Hard Questions for U.N. Nominee

Under normal circumstances, President Bush’s nomination of a veteran U.S. diplomat like John D. Negroponte to be ambassador to the United Nations would be a routine matter. Negroponte is well regarded in the State Department and close to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Senate approval would be all but certain.

But while Negroponte’s 37-year career in the foreign service has admittedly been an impressive upward arc of increasingly important ambassadorships, it was not routine. It would be a mistake for the Senate, and particularly for the Committee on Foreign Relations, to treat Negroponte with kid gloves.

To be sure, Negroponte’s diplomatic career has been marked by noteworthy accomplishments. He handled sensitive embassy posts quite effectively, most notably Mexico City in the years leading up to the North American Free Trade Agreement and Manila following the collapse of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ regime. But Negroponte’s career also includes some troubling activities that took place in Honduras during his tenure as ambassador there, between 1981 and 1985.

Those were the years when President Ronald Reagan ordered the CIA to launch covert activities against the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. The key element of Reagan’s anti-Nicaragua strategy was a guerrilla war waged by a puppet army based in Honduras and known as the Contras. It was composed largely of former soldiers of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, whom the Sandinistas had ousted. With such unseemly allies, the Contra war was immediately controversial, and Congress imposed limits on how the CIA could wage it.

Among other things, Congress insisted that before a small nation like Honduras received massive increases in military aid (from $4 million a year to $77 million during Negroponte’s tenure alone) that the U.S. Embassy there had to verify that the notoriously corrupt Honduran army would use the money properly. The Honduran security forces were not, for instance, to use the money to pursue political dissidents or otherwise violate the human rights of their fellow citizens. Congress even required annual human rights reports on Honduras to ensure that its mandate was being carried out.

The human rights reports that Negroponte signed off on during his tenure in Honduras need to be carefully reviewed by the Senate. For while he routinely reported few violations by the Honduran government, it has since become public record, through declassified government documents and reputable reports in the U.S. and Honduran press, that the Honduran military was indeed engaged in some very brutal activities in support of the Contras and U.S. policy.

Honduran officials have documented the disappearance of as many as 184 Honduran citizens, not just political dissidents but innocent civilians who may have been mistaken for dissidents, during that period. Most of these kidnappings and murders were carried out by a secret, CIA-trained Honduran army unit known as Battalion 316. The Senate should probe deeply regarding how much of this activity Negroponte was aware of and whether he hid what he knew from Congress.

The Contra war was an ugly and inconclusive affair--but brush-fire wars usually are. And no one is suggesting that Negroponte bears all, or even most, of the blame for whatever excesses may have taken place in Honduras. But he had a legal obligation to truthfully inform Congress of what was happening in Honduras in support of U.S. policy. If Negroponte did not live up to that obligation, it calls into question his suitability for an important post at the United Nations.

The Senate must not approve Negroponte’s nomination without asking him some very tough questions and putting his tenure in Honduras under renewed and thorough scrutiny.