris Dodd who opposed Negroponte when the committee reported his nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2001, has now come out in support of him, saying, "Whatever differences I've had years ago with John Negroponte, I happen to feel he's a very fine Foreign Service officer and has done a tremendous job in many places."


Senator Chris Dodd, speaking at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on John Negroponte.
While most Democrats either praised Negroponte or refused to raise his past record, some of the toughest questioning came from Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. But he did not question Negroponte on Central America, but on Iraq.

As Negroponte, responded to Hagel, he was interrupted by an activist, Andres Conteris of Non-violence International.


Andres Conteris, is program director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-violence International. He disrupted yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Negroponte's appointment as US ambassador to Iraq.
Father Joe Mulligan, is a Jesuit priest who has been based in Nicaragua for the past 18 years. He has been one of the main activists trying to determine what happened to American priest James Carney, who disappeared in Honduras in 1983. He has met John Negroponte.
Sister Laetitia Bordes, a Catholic nun with the Society of Helpers, a Catholic community of women. She is talking to us from San Bruno, California.

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