Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
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in Honduras they were being co-opted and the insurgency was cleverly transformed into a benign popular movement pacified with a few gains.’11 The fruit companies continued to meddle in Honduran affairs to lower costs and maximize shareholder profits. For example, in 1972 United Fruit, by then renamed United Brands, bankrolled its friend, dictator General Oswaldo López Arellano to power, again illustrating how US capital dominated the most lucrative markets by owning politicians.12 It was a special relationship that demanded docile political lapdogs, not business partners, which partly explains why in Honduras a modern-day oligarchy took so long to emerge.
The End Justifies the Means
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista victory against the US-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in 1979 caused blind panic in the US. Cuba was regarded as a humiliation, but at least it was an island, where socialist uprising could be isolated. Nicaragua on the other hand was on the same land mass, just a few hundred miles from the Panama Canal. So when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981 on an anti-communism mandate, the US turned its number one geopolitical partner into a major Cold War proxy battleground. The big guns – the spooks, special forces and top ally Ambassador John Negroponte – were deployed to Honduras with a clear mission: do whatever it takes to stop the communist rot.
British-born Negroponte, a zealous anti-communist action figure who cut his diplomatic teeth in Vietnam under Henry Kissinger, served in Honduras during its dirtiest years. This was no unlucky coincidence. The Cold War zealot played down, in fact didn’t mention, the huge spike in human rights violations – targeted arbitrary arrests, torture, the forced disappearances, and murder of suspected dissidents and refugees – in his diplomatic cables. During his 1981–85 tenure, military aid rocketed from $4m to $77.4m a year, a pretty straightforward cash-for-turf deal in which the US gained free rein over Honduran territory in exchange for dollars, training in torture-based interrogation methods, and silence.13 This patronage created a loyal force hooked on American money, equipment, training and ideology: cheaply-bought loyalty which the US would count on again and again.
Negroponte was a cardinal figure in the Contra war, coordinating support for the anti-Sandinista mercenaries who were trained, armed and commanded from clandestine bases. But the US role was much more than merely supportive. According to covert ops veteran Mario Reyes (a Mexican-born soldier posted to Honduras during the Contra war), ‘We conducted secret night-time missions to take out targeted Sandinistas on Nicaraguan territory; the killings were blamed on the Contras, that was the point, but it was us, and the Russians knew it was us.’
Reagan spent a billion or so dollars backing the Contras, whom he referred to as the ‘moral equivalent of the founding fathers’. Some of that money came from CIA-backed drug trafficking which flooded poor neighbourhoods with cocaine, especially African-American neighbourhoods, and helped dampen post-civil rights social revolts. In the end, CIA-traded cocaine muzzled two impoverished communities thousands of miles apart, and fuelled the burgeoning international drug trade.
Another funding stream was illegal arms sales. Negroponte oversaw the approval of a new military treaty which authorized US use of the Palmerola Air Base, sixty miles north-west of Tegucigalpa. From here, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the Iran-Contra operation – a clandestine effort to circumvent US law by selling weapons to Iran.14 A key ally for this operation was Juan Matta Ballesteros, the original Honduran drug capo. More about him later. What else did Honduras get in return? It was a see-no-evil approach, but Negroponte knew perfectly well what horrors the military were perpetrating on civilians. He and his superiors positively applauded the elimination of so-called subversives. This is the essence of the counterinsurgency doctrine: the end justifies the means.
Michael McClintock is tall, with a soft Ohio accent and a long, thinning grey ponytail. He was Amnesty International’s Latin American researcher during the Cold War years and became a renowned scholar on special forces and counterinsurgency doctrine. He witnessed the before and after effect first hand in Honduras. ‘With the arrival of Negroponte,’ he told me, ‘there was a sudden and huge injection of American dollars and personnel, and within a year or two the military had identified and got rid of social leaders and incipient guerrilla groups. They literally wiped them out, clearing the decks to make Honduras an American aircraft carrier for Central America.
‘It was a day-and-night change. The system changed from one of a sloppy rule of law, where powerful people get away with murder, to an organized ideological audit – a census of who’s thinking bad thoughts and then going after them. It had a hugely corrupting influence on the armed forces and weak public institutions. Then add poverty and supercharge it with cocaine, and you understand why people flee,’ he added.
The most prolific state-sponsored killing machine was without doubt Battalion 3-16, which McClintock describes as America’s ‘most glowing innovation’ in Honduras. It was created and commanded by General Gustavo Álvarez, a man the US could do business with.15 Officially it was an intelligence unit, but it also stalked, kidnapped, tortured and disappeared scores of suspected subversives. Its operatives were trained in counterinsurgency surveillance and interrogation techniques by the CIA in secret locations in the US, and at home by Argentine torture specialists on US-controlled army bases.16 In truth, the dirty war casualties in Honduras pale in comparison to its civil war-ravaged neighbours. Officially, 184 people were disappeared during the 1980s, though the exact number of people tortured and executed remains unknown, according to the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (Spanish acronym COFADEH); for years, decomposed bodies were dug up on isolated riverbanks or in citrus groves. The 1981 forced disappearance of Ángel Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez was the first such case ruled on by an international tribunal. The university student vanished after being interrogated and tortured at a police station and 1st Battalion military base by the DNI and G-2 (intelligence wing). The Honduran government denied any knowledge or involvement, told the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACrtHR) that he’d gone off with Salvadoran guerrillas, and refused to hear the family’s case in domestic courts. The case changed international law, and forced disappearances were designated a crime without statute of limitations.17
Special Forces: ‘Whatever, Whenever and Wherever’
To understand counterinsurgency, it is necessary to understand the role of special forces – an elite corps created by the US in the 1950s to combat the occupying forces in Western Europe, using unconventional warfare. Under John F. Kennedy their numbers and role expanded to include preemptive strikes and terror tactics against the international menace that was communism. The time to act was now, according to the field manuals, in order to neutralize popular leaders before they became violently militant. In Honduras the Special Forces were created in 1979, a few months after the Sandinista victory, and were touted as an urban anti-subversive ground force to liquidate guerrilla groups.
What’s so special about the Special Forces? Special means irregular, super-soldiers trained to bend the rules and operate outside normal parameters because, they are told, the end justifies the means. When there are no limits, killing is the ultimate way to neutralize a threat. This threat might be real, like an armed guerrilla fighter, or imagined, like the children of campesinos slaughtered lest they grow into guerrillas. But before this ultimate penalty, a range of tried and tested techniques from the counterinsurgency spectrum – smear campaigns, blackmail, bribery, threats against loved ones, jail, torture and disappearance – can be deployed to neutralize the target. Informants, infiltrators and surveillance are key tools to gathering intelligence to divide, dominate and conquer communities. That’s why to understand counterinsurgency, you need to understand Special Forces and military intelligence. Both are secret because both bend the law, McClintock told me.
US-backed special forces perpetrated some of the worst atrocities and most emblematic executions in the region, including the assassinations of Archbishop Óscar Romero and Bishop Juan Gerardi.18 The crème de la crème from each country were sent for training to the School of the Americas (SOA) in Georgia, and its satellite centre in Panama. In Honduras, at least nineteen members of Battalion 3-16 graduated from the infamous Fort Benning military school.19 A much larger number were trained at home at the US regional training centre (Centro Regional Entrenamiento