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From 1971 to 1973, John Negroponte — confirmed by the Bush administration this past week as the first U.S. National Intelligence director — was the officer-in charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. During that period, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Michael Levine was conducting undercover operations in Saigon, Thailand, and Cambodia where the U.S. government was smuggling heroin into the U.S. The government was utilizing caskets and body bags of those “Killed In Action” to smuggled the heroin.
From 1981-1985, Negroponte was assigned as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, where he illegally assisted the Contra war, aiding the Reagan administration in ‘disappearing’ close to 300 political opponents in classic death squad fashion. He supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, which the Contras used as a secret detention and torture centre. From 1989 to September 1993, Negroponte was ambassador to Mexico where he directed U. S. intelligence services in assisting the war against the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.
According to the New York Times, under the diplomatic cover of his role as ‘ambassador’, Negroponte organized right wing death squads in Central America, leaving tens of thousands of people dead in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as they murdered to prop up pro-U.S. dictatorships under President Ronald Reagan. The Times credits Negroponte with ‘carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua’ during his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
In an article titled, Former death squad man to run Iraq, Kevin Ovenden writes in IndyMedia UK that …
- Negroponte could give lessons to the most brutal dictatorships in the world on how to organise death squads, assassinate opponents and terrorise popular movements into submission
- Negroponte, during his term as ‘ambassador’, oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. Much of that money was funnelled to the death squads in neighbouring Nicaragua and El Salvador
- Negroponte concealed murder, kidnapping and torture by a CIA equipped and trained Honduran military unit, Battalion 3-16
Negroponte, while at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam, coordinated pro-U.S. death squads from 1964 to 1968
Dave Lindorff, writing in Counterpunch, calls the nomination by President George Bush of John Negroponte both ‘obscene and predictable’.
