Central America's Forgotten History by Aviva Chomsky

Author:Aviva Chomsky [Chomsky, Aviva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE USS HONDURAS AND COUNTERINSURGENCY AT HOME

As the Honduran army was drawn into the US wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, it increasingly embraced domestic counterinsurgency. Honduras never approached the levels of violence of its neighbors, but hundreds of political dissidents were murdered and at least 180 disappeared during the militarization of the country in the 1980s.15 Counterinsurgency and militarization nicely supported the US need to eliminate the church-based, student, peasant, and other movements that challenged its economic goal of remaking Honduras as a paradise for foreign investment.

Along with his amenability toward US foreign policy goals, Gustavo Álvarez shared the US commitment to quashing any hint of popular organizing inside Honduras. As US military aid poured into the country, the army became the seat of power, and it increasingly signed on to the fanatical anti-communism and state terrorism that characterized US policy in the region. With Reagan’s support, Álvarez oversaw a new “dirty war” counterinsurgency including death squads, kidnappings, and torture, which lasted far beyond his brief presidency. Reformism became more marginalized and dangerous, tagged automatically as “communist” or “subversive.”

The CIA helped Álvarez create Honduras’s infamous Military Intelligence Battalion 316 that was responsible for the assassination of hundreds of Catholic and leftist activists in the 1980s, including American Jesuit priest James Guadalupe Carney. In 1995, the Baltimore Sun interviewed four Battalion 316 members in exile. The paper described the battalion bluntly as “a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s” and “stalked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of Honduran men and women suspected of subversion.” The former members described in detail the instructions they received from Álvarez and their US trainers on army bases in Honduras and the United States, and the grisly forms of torture they were taught, and employed.16

The Sun concluded that Negroponte “systematically suppressed reports to Washington describing kidnappings and murders of political dissidents . . . Instead he was responsible for false reports to Washington that portrayed the Honduran regime as committed to democracy and the rule of law.”17 What was common knowledge in Honduras and amply documented in the local press, and even what was reported by Negroponte’s own staff in the embassy, was carefully excised from the reports Negroponte wrote for submission to Congress. If the human rights abuses had been reported, they would have required Congress to cut aid to Honduras and undermined the Contra operation and the entire US counterinsurgency effort in Central America.18

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