DATELINE: HONDURAS SUBJECT: THE CONTRAS

Document Type: 
Collection: 
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
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
May 1, 1987
Content Type: 
OPEN SOURCE
File: 
AttachmentSize
PDF icon CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6.pdf332.1 KB
Body: 
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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6 2, 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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6 3. 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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6 * 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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260028-6