Honduras police chief fired over abuse claims

General Juan Carlos Bonilla dismissed over accusations of human right abuses committed by him and his force.

Last updated: 20 Dec 2013 06:40

President Porfirio Lobo of Honduras has fired the country's national police chief, after mounting accusations of human right abuses committed by him and his force.

Lobo said he made the decision to remove General Juan Carlos Bonilla, who had expressed interest in leaving, in consultations with President-elect Juan Orlando Hernandez, who comes to office January 27.
Although the decision was expected in the wake of the nearing change in administration, neither Lobo nor Hernandez explained the reasons for the firing.

The incoming president has voiced doubt in efforts to root out corruption in the National Police, Honduras' only police force.

Bonilla, who was known as "the Tiger," was charged in 2002 of alleged human rights violations stemming from accusations he headed a social cleansing campaign that killed criminals while he was a regional police chief.
He was later acquitted of one alleged death squad killing by a court whose ruling was upheld by Honduras' Supreme Court in 2009.

In August 2012, Lobo put him at the top of Honduras' National Police department, which faces frequent allegations of beating, killing and "disappearing" people who are detained.

More:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/12/honduras-police-chief-fired-over-abuse-claims-2013122045125510418.html

The 49-year-old five-star general has also claimed receiving assistance from the US embassy which the US State Department has denied, citing knowledge of the human rights allegations against him.

In her book Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras, anthropologist Adrienne Pine recounts an evening in a family home in 2002:

(Ten-year old) Miguelito came in and sat down. “You know that girl who they showed on TV who was killed last night?” he said. His tone would have been no different had he been telling me about the results of a soccer match or the weather. “She was from right down the street. That happened here.” “Right here?” I asked him. “Did you know her?” “Yeah, I knew her. She was ten years old. The other was three. They killed them both.” “Who killed them?” I asked. “Some guys. People are always killing around here. Because of the gangs.” He then saw my camera and, giggling, posed for a picture with our smaller neighbor.

Crucially, the deaths of the two girls in this case are attributed to “el carro asesino”, described by Pine as “a sort of ethnic (read: social class) cleanser” and the heir to public terror techniques cultivated during the 1980s, heyday of the elite right-wing death squad Battalion 3-16 and its benefactor John D. Negroponte, US ambassador to Honduras.

Intelligence Battalion 3-16 or Battalion 316 (various names: Group of 14 (1979–1981),[1] Special Investigations Branch (DIES) (1982–1983),[1] Intelligence Battalion 3-16 (from 1982 or 1984 to 1986),[1][2] Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Branch (since 1987)[1]) was the name of a Honduran army unit responsible for carrying out political assassinations and torture of suspected political opponents of the government during the 1980s.

Battalion members received training and support from the United States Central Intelligence Agency both in Honduras at U.S. military bases,[3] Battalion 601 (including Ciga Correa), who had collaborated with the Chilean DINA in assassinating General Carlos Prats and had trained, along with Mohamed Alí Seineldín, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.[4] At least 19 Battalion 3-16 members were graduates of the School of the Americas.[5][6] The Battalion 3-16 was also trained by Pinochet's Chile.[4]

The name indicated the unit's service to three military units and sixteen battalions of the Honduran army.[1] The reorganisation of the unit under the name "Intelligence Battalion 3-16" is attributed to General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez.[2]

...

The CIA had a strong role in establishing, training, equipping and financing Battalion 3-16.[2][3] The U.S. Ambassador to Honduras at the time, John Negroponte, met frequently with General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez.[8] In summarising declassified U.S. documents showing telegrams (cables) sent and received by Negroponte during his period as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, the National Security Archive states that "reporting on human rights atrocities" committed by Battalion 3-16 is "conspicuously absent from the cable traffic" and that "Negroponte's cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place."

During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's 'dirty war' in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua.

When the Reagan administration came to power in 1981, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Binns claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post.

In These Times writer, Terry Allen described Negroponte as a "zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador."

In a biographical profile Foreign Policy In Focus reported that "on Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official 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. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was 'simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.' The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were 'no political prisoners in Honduras' and that the 'Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.'"

As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras. Between 1980 and 1994 U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America. [1]

"The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras - So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground. The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency," Allen wrote. [2]

~snip~
My mind went back to May 1982 and I saw myself facing Negroponte in his office at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. I had gone to Honduras on a fact-finding delegation. We were looking for answers. Thirty-two women had fled the death squads of El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 to take refuge in Honduras. One of them had been Romero's secretary. Some months after their arrival, these women were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared. Our delegation was in Honduras to find out what had happened to these women. John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts.

There had been eyewitnesses to the capture and we were well read on the documentation that previous delegations had gathered.

Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US Embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government and it would be to our advantage to discuss the matter with the latter. Facts, however, reveal quite the contrary.

During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.

John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country. The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.

In 1994, the Honduran Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents. It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations. Yet, back in his office that day in 1982, John Negroponte assured us that he had no idea what had happened to the women we were looking for.

I had to wait 13 years to find out. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in 1996 Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor as US ambassador in Honduras, told how a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women we had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981 and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, before being placed in helicopters of the Salvadoran military. After take off from the airport in Tegucigalpa, the victims were thrown out of the helicopters. Binns told the Baltimore Sun that the North American authorities were well aware of what had happened and that it was a grave violation of human rights. But it was seen as part of Ronald Reagan's counterinsurgency policy.