Knowing Negroponte’s Role

The Senate has yet to schedule hearings on President Bush’s nomination of John D. Negroponte to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. When it does, the Committee on Foreign Relations must allow ample time to ask some very hard questions about his tenure as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s--for there are now even more to be asked.

As detailed in recent stories by Times’ reporters T. Christian Miller and Maggie Farley, it is clearer than ever that Negroponte and other embassy staffers did not report all they knew about the role of the Honduran military in serious human rights abuses taking place in that country, even while some of those abuses were perpetrated by soldiers trained and financed by the U.S.

In the past, Negroponte has acknowledged that he was aware of “isolated incidents” of human rights problems in Honduras. But the fact that much more than “isolated incidents” were taking place has been documented not only by Honduran human rights officials, still working to rectify many of the wrongs done at the time, but in a declassified 1997 CIA inquiry into one especially notorious incident, the death of American Jesuit priest James Francis Carney.

A sympathizer with leftist causes, the Rev. Carney was traveling with a band of Honduran guerrillas attacked by government troops in 1983. Most of the band’s leaders were killed, some executed after being captured, according to the CIA. But Carney was never accounted for. His family raised such a political furor over his disappearance that Honduran military officials wrote to Negroponte asking him to help quash inquiries into the Carney case. The CIA’s documentary record is unclear as to how, or even if, Negroponte responded to that letter. Clearly that is something the Senate needs to find out. A fundamental issue in the controversy over the Negroponte nomination is whether his efforts to downplay reports of abuses by the Honduran military ever crossed the line into deceiving Congress. If so, that would have been a violation of U.S. law, and that would disqualify the veteran diplomat from the high-profile post as U.N. envoy.

Reporting from the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Miller spoke to several human rights officials who asked whether it is even appropriate to send Negroponte to the U.N., a forum where the U.S. must often lecture other nations about democratic principals, including respect for human rights.

‘What signal does it send ... for the United States to have a man like this in the United Nations?” one asked. “What is the U.S. thinking?” What, indeed? That’s clearly another question the Senate must ask when it reviews the Negroponte nomination.