Aguacate revisited

Christian Century, August 30, 2000 by Joseph E. Mulligan

AGUACATE, THE Honduran base built by the Reagan administration for the Nicaraguan contras in the early 1980s, faded from the limelight in 1988 when the contras and Sandinistas signed a cease-fire agreement. But in recent months church delegations, international journalists, and relatives of Honduras's "disappeared" have been traveling the 130 miles from Tegucigalpa to inspect the now virtually abandoned base, guarded only by an eight-man squad from the Honduran army.

Near the base's 8,000-foot runway, a lone building stands in the midst of trees and shrubs. The one-room brick structure seems to have a small basement, covered over by a concrete slab with embedded iron tings; tapping one's foot on the concrete indicates a hollow space below. The walls of the room show spatterings of blood; four samples taken by the Honduran human rights prosecutor have been identified as human blood. Many names of those once held in this rustic cell are scratched into the walls, including a "Mario." This was the pseudonym used by Chicago-born James Carney, a Jesuit priest who served as chaplain for an armed revolutionary group entering Honduras from Nicaragua in July 1983.

The human rights prosecutor has cordoned off several suspect plots of land at Aguacate, including two sunken holes where bones have been found. It is generally known that part of the base is a cemetery for the contras and perhaps for some of their Sandinista captives. Once the Organization of American States declares the area free of landmines, Honduran investigators and foreign forensic anthropologists will sift through the earth in search of human remains--and perhaps find those of Father Carney and others of his group.

Several years after the disappearance, Honduran deserters in exile began to testify that Carney and others in the column had been captured, tortured and thrown out of helicopters. The late Florencio Caballero, a former sergeant in the Honduran army, told the New York Times that he personally had interrogated Carney (June 5,1988).

In 1988, during a special hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, then-Senator William S. Cohen asked Richard Stolz, CIA deputy director of operations: "Can the CIA confirm the manner and death of Father Carney?" Stolz replied: "No, sir.... We do not know the answer to that. I spoke to Ambassador [John] Negroponte briefly Tuesday and again yesterday and the best information that anyone seems to have is that he probably died of--that a number of them were released and they were in the jungle somewhere and died." Did Stolz mean to say that Carney was among those captured and released?

At the Iran-contra hearings in 1987, Cohen quoted Walter Lippmann in explaining the reasons for the joint congressional hearings: "The great virtue of democracy--in fact its supreme virtue--is that it supplies a method for dragging realities into the light, of summoning our rulers to declare themselves and to submit to judgment." As secretary of defense, however, Cohen has presided over a shameless defiance of President Clinton's orders to provide information to human rights officials in Honduras. The small number of documents declassified by the Pentagon--and those few heavily blacked out--thwarts democracy's methods for "dragging realities into the light."

Carney was accompanied by another U.S. citizen: David Arturo Baez Cruz, a native Nicaraguan who had become a U.S. citizen and had served in the Green Berets for 11 years before returning to his homeland in 1981 to support the Sandinista revolutionary government. His father had been killed and "disappeared" by Anastasio Somoza's National Guard.

Baez Cruz was first identified in a "secret telegram" from U.S. military intelligence in Panama in 1983 which stated that the Green Beret, serving as the column's communications officer, was "killed in action." The telegram was declassified and presented to the Honduran human rights commissioner in early 1998 in response to his request for U.S. documents which could shed light on human tights violations in Honduras.

"The U.S. Government in 1997 and 1998 reviewed and declassified thousands of pages of official documents related to alleged human rights abuses in Honduras during the 1980s and provided them to Commissioner [Leo] Valladares," the State Department declares in its "Honduras Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1998," published in February 1999. Not mentioned, however, is the fact that almost 50 percent of this material is blacked out, including paragraphs in sensitive sections in which Father Carney is described as having been captured by the Honduran military, tortured and dismembered. In 1997 the CIA acknowledged that this version of Carney's fate "cannot be ruled out." (The official Honduran army version in 1983 was that perhaps Carney had starved to death in the mountains. The army presented the priest's stole, chalice and Bible to his relatives, but said they had not recovered his body.)

One declassified CIA page presents a report by an unnamed Honduran soldier who says that he carried Father Carney's head in his knapsack. Also, Honduran newspapers recently quoted a peasant leader as saying that Honduran military officers told him that Carney's head is preserved in a jar of alcohol in what is now the country's Ministry of Defense building. The human rights prosecutor vowed to investigate such stories.