Rights Issue Still Alive in Honduras : As Gains Are Made, Military Regime Tries to Strike Back

For 10 days in mid-October, plain-clothed gunmen prowling in pickup trucks with dark windows and no license plates terrified Honduras’ fourth-largest city. One by one, they seized seven men from poor barrios--reliable workers with no known politics or police records.

Amid an outcry by human rights activists and the victims’ mothers, authorities for weeks denied holding the men. A radio announcer who charged that an army death squad was afoot got three telephone warnings to shut up “or you will disappear too.” The local post office, where two of the men worked, halted deliveries for fear that other mailmen would vanish.

Last Friday, the army acknowledged its custody of the “Choluteca Seven.” In a confusing account, army spokesman Juan Sierra said they were plucked off the streets by army “recruiters”--even though one had already served and three were too old to be drafted. They were accused of spying for Nicaragua, on evidence that Sierra conceded had emerged only after their capture.

To critics of Honduras’ military-dominated government, the bizarre incident is a sign that a notorious army unit blamed for scores of kidnap-style arrests and death-squad killings in past years is still active. But the re-emergence of the seven also showed the growing effectiveness of human rights groups in obliging the army, however clumsily, to account for its prisoners.

“The people are more and more aware of their rights and very quick to demand respect of those rights,” Atty. Gen. Ruben Dario Zepeda said in an interview in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. “A citizen’s complaint in a case like this cannot go unnoticed without an investigation.”

“In the past, these seven might have disappeared forever,” said Ramon Custodio, president of the Honduras Human Rights Defense Committee. “This does not mean the repressive attitude of the military has changed. It is simply more limited in its conduct.”

Indeed, as its police methods become better known, the government is escalating a campaign to discredit Custodio and his group, calling them tools of a Communist plot to take over this Central American country.

Army Unit Blamed

About 120 people disappeared in Honduras between 1981 and 1984 as the army moved, with U.S. assistance, to prevent a leftist insurgency from taking hold. Most of the disappearances and scattered overt killings since then have been blamed on army intelligence Battalion 316.

Details of clandestine jails and torture methods emerged in testimony by a battalion defector before the Inter-American Human Rights Court in Costa Rica. In July, the court found the Honduran government guilty in the 1981 disappearance of a student.

The verdict was a costly vindication for Honduran rights activists. In January, a leading witness, Miguel Angel Pavon, was shot to death with a friend in the city of San Pedro Sula, where Pavon headed the defense committee’s office.

Another defector, Sgt. Fausto Reyes Caballero, has turned up in Washington blaming Battalion 316 agents for Pavon’s unsolved murder. Army commanders insist that the unit was disbanded 14 months ago. But in interviews with the New York-based rights group Americas Watch and the Washington Post, Reyes said he fled Honduras in August when army agents tried to kill him for refusing to join Battalion 316.

Human rights activists say the Choluteca sweep used covert methods pioneered by Battalion 316. The brother-in-law of one the arrested men said an army colonel in Choluteca told him the intelligence unit was involved.

Why the seven men were picked up is unclear. Choluteca, a hot, dusty city of 47,000, is near the Nicaraguan border and feels the tension of the Honduras-based Contra insurgency against the Sandinista army. Two of the suspects are Nicaraguans but have worked here more than a decade. According to relatives, neither has returned to Nicaragua and did not know the five Honduran suspects, who in turn barely knew each other.

“The repression here is often irrational,” said Gil Aube, a Canadian doctor and Roman Catholic lay worker here. “People are suspicious of each other, and one can be picked up because a neighbor denounces him.” A soldier is said to have borne a grudge against one of the mailmen under arrest, because the mailman had denounced him for a $135 barroom robbery.

Moving Against Critics

While denying covert repression, the government is moving openly against its critics. Joseph Eldridge, a U.S. citizen who represents Americas Watch in Honduras, was recently barred from returning to the country after criticizing military leaders in a commentary in the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times.

Custodio, a 58-year-old pathologist who founded the defense committee in 1981 and paid his legal expenses with Ford Foundation grants, is the government’s main target.

The foreign minister has accused him of plotting to assassinate Honduran leaders. Honduran officials have distributed public reports by the U.S. Embassy branding Custodio a “Marxist ideologue”--a label he rejects.

“This is not a campaign as such,” said army spokesman Sierra. “We are just trying to orient public opinion objectively about who is trying to destroy Honduras.”

One government weapon against Custodio is Hector Orlando Vasquez, a former army sergeant who gained Pavon’s trust and succeeded the slain rights leader as head of the San Pedro Sula office. Later fired by the defense committee as a suspected army infiltrator, Vasquez told a military-sponsored press conference last month that Custodio probably had Pavon murdered to settle a power struggle in the organization.

Zepeda, the attorney general, has written to Amnesty International and other rights groups calling Vasquez’s remarks “credible.”