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Honduran Military Document Reveals US Complicity in Disappearances |
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by Kari Lydersen
Email: Karilyde (nospam) aol.com (unverified!) |
26 Jun 2001
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An internal Honduran military document proves the existence of a secret jail where political prisoners are/ were tortured and disappeared, and the US role in the operation. John Negroponte, Bush's choice for UN ambassador, played a key role in human rights abuses in Honduras. |
Pedro Jose Amador Meza, Melba Cacaras Mondragon, Filiberto Flores Zuniga and Jose Martinez Vasquez are just a few of the hundreds or even thousands of people who have \"disappeared\" in Honduras over the past several decades.
As in Guatemala and other Central American countries over the years, it is common knowledge that political activists and opposition leaders are constantly in danger of kidnapping, interrogation, torture and murder by U.S.-supported repressive government forces and the paramilitary groups aligned with the government.
However, in Honduras as in other countries, it is relatively rare that the public finds written proof of this repression, and the U.S. government’s role in it. At a presentation in the Pilsen neighborhood on June 16, the Chicago activist group La Voz de los de Abajo (\"The Voice of Those Below\") released an internal document from the Honduran military that confirms the existence of a rumored interrogation center where many local and foreign opposition leaders were said to have disappeared, and confirmed the U.S.’s support of the secret interrogation jail and political spying operations.
The document is particularly relevant right now because it refers to the operations of the notorious Intelligence Battalion run by General Alvarez Martinez. Martinez worked closely with John Negroponte, who was recently nominated by President George W. Bush as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Local activists say that if Negroponte is confirmed as ambassador, it will allow the U.S. to continue supporting brutal, corrupt and oppressive regimes like those in Honduras and Colombia without international interference.
The 1984 military document obtained by La Voz de los de Abajo lists the names of 20 \"suspects\" being held at the CREM (Regional Center for Military Training) detention center in Trujillo, Honduras and a secret jail with 30 cells 14 kilometers away.
The center’s official purpose was to train troops from Honduras and El Salvador and commandos from the Nicaraguan Contras. The document details how the center was at the moment training 4,000 troops, including 2,400 from two different battalions in El Salvador, 1,000 Nicaraguan Contras and 600 from two battalions in Honduras. 160 U.S. instructors with \"competency in irregular warfare\" were assigned to the center, and 320 workers were contracted and financed by the U.S. through a private company called PAE for the construction and maintenance of the facility, according to the document, which is actually a report from Commander Angel Ricardo Luque Portillo to his superior, Commander in Chief Walter Lopez Reyes.
\"The joint operations carried on at the center included coordination of intelligence and ‘dirty war’ activities against civilians and opposition organizations in Honduras,\" says a letter from La Voz de los de Abajo. The detainees, all of whom were never heard from again, are of Honduran, Nicaraguan and other nationalities and were captured through surveillance operations run by a joint U.S., Honduran and Nicaraguan task force outlined in the document. The document demands \"absolute discretion regarding the internal situation, and even more so, regarding financing by the United States of this project.\" It also says that, \"in view of claims made by some of the leaders of organizations that are a front for the national left, the recent questioning about this center, for example, it is imperative to move the prisoners.\" (The document was translated from Spanish by La Voz de los de Abajo.)
The document outlines how microwave surveillance by the Honduran national phone company was used to spy on and capture detainees. It orders that the report not be divulged to the government Superior Council, and outlines plans for preventing information leaks within the military. \"Develop through PROMITEC psychological actions in the zone and among troop personnel to avoid information leaks,\" it says.
The military document was released to the Honduran media in 1998, according to La Voz de los de Abajo members Vicky Cervantes and Alexy Lanza, but received little publicity. Now, by publicizing the document in the U.S., they are hoping to raise U.S. awareness of the complicity of the U.S. government with oppression, interrogation, murder and torture in Honduras, Colombia and other Central American countries, and specifically to block Negroponte’s appointment as ambassador to the U.N.
They are also hoping to shed light on the often-overlooked plight of indigenous people and landless peasants in Honduras, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. A tiny percentage of people own the vast majority of land and resources in Honduras, while four million people – two thirds of the population – live below the international poverty line and one half of that number live in \"abject poverty.\"
The Honduran government has been labeled one of the most corrupt in Latin America by the international survey firm Claritas.
\"Honduras was hard-hit by Hurricane Mitch three years ago, but even before the hurricane it was a man-made disaster of poverty and oppression,\" said Cervantes. \"Even before the hurricane it was the second poorest country in the hemisphere. For peasants, the situation has continued to get worse.\"
In addition to releasing the document on June 16, La Voz de los de Abajo members talked about the struggle of indigenous people in Honduras to hold on to their land in the face of government plans to develop more tourist resorts. They also described recent land takeovers by landless peasants – indigenous people and other campesinos who have been displaced over the years or who have never had land to call their own. Land reform amendments passed in the past several years have actually allotted land to the peasants, but the military and government has been slow in carrying out the reform and many land titles have fallen back into the hands of military and government leaders. The government has consistently channeled international relief funds, including those allocated for rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, to line the pockets of government officials and cronies, numerous studies show. The government is currently working with various multinational hotel and resort corporations to remove indigenous tribes from their beachfront land and develop new resorts and hotels to serve foreign visitors. In doing so, the government has trampled on the land and treaty rights granted indigenous groups like the Garifuna and the Lenca in the Constitution.
During several delegations to Honduras in the past few years, Lanza and Cervantes have interviewed indigenous people organizing to stay on their traditional land. During a recent visit, Lanza participated in a land takeover in which landless peasants constructed a village, where they continue to live, on a former military base. The community, called Guadalupe Carney, is named after a Chicago Jesuit priest, Father James Francis Carney, who gave up his American citizenship and moved to Honduras to work with the landless peasant movement.
Carney disappeared in 1983, and is alleged to have been interrogated at CREM.
\"These people have built communities where there was no community,\" said Cervantes. \"Most had been landless peasants who were surviving on subsistence squatting. What they’re doing in Guadalupe Carney is tremendous. They’re building schools and community centers. They’re taking their destiny into their own hands.\"
Cervantes noted that the housing in Guadalupe Carney is all built with palm trees, which are considered sacred plants. The buildings are made with palm wood and fronds, and the palm hearts are eaten. Palm oil also serves various purposes.
\"This is the integration of the land and the struggle,\" she said.
On June 10, according to a letter from the CNTC indigenous group, an organization of women campesinos, including many single mothers, made a successful land seizure of 100 manzanas of land. The land had been granted to a university by the government to carry out an experimental project, but \"the project was never carried out and the land was left uncultivated,\" according to the letter.
\"For that reason, the women peacefully occupied the land,\" says the letter from Rosalio Murcia Portillo, general secretary of the CNTC. \"Conditions for the women are precarious, especially regarding food and housing, and taking into account that they are accompanied by their children.\"
The takeover occurred in a northern region of Honduras that is known as a battleground between peasants and poor banana workers against the transnational corporations that operate in the area.
\"Women have played an extremely important role in taking action to win demands, especially in the struggle for land,\" says the letter. \"They have done this accompanying their partners or alone, seeking for their families a place to work and to make a just income that would help them improve the conditions of their lives.\"
Cervantes described Bush’s nomination of Negroponte as a direct attack on people like the women involved in the land takeover.
\"This is a very personal slap in the face to the people of Honduras, the people of Central America and anyone who cares about human rights,\" she said.
For more information on the situation in Honduras and future human rights and aid delegations, contact La Voz de los de Abajo or Pastors for Peace at p4p (at) igc.org or 212-926-5757. |
See also:
http://chicago.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=3049
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