DATELINE: HONDURAS SUBJECT: THE CONTRAS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 21, 2011
• Sequence Number: 28
• Publication Date: May 1, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6
STAT ARTICLE APPEARED
. ON PAGE 2_
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
?ay/June 1987
Dateline: Honduras
Subject: the contras
It's a big story,
but nobody involved
wants it covered
by ANNE-MARIE O'CONNOR
Somewhere deep in the mountains
of southern Honduras - in an
off-limits area sealed with mili-
tary roadblocks and ringed with clusters
of land mines - U.S.-backed Nicara-
guan rebels are preparing to step up their
war against the Sandinistas. The signs
of war are everywhere: mysterious arms
shipments arriving in Honduran ports;
infighting among Honduran officers over
profits from the rebel-supply business;
the resettling of Honduran peasants
forced out of a border "emergency
zone" by battles between Sandinista
troops and the contras; a CIA helicopter
Anne-Marie O'Connor is a wire service re-
porter who has been based in Honduras for
three years.
that crash-landed next to the largest uiaL IJ ~;,.F"-- ?~ -
shoppin? mall in Tegucigalpa, the na- serious threat - are cutting down on the
tion's capital. But almost no one wants number of permits allowing journalists
journalists - foreign or domestic - to to enter the embattled region.
cover this war, and the obstacles placed And then there are the contras them-
in their way make reporting on this con- selves. They don't like reporters ap-
flict "in our own backyard" peculiarly pearing unexpectedly or wandering
difficult. freely around camps which they still
Many of the obstacles have been publicly claim are inside Nicaragua.
erected by the Honduran government. Moreover, they have long been worried
Recently, President Jose Azcona tight- that critical coverage might reduce their
ened the enforcement of a ban on en- chances of securing further U.S. aid.
trance to the emergency zone - a 450- "It's increasingly difficult to cover
square-mile area of El Paraiso province this war." says Marjorie Miller, a Los
that has become known as "New Nic- Angeles Times reporter in Central Amer-
aragua" because more than 12,000 Hon- ica. "The contras have restricted access
duran residents have fled from it, leaving on their side for some time, and now
the region to the contras and their fam- that the fighting is heating up, the San-
ilies. Reluctant to have its role as host dinistas are restricting access to the war
to the contras publicized, the Hondurans on their side." Miller adds that the con-
seek to suppress news about the foreign tras are "very suspicious of any jour-
army on their soil - except when such nalists who have worked in Nicaragua
l journalists
b
l
i
k
e
a
to
c
news serves their own interests. and are very qu
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pro-Sandinistas. They only let a small
border, the Sandinistas - reluctant to group of journalists into their camps and
acknowledge the spread of a war they into their confidence."
like to portray as a U.S. -initiated conflict Over the past few years the Honduran
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government's attitude toward coverage
of the contras has fluctuated in ways that
reflect shifts in the country's military and
political leadership, as well as such de-
velopments as Congress's cutoff of aid
to the contras in October 1984 and the
downing in Nicaragua of a contra-supply
plane in October 1986. John Lantigua of
UPI was one of the first foreign reporters
to cover the growing rebel presence on
a daily basis. He was expelled from Hon-
duras in May 1983. Authorities said he
was "denigrating the image of Hondu-
ras" in violation of the country's im-
migration law. However, when a U.S.
official later asked the country's then
president, Roberto Suazo Cordova, if
Lantigua would ever be allowed to re-
turn, Suazo said no, explaining, accord-
ing to the official, "He is a communist. "
During this time the military chief was
General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. A
close U.S. ally and a vehement anti-
communist, Alvarez oversaw the estab-
lishment of the contra presence in Hon-
duras when he assumed command in
1982. So long as he remained head of
the military, domestic reporters were
forbidden to mention that the contras
were based in Honduras; thus, they
could not report on the disruptive effect
the contra presence was having on the
country. Meanwhile, contra leaders
were able to use money provided by the
CIA to assure favorable coverage of their
movement (see "Contra Coverage -
Paid for by the CIA " cJtt March!
App
Alvarez was ousted as head of the mil-
itary in March 1984 and it was his suc-
cessor, General Walter Lopez, who
sealed off the rebel zone, thus ending an
era when, while the government offi-
cially denied that it was supporting the
contras, reporters could drive right up to
the gates of the rebels' camps. At this
time, too, the military embarked on an
effort to persuade the U.S. to increase
its aid to Honduras and, as part of that
effort, began leaking stories to U.S. re-
porters. Some of these stories were
highly critical of the rebels, in an ap-
parent effort to show the cost of Hon-
duran support. In January 1985, for
example, military sources told journal-
ists they had evidence that the contras
had participated in several political as-
sassinations and in the "disappear-
ances" of Honduran leftists and opposi-
tion figures that had taken place while
Alvarez was in charge of the military.
While some evidence existed to support
this charge, the story seemed clearly de-
signed to deflect attention from a human-
rights investigation into the activities of
a Honduran anti-terrorist unit to which
even fellow Honduran officers attributed
most of the killings and disappearances.
U.S. intelligence sources, caught off
guard by the appearance of the story in
the Honduran press, first thought it must
have originated in Managua.
Honduran military Teaks, especially
those involving U.S. covert programs..
continue to infuriate U.S. military in-
telligence officials. "They can't under-
stand why the Hondurans are leaking
information to the press that is detri-
mental [to the contras]," says one State
Department official. "But what is hap-
pening is that the Hondurans are begin-
ning to give out information deliberate-
ly, in response to their own agenda, just
like [politicians[ in Washington."
0 ne apparently leaked story was
an October 1985 account by Noe
Leiva, a reporter for the Tegu-
cigalpa daily El Tiempo and a UPI
stringer. It appeared at a time when Pres-
ident Suazo was allowing anti-contra
stories to appear in an effort to pressure
the U.S. to allow him to stay in power
beyond his term. Leiva reported that a
rebel warehouse and training ground was
located, not up in the mountains, but in
the compound of Honduras's First In-
fantry Battalion on the outskirts of Te-
gucigalpa. This expose was followed by
a spate of contra coverage in the do-
mestic press. Among many leading mil-
itary and government officials there was
increasing frustration and anger at the
way the rebel presence was being man-
aged; meanwhile, anti-contra sentiment
was rife in the border areas where the
contras were encamped. General Lopez,
although staunchly anti-Sandinista,
thought the rebel movement was corrupt
and poorly led and wanted the rebel
troops out of the country. In February
1986, a group of ultra-conservative, pro-
U.S. colonels ousted Lopez as military
chief and installed General Humberto
Regalado. Honduran intelligence offi-
cers began calling in reporters from the
nation's papers for tough talks and began
trying to draw up a strategy to deal with
the growing public outcry over the con-
tras' presence. The new stance was re-
flected in an article in the April issue of
the military monthly Provecciones Mil-
itares, which warned that the local press
corps had been infiltrated by "terror-
ists," some of whom it said had grad-
uated from Moscow's Patrice Lumumba
University. The article seemed shrill and
overblown even to the military's closest
allies in the conservative journalists'
guild, which protested that no Honduran
journalists were known to have gradu-
ated from the university.
Given such a climate, running the risk
of offending both the government and
the contras would seem to be asking for
Honduran expose: Noe Leiva of El
Tiempo revealed the presence
of a contra training ground on the
outskirts of Tegucigalpa.
trouble. This, however, is exactly what
Rodrigo Wong Arevalo - director of
Radio America, the most-listened-to sta-
tion in the nation - did when, last sum-
mer, he aired a series of editorials op-
posing the contra presence and also a
series on a scandal involving tens of
thousands of dollars' worth of embez-
zled government funds. In the early
morning hours of August 4, a week after
he had broadcast the last of his series of
anti-contra editorials, a car bomb ex-
ploded outside his home. No evidence
has been uncovered to suggest who
might have planted the bomb; Arevalo
himself says he has no idea who might
have been behind the bombing. Several
Honduran journalists, however, inter-
preted the incident as a warning to lay
off the contras. "The feeling is that, if
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you write something about the contras,
something could happen to you," says
Gustavo Palencia, a reporter for El
Tiempo and this year's winner of Hon-
duras's most coveted journalism prize,
the Medardo Mejia award.
Palencia is one of the handful of Hon-
duran journalists who, at local press con-
ferences, ask hard questions about the
rebels and the U.S. military presence.
This past December his name was
crossed off a list of reporters who were
to be allowed to enter the sealed-off zone
along the country's southern border.
When his paper demanded an explana-
tion for his exclusion, the military re-
plied that they did not like his coverage.
When the newspaper's owner, Jaime
Rosenthal, who is also vice-president of
Honduras, pressed General Regalado for
an explanation, Regalado replied that
Palencia was believed to be "a Sandi-
nista spy." The label is routinely applied
to reporters whose coverage of the con-
tras displeases the authorities.
In a recent. conversation, Regalado
made it clear that the label could also be
applied to foreign journalists, saying,
"There are those among the foreign
journalists who support communism."
When asked what sort of stories he
thought reflected communist tendencies,
he cited photographs of Honduran pros-
titutes and articles describing Hondu-
ras's role as host to the rebels that had
appeared recently in U.S. and other for-
eign publications.
"It's the McCarthy era down here,"
says Laura Brooks, a twenty-seven-year-
old stringer for the Voice of America
whom the agency let go, with no expla-
nation, in September 1986. "Whatever
they can spread around about you, es-
pecially if it has to do with communism
or left-wing sympathies, they say -
whether they believe it's true or not,
whether it hurts your career or not. " Ac-
cording to two sources - one connected
with a U.S. intelligence agency, the
other a congressional aide - the rec-
ommendation to drop Brooks came from
the National Security Council after it had
received a report from intelligence of-
ficials in Tegucigalpa that Brooks was
suspected of being soft on the Sandinis-
tas. Brooks says she subsequently
learned that VOA reporters had heard
rumors in Washington to the effect that
she had a close personal relationship
with a Sandinista agent posted in Hon-
duras. "If they really believe that," says
Brooks, who was, she says, a Reagan
supporter when he ran for re-election,
"it's a pretty sad comment on the state
of U.S. intelligence."
U.S. officials in Tegucigalpa keep a
close watch on what U.S. reporters
write. Meanwhile, as sources, these of-
ficials are not always reliable. When the
home of a leading Honduran business-
man was shot up by Honduran police last
August - a time during which the mil-
itary was squabbling internally over
profits from the rebel-supply industry -
U.S. embassy sources told several jour-
nalists that the incident had nothing to
do with any Honduran military involve-
ment in the supply trade. This point of
view was at variance with that of prac-
tically everyone else in Tegucigalpa, in-
cluding the businessman himself, who
openly complained that the shooting was
an'attempt, led by the head of military
intelligence, to edge him out.
To cite another instance: a month
before a rebel aid package was
defeated in Congress in October
1984, the embassy arranged for a foreign
journalist to meet with a Nicaraguan
teenager who claimed to have been kid-
napped by Sandinista soldiers in north-
ern Nicaragua and sexually abused by
them for eight months. However, the
journalist happened to have met this
same girl at a contra hospital six months
before, on which occasion she had been
introduced as "the youngest girl con-
tra." When the journalist mentioned this
to the embassy official who had set up
the "exclusive," the girl's interview
with the Honduran press the next day
was cancelled.
Honduran authorities are no more re-
liable. In April 1985, following the
shelling by the Sandinistas of the Hon-
duran village of Espanol Grande - it
was after this shelling, incidentally, that
the rebel-occupied zone was sealed off
- the Honduran military assured jour-
nalists that the contras were not in that
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area. But two foreign journalists who
ignored their military escort's instruc-
tions to remain with a press group taken
into the area stumbled on the home of a
contra commander whose nom de guerre
is Tiro al Blanco. His troops had been
hiding there during the journalists' visit
and, when the two reporters approached
the house, soldiers jumped off the porch
and fled into a cornfield.
An unauthorized horseback ride into
the rebel zone of El Paraiso province by
two reporters last May made it clear why
neither the contras nor their Honduran
hosts nor their Reagan administration
backers welcome uninhibited coverage.
The reporters - Sam Dillon of The
Miami Herald and I - did not get to
see any top rebel leaders, but we were
able to observe the considerable impact
the rebels' presence had had on the so-
called New Nicaragua area. The major
town in the region, Capire, had the law-
less feeling of an Alaskan gold-rush-era
town. Most of its inhabitants were armed
Nicaraguan men who, beer can or bottle
in hand, seemed to have gotten a head
start on the approaching Saturday night.
One rebel, whose cap and T-shirt pro-
claimed him to be "Diablo" (the devil),
sliced the air with a combat knife which,
he boasted, had been supplied by the $27
million aid package. Another rode
through the town's dusty main street on
a white horse, an AK-47 held high. Oth-
ers carried tape players blasting Michael
Jackson's "Thriller" album.
It was difficult to find a Honduran;
most of the village's native inhabitants
had moved out after a battle nearby be-
tween the contras and the Sandinistas. A
religious worker said that, around the
time of the battle, more than a dozen
Honduran peasants had been killed by
one side or the other.
Such a visit, of course, provided
only a partial picture of the reb-
els, who can count among their
numbers many young, determined peas-
ant recruits who have no ties to the So-
moza regime and whose dedication to
the struggle lends validity to their cause.
But partial views are almost inevitable
so long as the rebels shut out reporters,
as they recently did for more than a year.
"They handle their relations with the
press quite badly," says James Le-
Moyne, the New York Times reporter
who, along with Christopher Dickey of
The Washington Post, was on the first
reporting trip with the rebels in March
1983 and who was the only mainstream
print correspondent allowed into their
camps this past February. The contras'
wary attitude toward the press is under-
standable, LeMoyne says, "because
there are things they don't particularly
want publicized: human-rights abuses,
the continuing influence of Somoza-era
politicians and businessmen and Na-
tional Guard officers." What makes the
story complicated, he adds, is that
"when you meet the peasant recruits you
realize that this is a very traditional Latin
American army, in which the mass of
fighting men bear very little resemblance
to the people commanding them. They
are very conservative people from north-
ern Nicaragua who do have genuine
grievances against the Sandinistas."
As a reporter, LeMoyne says, it is
necessary to try to understand the con-
tras' reasons for fighting, but, he adds.
"it's also important to remember that
... there are as many or more Nicara-
guans with the Sandinistas who feel that
they have equally legitimate reasons for
fighting to defend the revolution and to
defeat the contras. So the question for
the reporter isn't the authenticity or the
truthfulness of the struggle on either
side; our job is simply to do the best we
can to make sure our readers understand
the views of the people on both sides of
this conflict." E
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