NEW UN AMBASSADOR - Wrong man for job

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HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Editorial

Oct. 2, 2001, 5:56PM

New ambassador to U.N. is wrong man for job

By FRANK DEL OLMO

IN the wake of all the media coverage of the terrorist attacks on the East Coast, one news story got very little attention: the Senate's Sept. 14 approval of John Negroponte to be the U.S. ambassador to United Nations. The timing could not have been worse, given President Bush's by-then urgent campaign to rally international opinion against terrorism and the thugs who carry it out.

Negroponte's nomination, which had been held up for half a year because of his record on human rights, was ramrodded through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 13 on a 14-3 vote. The next day, the Senate approved it as a routine consent item, i.e., without even a formal floor vote.

We may yet come to realize how far from routine the Negroponte nomination was. For as nations all over the world close ranks with the United States in its new war against terrorism, the comparative silence south of the border has been deafening.

Sure, most Latin America governments have expressed regret over the loss of life in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, but there has been no substantial show of solidarity by any Latin American leader since then, with the exception of Mexico's President Vicente Fox.

It would be a mistake to assume that this is just another case of knee-jerk anti-gringo feelings in Latin America or to expect our southern neighbors to eventually come around. For by putting Negroponte in a key foreign policy post, Bush has rewarded a U.S. diplomat whom many Latin Americans consider a terrorist -- albeit of the well-bred, Ivy League variety.

Negroponte is a career Foreign Service officer whose first ambassadorial post was in Honduras in 1981-85 when Central America was one of the hot fronts in the Cold War. There, he was paymaster for an unsavory covert army known as the Contras, who, under the tutelage of the United States, waged a dirty little war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

To give the Contras a free hand to operate from Honduran territory, Negroponte purchased the cooperation of the corrupt generals who ran Honduras at the time, underwriting a death squad they used against political opponents, according to documents the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had before it.

Several investigations have documented the activities of that death squad, known as Battalion 316. It was funded and even partly trained by the CIA. And recently declassified CIA and State Department documents indicate that Negroponte knew more about that death squad's operations than he reported to Congress at the time, as the law required him to do. During the pro forma committee meeting Sept. 13, Negroponte claimed his reports and judgments about the Honduran military "were made in good faith."

Pretty lame words considering the enormity of what Battalion 316 did to its fellow Hondurans. It is no exaggeration to say that Battalion 316's dirty work induced the same kind of terror in a small nation of 6 million people that the recent bloodshed in New York City, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania did in this country. Among Battalion 316's victims were 184 Hondurans and at least one U.S. citizen, a Jesuit priest named Joseph Carney.

Little wonder, then, that Latin Americans think Negroponte has blood on his hands as surely as Osama bin Laden has blood on his.

Bush, not to mention Negroponte's good friend, Secretary of State Colin Powell, should have realized how hypocritical it would look for us to apply one set of moral standards to terrorists who killed thousands of innocent people in a few terrible hours while at the same time we use another set to judge a man who oversaw American aid to military thugs who did similarly cruel things to Central Americans.

Even assuming, for a moment, that morality doesn't matter in international affairs, especially during wartime, what about pragmatism? Can Negroponte be the effective voice we will need at the United Nations the next few years? Not very likely.

Oh, the new U.S. ambassador will get the United Nation's attention when he speaks up. He represents a superpower, after all. But if and when Negroponte has the gall to lecture the world about human rights, no one could blame U.N. diplomats for holding their noses. The stench of hypocrisy will be that bad.

Del Olmo is an associate editor of the Los Angeles Times.

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2001


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