Negroponte: Nominee for Baghdad Embassy, a Rogue for all Seasons
Negroponte pressed Powell to pressure Chile’s and Mexico’s weak-willed leaders to discharge their U.N. ambassadors over
Iraq votes.
Negroponte has a sordid human rights record in Honduras.
A Cruel Joke: Negroponte, the arch authoritarian, teaching democracy to the Iraqis.
Life under Saddam somewhat prepares you for the Negroponte era.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee unlikely to closely scrutinize Negroponte nomination.
Like the earlier nominations of Otto Reich, John Bolton and Roger Noriega, Secretary of State Colin Powell will have no
trouble in describing this villain as an “honorable” man.
President Bush confirmed recent rumors by announcing on Monday that John D. Negroponte was being nominated to become
this country’s ambassador to Iraq, a post that he would assume on June 30, when sovereignty ostensibly will be
transferred to Iraqi authorities. But the Negroponte nomination must be seen as a profoundly troubling one since the
same nagging questions which were present during the summer of 2001, when Negroponte was nominated to be U.S. ambassador
to the UN, continue to persist. Enough time apparently has passed since a number of accusations first surfaced
concerning Negroponte’s profound moral derelictions (which at least date back to the time that he served as U.S.
ambassador to Honduras (1981-85)), for these again to be thoroughly aired. But if the past is any precedent, Negroponte
will sail through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the full Senate as if he was a Happy Warrior rather than
the immoral reprobate that his record undeniably portrays him as being. Since then, Washington’s ability to slip into
political amnesia regarding his reprehensible actions in Honduras will now once again be at play.
The central fact to the Negroponte story is that he misled Congress when some of its members attempted to question him
about his complicity in helping to cover up his knowledge and direct personal involvement in the training, equipping and
distracting attention from the heinous acts of Battalion 316, the Honduran death squad which at the time of Negroponte’s
residence in Honduras was responsible for the murder of almost 200 Honduran dissidents opposed to their country being
used as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the U.S.-backed Contra war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinistas.
Negroponte Arrives in Tegucigalpa
Negroponte replaced Jack Binns, who had been President Carter’s ambassador to Honduras during 1980-81, after Binns had
spoken out against mounting evidence of major human rights violations occurring in that country against political
dissidents who dared to speak out against the growing involvement of Honduras in the secret Contra war against
Sandinista Nicaragua. He made references to activities that were being carried out by a shady operation which came to be
known as Battalion 316. A big part of this story is the flawed annual human rights reports, prepared every year by U.S.
embassies around the world, which had to be presented to Congress under terms of the Foreign Assistance Act. When it
came to Honduras, this report was significantly expurgated, first in Tegucigalpa by Negroponte, and then once again
after it reached Washington by then Assistant Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs, the infamous Elliot Abrams.
Abrams, an obsessive cold warrior, had as little sympathy for human rights issues in Honduras as he was in favor of them
when it came to Cuba. This operation subverted the law, and Abrams eventually confessed to his role in the Iran-Contra
war, but was later pardoned by the first President Bush. This dominated Honduran realities during the early 1980s, which
were to further deteriorate during Negroponte’s ambassadorial stint. The new ambassador’s mission was to ensure that the
steady stream of U.S. aid to Honduras, aimed at preventing the spread of Communism by Sandinista Nicaragua, was to
continue at any cost. Years later, in 1995, a former junior political officer, who had worked in the embassy under
Negroponte, came forth with serious accusations concerning the human rights lapses of the Honduran army in the annual
human rights report he was required to draft during the Negroponte era. This report was meant to be sent to Congress,
but he claimed the charges had been eliminated or transformed by others by the time that the report had reached its
ultimate destination.
Negroponte Doctors Human Rights Reports
There is no question that Negroponte and the rest of the senior embassy personnel must have known about the
disappearances and tortures of Honduran leftists since some of the most widely-distributed newspapers in the country
carried at least 318 stories about such military abuses in 1982 alone. Negroponte also had direct contact with General
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, by then the chief of the Honduran armed forces and the secret head of Battalion 316.
Negroponte himself has insisted that on occasion he requested the release of a torture victim when the story was close
to breaking in the U.S. press. This happened in the 1982 case of the arrest and torture of journalist Oscar Reyes and
his wife, Gloria. Clearly, Negroponte and the embassy knew enough about these cases to act appropriately on occasion and
when compelled by circumstances to do so.
Negroponte Introduces the Hard Line
The replacement of Binns by Negroponte reflected a shifting foreign policy strategy for Central America, witnessed by
the introduction of the Reagan administration’s hard-line policy and its implementation by Elliot Abrams; regarding
Honduras, it was represented by the zealotry of the ambassador in Tegucigalpa, John Negroponte.
Negroponte’s objective in Honduras was eerily familiar to the Bush administration’s present goal in Iraq. The U.S.
government, again, is attempting to implement a democratic format in a country that has not yet chosen to do it on its
own, and not necessarily by democratic means. To implement this complex task will inevitably create a less than ideal
situation for the ambassador to fulfill his instructions. But given Negroponte’s well-practiced M.O. of dark box
chicanery, the spread of false information and outright lying, it is doubtful that he will be any less controversial or
contrived in his task of successfully introducing democracy in Iraq than he was in Honduras, perhaps because “democracy”
is not exactly his stigmata. John Negroponte is preeminently an-ends-justifies-the-means operator. He repeatedly in the
past has proven that he is willing to employ practices which seem to be the antitheses of the definition of
“democratic”, in democracy’s good name. Negroponte’s career has been one where in his professional life he has shown a
willingness to use authoritarian means to professedly advance democracy.
Which Man is Negroponte?
To his admirers, Negroponte is a distinguished career senior foreign service officer who has served his country well in
a number of important posts. To his detractors, Negroponte is a blunt, self-serving opportunist who aggressively (to a
point well past overkill) took on what he perceived as being the ideological ethos of whatever administration he was
serving at the time, even if it meant stretching credulity, ethics and personal honesty to the breaking point. Perhaps a
more accurate assessment of his performance is that he misused his authority and egregiously flouted decent standards of
professional behavior, while scarcely looking backwards. Rather than a paragon of democratic virtues, Negroponte is a
man who has to be seen as the anti-Christ of democracy, repeatedly dragging its noble cause through offal. Negroponte’s
nomination, along with the earlier appointments of Cold War stalwarts such as Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams, as well as
Senator Helms’ protégé, Roger Noriega, to key hemispheric posts by President Bush, represents a throwback to an era when
human rights and democratic processes were routinely suffered in the name of halting purported efforts by Moscow to
expand Communism throughout the hemisphere.
To Iraqis used to Saddam Hussein’s inflexible rule, his cynicism and indifference to the suffering of others,
Negroponte’s arrival in Baghdad will require no prolonged adaptation to the rule or style of America’s new pro-consul in
the country. They will have exchanged one man on horseback for another. For those who are familiar with his professional
history, it will take a clothespin on one’s nose for his Iraqi audience to stomach any speech that he makes touting
democracy.
Negroponte’s Recent Past
After Negroponte had been nominated for the U.N. Ambassadorship, he was scheduled for a potentially withering
cross-examination by his detractors on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his actions in Honduras, as part of
his confirmation hearings that were being conducted for that post. But he was spared any further scrutiny by the
occurrence of 9/11 and the overpowering feeling in the Senate that the U.S. must quickly fill the existing UN vacancy,
by a peremptory vote. Thus, rather than be submitted to exacting querying, the process then turned out to be little
better than a pro-forma interrogation.
This scenario is sure to be replicated when it comes to the Iraq post. The nomination is another in a series of
disturbing foreign relations moves by the Bush administration and the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, which has had
its ramifications when it comes to Latin America. After all, Negroponte played a key role when it came to manipulating a
string of weak leaders in Mexico and Chile in order to persuade them to fire their respective ambassadors to the UN
because they opposed Negroponte’s position on Iraq. Negroponte’s complicity in efforts to obtain the discharge of
Mexico’s ambassador Adolfo Abullar Zinnser and Chile’s Juan Gabriel Valdes scarcely differed from his purported perjured
testimony in which he covered up the full extent of his knowledge of the human rights abuses committed by the Honduran
military during his stay in that country, and his testimony over the details of his involvement in the Iran-Contra
scandal. He also admitted to the illicit diversion of U.S. aid to Honduras for the Contra forces, which normally should
have disbarred any attempt to let him into a higher posting. Unfortunately, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
its chairman can be counted on to do themselves little honor by trivializing their advice and consent responsibility
when it comes to sending off this appointee to Baghdad.
General Luis Alonso Discua Elivir, a former Honduran death squad commander who claimed that he would “spill the beans”
on Negroponte unless his family was allowed to remain in this country, had his U.S. visa revoked in 2001. It would be
perhaps of interest to hear this man’s testimony and have Negroponte respond to the huge amount of material implicating
him in playing a sedulously deceitful role after being posted to Honduras. Despite an abundance of reporters, scholars
and former governmental officials who have publicly raised questions about Negroponte’s record, no public witnesses were
invited to try to establish before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Negroponte was not qualified for his
appointment to the UN post. Therefore, what should have been an occasion of close scrutiny over serious charges of
malfeasance in office, will instead be afforded no better than a cursory screening which will be more of a celebration
than an examination.
Complicity with Death Squad Leaders
During his ambassadorship in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was known to have close working ties to that
nation’s most egregious local abuses of human rights. One of the most notable of these unsavory characters was
then-Colonel Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, at the time Honduras’ military chief and the de facto strongman of the country.
Promoted to general, Alvarez was later assassinated after returning from the U.S., where he had sought refuge from his
senior military colleagues, who purportedly later had him murdered after he had refused to share with them the alleged
large bribes that he had received via the U.S. embassy. This largesse was a reward for facilitating the conversion of
his country into a base to wage the Contra war against the incumbent leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Alvarez was perhaps most infamous for his close connections to the death squad that became know as Battalion
316. This Alvarez-created unit, which received training in torture techniques from Argentine ‘dirty war’ veterans and
the CIA (according to the Pulitzer prize-winning Baltimore Sun series which in part examined Negroponte’s controversial
role in Honduras), is widely suspected of “disappearing” over 180 suspected “subversives” in the early 1980s. At the
time, any Honduran opposed to that country’s use as a staging ground for President Reagan’s anti-Sandinista campaign was
generally considered a “subversive.”
Promoting Human Rights to Save Face
In response to recurrent journalist inquiries, as well as in formal proceedings, Negroponte repeatedly has
denied or minimized any knowledge of charges that the Honduran military was behind the death squads and that such a
force as Battalion 316 even existed. Negroponte’s attempts to dismiss the role of death squads have been undermined by
his later boasts that, quite to the contrary, he personally intervened in a number of instances to secure the release of
politically sensitive detainees being held by Honduran authorities. Even if one grants this claim, such behavior on
Negroponte’s part was the exception rather than the rule, and perhaps is an indication of how he could have saved many
more lives, if he had used his plenary position in Honduras to be a true advocate of human rights and human decency.
One such apparently rare occasion in which he professedly intervened involved journalist Oscar Reyes, who was
abducted after writing numerous articles critical of the Honduran military. Former U.S. embassy spokesman Cresencio
Arcos has verified that in July of 1983, Negroponte approached General Alvarez about his apprehensions over the just
“disappeared” Reyes. It should be recalled that Arcos himself, as the embassy press officer, has been repeatedly accused
by scholars studying Honduras during that epoch, of knowingly distributing false information to U.S. journalists
stationed in Honduras at the time, and that he had entered into a familial relationship with a politically important
Honduran family, allegedly not keeping his personal life entirely separate from his official responsibilities.
Prompted by protests from university students and a rash of newspaper publicity on Reyes at the time, it is unlikely
that Negroponte’s request for the journalist’s release was principally motivated by abiding human rights concerns.
Rather, the impetus for such singular concern in this case almost certainly was the fear that widespread coverage of the
Reyes kidnapping could eventually make headlines in U.S. newspapers and bring unwanted publicity to his ambassadorship
and the skullduggery in which it was involved.
Recently released declassified documents that had been requested by the Senate for the Negroponte hearing were
always on Negroponte’s mind because they repeatedly articulated a concern over any bad publicity that could becloud his
reputation. An undesirable outcome of this kind would have hardened opposition to President Reagan’s extremely
controversial policy of trying to suck Honduras into the Contra war in exchange for secret bribes to a number of that
country’s political and military officers, as well as hundreds of millions in U.S. funds being allocated for economic
and military assistance programs to the Honduran regime.
Another high-profile case in which Negroponte claims to have intervened was the disappearance of a suspected
leftist, Inés Murillo. A number of reports at the time stated that a U.S. Embassy (or perhaps a CIA) official had
visited the Honduran torture facility known as INDUMIL, where Murillo was being held and tortured. The daughter of a
prominent local family, Murillo’s parents were relentless in trying to locate their daughter, even taking out a
full-page advertisement in the Honduran newspaper, El Tiempo. Negroponte professedly vocalized concern over Murillo’s
status, again fearing bad press coverage, and brought up the matter when meeting with Honduran officials. Four days
later, Murillo was, in effect, narrowly saved from a certain death when she was publicly sentenced to two years in
prison.
Contra Connections
Starting in the early 1980s, Hondurans had become the primary U.S. support base for the Contra war. The Honduran
Army provided facilities and logistical support in a swath of territory adjacent to Nicaragua which became known as
“Contraland.” Honduran channels were also used to funnel U.S. funds to the Contras, without disclosing their source, at
a time when such funding to the rebels was prohibited by Congress, but was still flowing from other U.S. funding
sources, including the CIA.
During his stint in Tegucigalpa, Negroponte expanded the embassy staff’s size ten-fold and it came to house one
of the largest CIA deployments in all of Latin America. The same scenario inevitably will be the case in Baghdad once
Negroponte initiates his ambassadorship, and presides over what is being touted as the largest U.S. overseas diplomatic
mission in the world, with anywhere from one to three thousand personnel being employed there. Hondurans frequently
referred to Negroponte as the U.S. “proconsul” of the country, as his arrogant and stealthy style of operating was more
like that of an intelligence officer than a traditional diplomat, redolent of his days as a young agent in Vietnam.
Utilizing this persona, he was able to guarantee the cooperation of a Honduran base for the Contra rebel army through
his domination of compromised local officials and institutions.
Negroponte and the Boland Amendment
Negroponte also played a primary role in organizing such pro-Contra projects as a regional U.S.
counterinsurgency training center at Puerto Castilla and the construction of the controversial $7.5 million highway to
Puerto Lempira, which passed through a virgin strand of mahogany trees towards the country’s eastern coast. Such a road
would facilitate the flow of supplies to the U.S.-directed Nicaraguan right-wing contras. In spite of U.S. AID
regulations stipulating that such a U.S.-funded project must have an environmental impact study conducted before
construction could commence, Negroponte huffily overruled such legal niceties and resorting to expletives, ordered the
road to be built in spite of the illegalities involved and the protests of an AID official who had been sent from
Washington to argue his case. Support of Honduran aid to the Contras at the time also violated Congressional
prohibitions, such as the 1982 Boland amendment, which banned the use of U.S. funds for “military equipment, military
training or advice, or other support for military activities, to any group or individual not part of a country’s armed
forces, for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua
and Honduras.”
In exchange for General Alvarez’s total collusion in support of Contra operations in Honduras, Washington
offered full political and economic support to that country’s corrupt military. U.S. military aid to Honduras swelled
from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by 1984. Between 1981 and 1986, more than 60,000 U.S. soldiers and members of
the National Guard traversed Honduras in over 50 military exercises meant not so much to intimidate the Sandinistas as
to covertly transfer arms to the Contras. Cynically enough, upon recommendation by Negroponte and others, the Reagan
administration obscenely awarded Alvarez the Legion of Merit in 1983 for “encouraging democracy.”
By Whatever Means Necessary
John Negroponte was sent to Tegucigalpa with the mission of keeping U.S. aid flowing into Honduras for the
Contras by whatever means necessary. Under Negroponte’s direct guidance, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa turned a blind
eye to glaring evidence of systematic human rights abuses by Honduran officials. Recently declassified State Department
papers also reveal the lengths that Negroponte would go to in order to protect the victimizer, rather than the victims,
of human rights abuses. In 1982 alone, there were over 300 newspaper articles in the Honduran press reporting the
illegal detention of university students and the abduction of union leaders. Colonel Leonidas Torres Arias, a
disgruntled former intelligence chief of the Honduran armed forces, stated in a 1982 news conference that Battalion 316
was indeed a death squad, citing three of its victims by name. Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga, a Honduran congressional
delegate, also said that when he spoke about the military’s abuses at the time to Negroponte, he was met with an
“attitude…of tolerance and silence.” In addition, organizations such as the Committee of the Relatives of the
Disappeared visited the U.S. embassy to complain that the Honduran military was holding suspected dissidents in
clandestine jails such as INDUMIL, to a totally unmoved Negroponte.
Recent reports have further established that Negroponte was very well aware of human rights abuses in Honduras,
and any doubts he had about individual cases were politically motivated rather than the product of genuine caution or
any high evidential standard. In Search of Hidden Truths, co-authored by the Honduran Human Rights Commissioner,
documents recently-declassified reports which provide solid evidence that the U.S. was minutely aware of human rights
abuses committed by the Honduran military in the 1980s, in spite of Negroponte’s persistent claims to the contrary. In
addition, declassified State Department documents also establish that in October of 1984, after General Alvarez had been
deposed by the Honduran armed forces, Negroponte’s embassy was finally willing to acknowledge that, “responsibility for
a number of the alleged disappearances between 1981 and March 1984 can be assigned either directly or indirectly to
Alvarez himself.”
Recently declassified cable traffic indicates a persistent inclination on Negroponte’s behalf to wholeheartedly
believe rather pitiable excuses offered by General Alvarez to explain any human rights abuses. For example, in a 1983
letter, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-America Affairs Craig Johnstone conveyed to Negroponte that a number of
guerrillas had been captured and executed by elements of the Honduran armed forces. Negroponte’s response was to accept
General Alvarez’s lame excuse that the six detainees were shot dead while trying to escape. However, when dealing with
protests coming from human rights activists and political dissidents, the exact opposite was true when it came to
assessing the quality of the information concerning allegations by Honduran human rights groups, such as CODEH, on
violations by the armed forces. These were routinely met with skepticism if not total denial by Negroponte’s embassy,
and often, by the ambassador himself.
Further discrediting Negroponte’s bona fides on the country’s human rights situation are statements by Jack
Binns, his immediate predecessor as ambassador to Honduras from 1980 to 1981. At the time, Binns warned State Department
officials of what he described as “increasing evidence of officially sponsored and/or sanctioned assassinations of
political and criminal targets.” Binns also has stated that there was no way for Negroponte not to know the grim facts
of life in Honduras. Thomas Enders, then Binns’ superior as Assistant Secretary of State, has admitted that he told
Binns not to report human rights abuses through official channels in order to keep U.S. aid flowing in Honduras by any
means. Enders confessed his transgressions at a later date, something that Negroponte has failed to do, let alone even
consider.
Blatant Contradictions in Human Rights Reports
Instances of disappearances, harassment and abductions of political dissidents all escalated under Negroponte, yet the
annual Human Rights Reports prepared by the ambassadorial staff for the State Department’s Bureau of Humanitarian
Affairs were masterpieces of cunning redaction or invention, consistently downplaying human rights abuses and denying
that any evidence existed of systematic violations by manipulating language and statistics. For example, the 1982 report
prepared for the State Department by Negroponte’s staff asserted, “Legal guarantees exist against arbitrary arrest or
imprisonment, and against torture or degrading treatment. Habeas Corpus is guaranteed by the Constitution, Honduran law
provides for arraignment within 24 hours of arrest. This appears to be the standard practice.” All of this is absolute
rubbish, and is not even true today, let alone in the early 1980s. In fact, Honduran judicial procedures are routinely
given the worst ratings by Transparency International. In reality, extra-legal abductions by the military were rampant
at the time and widely reported as well. In addition, as was acknowledged in declassified State Department documents at
the time, the judicial system was (and still is) almost entirely corrupt. Relatives’ requests for information or
visitation rights for imprisoned family members were met with stonewalling, as court and military officials asserted
that there was no record of the individual being detained, and thus no assistance was given in locating them. The U.S.
embassy was often asked to help find relatives or use its influence to gain the individual’s release. Negroponte’s
awareness of at least a substantial number of these abductions is beyond dispute.
Honduras or Norway?
Curiously enough, the aforementioned Reyes case did not even deserve any mention in Negroponte’s 1982 Human
Rights Report, despite widespread media coverage and his self-professed personal involvement. However, the following was
included in the report: “No incidence of official interference with the media has been recorded for several years.” It
was difficult even for embassy staff in Honduras to take the human rights reports seriously, as they appeared to be in
such blatant denial of what U.S. officials were witnessing in Honduras on a daily basis. Rick Chidester, then a U.S.
embassy aide in Honduras, has been quoted as jocosely wondering at the time whether they actually had not just prepared
the human rights report on Norway.
Promoting Democracy Only When Necessary
Before being sent to Washington, the embassy’s human rights reports were being carefully edited to clearly
correspond to Negroponte’s own ideological sentiments and mission rather than to objective facts. One must realize that
Negroponte did not look upon the report as being routine, but rather as a potentially explosive document whose
revelations must be contained. What is certain is that Negroponte hypocritically set an incredibly high standard of
proof for the inclusion of evidence of any wrongdoing by Honduran authorities, but repeatedly questioned the legitimacy
of various human rights leaders in the country, which was certainly not in conformance with existing State Department
practices. Someone with such a ‘distinguished’ Foreign Service career as is routinely claimed for Negroponte by those
whose capacity for righteous indignation – such as former Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson and U.N.
ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick – is quite low, if it existed at all. They would surely have known that in spite of their
fulsome praise for Negroponte, such embassy reports are not intended to be exclusively based on facts and be admissible
in court, but rather are also meant to include anecdotal information from ordinary citizens and the media concerning
human rights abuses, which were myriad in Honduras at the time, and of which Aronson and Kirkpatrick have been aware.
Negroponte broke with this practice by requiring that all testimonies be in the form of public affidavits. This
criterion could only be met at great risk to the personal safety of those who wanted to come forward and reveal the
truth behind the human rights violations occurring at the time, but were fearful of doing so.
The juxtaposition of the Human Rights Reports for Honduras and Nicaragua provides a striking contrast of exactly
what purpose the documents served. While the embassy-produced Human Rights Reports for Honduras were characteristically
incredulous over allegations of abuses by the military, in Sandinista Nicaragua the reports were manipulated to have the
U.S. public believe that atrocities committed by the Sandinista government were of a gross nature and a daily event,
which was far from the truth. The Embassy reports provided by Negroponte’s office appeared to state whatever was
necessary in order to assuage the concerns of the Democratic majority in Congress as to what was happening in the area,
disregarding the murderous realities that average Hondurans confronted on a daily basis. The skewering of human rights
reports thus appear to have been an exceedingly serious instrument in the Negroponte Embassy’s arsenal, aimed at
promoting his full-time efforts to abet the overthrow of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and were not at all intended to
strengthen democratic institutions by actually reporting on human rights violations, or saving lives in that country.
There is ample reason to believe that charges of complicity in the murder of a Chilean constitutionalist general, that
were leveled against Henry Kissinger in a U.S. court, could very well have been duplicated against Negroponte in a civil
proceeding involving his own lawless behavior.
The Worst Man for the Job
Negroponte’s mental and moral flaws in the area of human rights should be prompting serious concerns over the
disservice that his appointment would do to the diminished standing of this country’s already tattered reputation over
its troubled Iraq policy. As a would-be harbinger of democracy to Iraq, it would be little more than a cruel joke to
pretend that this man had a bone of democratic rectitude to him. Given Negroponte’s tawdry record in Honduras, some
observers contend that the original Negroponte nomination to the UN offered one more example of Secretary Powell’s lack
of standards when it comes to State Department policy, and that his testimonials of the honorable nature of such
nominees, as was equally true of his nomination of Otto Reich, John Bolton and Roger Noriega, whom Colin Powell defended
as “honorable men,” are totally at variance with reality. The nomination of such a tainted figure as Negroponte to one
of the most prominent posts available today to a U.S. diplomat should represent an insult to the international
community, as well as a hollow affront to the memory of the victims of the Central American wars of the 1980s, and can
only result in a further diminution of the reputation of this country for civic rectitude at a very difficult moment in
its history.
This analysis was prepared by Larry Birns and Jenna Wright, with archival contributions by Jeremy Gans and Matthew
Tschetter
Mr. Birns is the director of the Washington based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, where the other authors are research
fellows.