Timing of Envoy’s Deportation Raises Questions

If anyone could shed light on the controversial history of U.N. ambassador nominee John D. Negroponte, it is Honduran Gen. Luis Alonso Discua Elvir.

Discua helped form a U.S.-trained intelligence unit, Battalion 316, blamed for the torture and killing of more than 100 Hondurans during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador to the country in the 1980s. And while Negroponte may not have known Discua, the general claims he knows plenty about the extent of the U.S. Embassy’s involvement in covert activities in Washington’s proxy war against communism in Central America.

A U.N. diplomat until February, Discua is now back in Honduras, his diplomatic visa revoked with unusual speed three weeks before Negroponte was put up for the U.N. post. State Department officials said they took the action after learning that Discua was spending most of his time in Miami, not at the U.N. in New York, as his visa required.

In an interview with The Times, Discua offered no answers about the speed of the visa revocation, usually a lengthy process. He avoided a direct answer as to whether he believed it was related to Negroponte’s nomination.

“I think you, as journalists, can draw your own conclusions,” he said. “The only thing I hope for is a quick end to this situation, and the nomination of Mr. Negroponte as ambassador of the United States before the United Nations.”

He declined to comment further, saying he wanted no more “problems with the United States.”

“Your country,” he said, “is too powerful.”

One of the primary questions surrounding the revocation of Discua’s visa is timing. Several Honduran government officials said the U.S. has long been aware of concerns over whether Discua was abusing his diplomatic status by living in Miami.

Fernando Martinez, a former foreign minister of Honduras, said he believes that the U.S. knew at least as early as 1998 that there were claims that Discua wasn’t working at the U.N. on a regular basis.

That’s because Martinez engaged in two highly public clashes in February and September of that year with Honduran President Carlos Flores over Discua’s ersatz appointment. The president, who later fired Martinez, resisted dismissing Discua, as the foreign minister demanded, but agreed to drop his salary and reduce his rank, Martinez said.

“The [U.S.] Embassy here of course knew about this debate,” Martinez said. “It was very, very public.”

In fact, early in 1998, U.S. officials approached Honduras’ U.N. ambassador, Edmundo Orellana, to ask whether Discua was actually working at the U.N. or living in Miami, a source close to Orellana said.

Orellana assured the officials that Discua was an active member of the Honduran mission but immediately called Discua and asked him to begin making more regular trips to New York, the source said. (Discua started coming to the U.N. every other week, attending meetings on issues such as disarmament.)

That was the end of the matter until last January, when a Florida-based human rights group, International Educational Missions, received a tip that Discua was living and working in Miami. IEM’s director, Richard Krieger, a former U.S. immigration service official, sent a letter to the State Department pointing out that Discua was violating the terms of his diplomatic visa by residing in Miami, and demanding that he be removed.

The State Department took immediate action. Discua was out of the country by the end of the month.

State Department officials who handled the case said they were delighted but surprised by the efficiency of the revocation, which had required coordination across at least seven departments. “It raises interesting questions,” said one, who asked not to be named. But he said there was never any hint of a connection to Negroponte’s nomination. “If there is a link, it was at a level much higher than ours,” he said.

Discua had once warned human rights investigators that he had kept CIA documents as an insurance policy, so that if he were ever scrutinized, he would expose U.S. collaboration in any misdeeds. And indeed, in interviews and a court hearing, he began to parcel out details after his return to Honduras.

In sworn testimony to a Honduran judge investigating rights allegations, Discua said he was taken to an intelligence training center in Oklahoma by officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 1984. There, he was instructed on how to form a counterintelligence unit to contain the influence of Nicaragua’s leftist government on Honduras.

Discua said he was in command for only two months and that his only role was to process paperwork organizing the unit. He said he never had direct command over its actions.

Discua’s departure from the U.S. coincided with the deportation of two other men who claimed involvement with Battalion 316 in efforts to win political asylum.

One was Jose Barrera, who testified that he killed political opponents while part of 316. He was deported from Canada in February.

In a Canadian detention review Jan. 31, Barrera denied involvement in the death squad and said he feared for his life if he went back to the Honduras. His daughter had recently been killed in a murky incident involving a loaded pistol, heightening his fears.

“It was a form of coercion. It’s a form of intimidation,” he said of her death in an interview in a Tegucigalpa hotel room last month. Barrera claims that the Canadian Consulate in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, told him the Canadian government had erred in his deportation and that he was welcome to return to Canada after filling out required applications.

“They know they have put my life in danger. They want to keep a lid on things,” he said. “They know they made a mistake.” The Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board would not comment.

The third case involved Juan Angel Hernandez Lara, 37, who was deported from Miami on Jan. 17. After he returned to Honduras, he denied direct involvement in Battalion 316 and said he had been a foot soldier in a U.S.-backed operation in Honduras’ Olancho province. A clash there resulted in the execution of nine prisoners and the disappearance of an American priest--and Negroponte feared accounts of Honduran human rights violations would alarm Congress if reported. Lara was later posted as a guard at the 316 compound outside Tegucigalpa.

After a fearful month in Honduras, Lara sneaked back into the United States. Another anonymous tip to IEM led to his arrest March 28. He is now being held in a Miami detention center pending trial for illegal reentry after deportation.

Another State Department official pointed out that the original arrests of Lara and Barrera took place long before Negroponte’s selection, but he conceded that their deportations theoretically could have been expedited because of it.

“Conspiracy theories tend to overestimate the State Department’s abilities of coordination,” he said.

A State Department spokesman said the timing of the three cases was purely coincidental.

Krieger, the director of IEM, would not reveal who tipped him off about Lara and Discua but said the group’s motives were not political. “We’re not trying to protect Negroponte,” he said, “and I feel pretty certain we were not set up and used as a tool to protect him.”

He asserted that making Discua’s case public compelled the State Department to act swiftly, even if it had looked the other way in the past.

“I know they knew about it,” he said. “Otherwise, they couldn’t have acted so quickly.”

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Miller reported from Tegucigalpa and Farley from the United Nations. Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington and special correspondent Alex Renderos in San Salvador contributed to this report.