The Washington Post
reports on John Negroponte's time as ambassador to Honduras pointing out that at the height of extrajudicial repression in Honduras, reportedly only a relative handful of left-wing and anti-militarist students, activists, and professors were targetted for torture and/or disappearance. This is contrasted with El Salvador by Negroponte himself in earlier hearings for his confirmation as UN ambassador:
"While acknowledging that there had been occasional 'abuses of authority' by Honduran police officials, Negroponte reiterated his assertion that they were not officially sanctioned. He told the committee that he associated the term 'death squad' with events in El Salvador, where more than 50,000 people had disappeared.
'I did not think that any activities that were occurring in Honduras at that time fit that description,' Negroponte said."
In other words, go bug Elliott Abrams about El Mozote.
Anyone old enough to remember the Reagan administration's race to the bottom in allowing Central America to be turned into a charnel house while sycophantic climbers like Negroponte were wining and dining the Generals responsible should be forgiven a grim smirk at such policy outcome sleight-of-hand. This "quick, look over there!" strategy wouldn't work if our Congress and mainstream press weren't so docile as to never ask "Well, what do you think about the US government involvement in obfuscating and giving diplomatic cover to the crimes of the right-wing death squads (aka, the military) of El Salvador?...How do we distinguish acceptable degrees of torture and murder?", etc.
Such thinking might inspire some similar sustained curiosity about our new regimes of policy mandated, up-close-and-personal torture, rather than the spat between Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa or the race to form legislation ensuring that everyone will have the opportunity to have Tom DeLay personally ram a feeding tube down his or her throat.
Of course, as the cuddly embassy dinner guest Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez told Negroponte's predecessor:
"...'extralegal' methods might be necessary to 'take care' of subversives, declassified State Department documents show. He praised the 'Argentine method' of dealing with the problem, which Binns took to refer to the kidnappings and disappearances of thousands of government opponents."
As other unclassified documents have revealed, the South American juntas got, at the least, a tacit US seal-of-approval for wholesale repression, torture, and murder. In this context, it would seem that Abu Ghraib, et al. is simply the latest, if most sordid and damning, chapter in the US government's endless equivocations on human rights.