John Negroponte, Satan's Nuncio
He speaks five languages.
From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras.
During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year.
According to The New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua."
Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.
Negroponte supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s.
In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.
-
When President George W. Bush announced Negroponte's appoint to the UN shortly after coming to office, it was met with widespread protest.
However, the Bush administration did not back down and even went so far as to try to silence potential witnesses.
On March 25, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his Senate confirmation hearings.
One of the deportees was General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16.
While Negroponte claimed, and still claims, ignorance of human rights abuses by the Honduran military, the Baltimore Sun noted that in 1982 alone Honduran newspapers ran 318 stories of extrajudicial killings and torture by the Honduran military. The Sun also reported that CIA agents were aware of abuses and even participated in the interrogations of people abducted, tortured, and later disappeared. One survivor of the clandestine jails, In�s Murillo, told the Sun that a CIA agent visited her cell and participated in her questioning. She was blindfolded but heard him writing on a pad that was then slid across the table to the interrogator.
-
Rick Chidester, 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" (The Progressive Response, Mar. 23, Vol. 5, No. 10).
Discua is not the only Battalion 3-16 participant to be booted out of the US this year [2001]. As Discua was having his visa revoked, Juan Angel Hern�ndez Lara, another alleged member, was deported from Florida. Lara had been arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) seven months before under a relatively new program that targets for deportation foreign nationals accused of human rights violations, including torture, murder and kidnapping.
More links here
