OxBlog

Monday, April 19, 2004

# Posted 11:23 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

NEGROPONTE AND THE DEATH SQUADS: As of June 30, US Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte has will become the United States' Ambassador to Iraq. And in case you haven't noticed, Matt Yglesias has been waging a one-man blog-war against Negroponte because of his toleration of right-wing death squads while serving as Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s.

On Matt's behalf, I'd like to say that both the NYT and the WaPo have done a marvelous job of whitewashing Negroponte's record in their coverage of his appointment as Ambassador to Iraq.

Throwing balance out the window, neither the Times nor the Post bothers to balance the President's lavish praise of Negroponte with a single critical comment. And believe me, it would not be hard to find some very knowledgeable people who would be willing to gives the Times and the Post an earful. If any NYT or WaPo staff happen to be reading this post, why not give Bill LeoGrande or Cynthia Arnson a call? Both of them are well-respected scholars who have published op-eds in the leading newspapers as well as longer articles in places like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, not to mention numerous books on the subject of the United States and Central America.

You'd think Matt would've had some more sharp words for the Times and the Post, given his constant efforts to show that the media is biased in favor of the right and not hte left. So is this a case of conservative media bias? No, not really. I think what's going on here is simply that journalists have very little knowledge of any sort of history that they didn't experience themselves. If Ray Bonner or Alan Riding -- both of whom are current NYT correspondents with experience in Central America in the 1980s -- had written the Negroponte story, I seriously doubt that Negroponte would've gotten off so easily.

Now, you may be wondering, "What did Negroponte do that was all that bad? If the only one covering this story is Yglesias, wouldn't it be safe to dismiss the accusations against Negroponte as just another liberal Democratic vendetta?" Actually, no. For an excellent summary of Negroponte's amazing ability to deny the existence of death squads in Honduras, take a look at this article in TNR from March 2001. (Link via Yglesias)

However, Matt goes pretty far overboard with his suggestions that Negroponte will start training death squads in Iraq. Now, I generally agree with Matt that from an ethical perspective, Negroponte is not the right man to be running the Embassy in Baghdad. After all, how long will it be before Sunni and Shi'ite insurgents begin telling anyone and everyone that the United States has installed a death squad chieftain in the embassy in Baghdad? No, that characterization of Negroponte isn't fair. But the Iraqi people aren't likely either to appreciate the nuances of the situation in Central America in the 1980s or give the benefit of the doubt to an American pro-consul.

But nuances there were, and an American audience deserves to know a little more about them. While Matt and others have focused on the death squad issue, Negroponte real job in Honduras was to build up the right-wing Nicaraguan guerrilla force known as the contras. In addition to the logistical challenges of running a guerrilla war, Negroponte had to face the twofold diplomatic challenge of keeping the whole operation secret while also persuading the Hondurans to severely compromise both their own sovereignty and international law by voluntarily hosting a guerrilla force dedicated to the violent overthrow of a neighboring government.

In November 1982, Newsweek destroyed the myth that the United States wasn't the main sponsor and organizer of the Contra forces. Unsurprisingly, widespread knowledge of what the United States was up to made it far harder for the Hondurans to pretend that they weren't involved. The fact that Negroponte persisted in such adverse circumstances won him a reputation as a top-flight diplomat, at least on the Republican side of the aisle. Lately, Negroponte seems to have won admirers on both sides of the aisle.

What I can't say, since I haven't finished my research yet, is what role Negroponte played in the illegal phases of the Contra war. If you're interested in reading what an unreliable and partisan source has to say about Negroponte and the contras, click here. When I have some hard facts, I'll put up a post on the subject.

On a related note, it is also important to put Negroponte's blindness to human rights abuses in context. During Negroponte's five years in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran death squads only committed about as many murders as the Salvadoran death squads did in an average month (between 1980 and 1983). At the same time, the Guatemalan military was waging a genocidal campaign against indigenous Guatemalans that resulted in tens of thousands of innocent lives lost. Thus, Negroponte hardly stands out among diplomats of his time as someone blind to human rights abuses.

On the other hand, American diplomats in El Salvador did far more to speak out against the brutality. In 1981, Reagan sent Deane Hinton to replace Bob White, the Carter's administration's Ambassador in San Salvador who was appointed precisely because of his commitment to human rights. While Reagan & Co. expected Hinton to stay relatively quiet, Hinton delivered a blistering anti-death squad speech in late 1982 that the Reagan administration disavowed because it was so embarrassing to the United States.

On the other hand, it was Bob White who presided over the most murderous era in the Salvadoran civil war. His intentions were good, but does that really excuse the fact that he actively supported a junta responsible for ten thousand murders? The same can be said of Hinton. Should White and Hinton have resigned? Or was being more honest than their colleagues enough? The same can even be said of Thomas Pickering, the #3 man at State under Albright. As Ambassador to El Salvador after Hinton, he was so outspoken in the campaign against the death squads that they ultimately tried to kill him. Yet he, too, presided over a slaughterhouse far worse than that in Honduras.

Of course, it was not the killings in Honduras that truly represent Negroponte's greatest blindness. In my opinion, his willingness to work with the Contras, whose leadership was drawn from the ranks of the Somoza dictatorship's brutal National Guard, was even more problematic. Unsurprisingly, the Contras amassed a record of human rights violations far worse than that of the Hondurans. They just didn't have death squads.

But there is another twist to the story. Neither the New Republic nor Matt Yglesias describe how Negroponte helped consolidate democracy in Honduras. Although the transition to democracy in Tegucigalpa begun under Carter, it could not have been completed without the active support of the Reagan administration. While Honduras is not exactly a model democracy today, we'd probably all be pretty happy if Negroponte managed to build an Iraqi state that regularly held elections for more than 20 years, subordinated the military to the civilian government and ultimately got rid of almost all major human rights abuses.

All in all, the situation is far more complex than what you would pick up by reading either the NYT/WaPo descriptions of Negroponte's career or Matt's polemics against him. In spite of my belief that the Reagan administration made a tremendous contribution to promoting democracy in Central America, I still cannot forgive the fact that so many of its highest ranking officials regularly lied to Congress in order to support that policy. Even in hindsight, it is very hard to separate right from wrong.
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