John Dimitri Negroponte. Born in London on July 21, 1939, just before the
outbreak of the second world war, he was the son of Dimitri, a Greek shipping
magnate, and Catherine. He grew up in England, Switzerland and New York, where
his father settled. He became a product of elite American institutions,
educated at Phillips Exeter prep school in New Hampshire and at Yale, before
being accepted at Harvard Law School. Negroponte is connected to Britain's
royal family and British intelligence through his wife, Diana Villiers.
THE QUESTION IS:
Technically, when, how did John Negroponte become a United States Citizen?
INFO AND LINKS:
John Negroponte
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
John Dimitri Negroponte (born July 21, 1939) (pronounced neg-row-pontee) is the current United States ambassador to Iraq and the nominee as the first U.S. Director of National Intelligence. A career diplomat who served in the United States Foreign Service from 1960 to 1997, Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from September of 2001 until June 2004. As ambassador to Iraq, Negroponte oversees the largest American diplomatic facility in the world.
He is a controversial figure because of his involvement in covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua (see Iran-Contra Affair) and his covering up of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras in the 1980s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte
==============================
Bush to name John Negroponte as national intelligence chief
... Bush on Thursday named John Negroponte as the first national intelligence director to coordinate the work of all 15 intelligence agencies of the United States. ...
John Negroponte Named for US Intelligence Chief Sofia News Agency
Bush taps Negroponte as new spy overseer Turkish Press
Bush Nominates Negroponte As Intel Chief Guardian
ABC News - Ireland Online -
all 310 related »
http://nicaragua.newstrove.com/
Bush named Lt. Gen. Mike Hayden, who has served as director of the National Security Agency since March 1999, as Negroponte's deputy. He is the longest serving director of the secretive codebreaking agency and has pushed for changes, such as asking longtime agency veterans to retire and increasing reliance on technology contractors. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike," Bush said, "we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise." Negroponte, 65, was at the United Nations when he was tapped to take on the delicate job of transforming the U.S.
http://nicaragua.newstrove.com/
Bush names first national intelligence director
Published in Dailybreeze.com - Indexed on Feb 17, 2005 Similar pages
Relevance:
Responding, Negroponte called the new job "the most challenging assignment I have undertaken in more than 40 years of government service." Said Bush: "He understands the power centers in Washington." Bush named Lt. Gen. Mike Hayden, who has served as director of the National Security Agency since March 1999, as Negroponte's deputy. He is the longest serving director of the secretive codebreaking agency and has pushed for changes, such as asking longtime agency veterans to retire and increasing reliance on technology contractors.
http://nicaragua.newstrove.com/
==============================================
... Congressional investigations into Iran-Contra, and with the expose by Gary Webb
of the ... he just an "old friend?" Or is he like John Negroponte, "uniquely suited ...
... possessed; they are communist." Negroponte will now ... Managing Director, Riverside
Holdings: John Lancaster Managing ... Like Moore, Gary Webb, a former reporter for ...
=======================
On December 10, 2004 former investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News Gary Webb - who had been on the CIA's "black list" ever since he broke the story of the agency's VILE involvement in flooding the poor black neighborhoods of L.A. with cocaine in the early 1980s - was found dead in his Sacramento area home, an apparent suicide according to the coroner. There was a gunshot wound through his head. No! - make that TWO (possibly three) gunshot wounds, apparently from his father's old .38 caliber revolver. [Please see our articles, "The Drug Epidemic, Viruses, Ebola, and AIDS" and "Material Developed by Gary Webb on the Importation of Drugs into the Neighborhoods of the Poor" for a "run-down" or synopsis on Webb's article, "Dark Alliance;" please also see our story as to why the elites (and the CIA) targeted the poor black neighborhoods of the country in this fashion, "The Utility of Police Brutality in the Elite's War Against the Poor;" finally, we urge you to read our article on the CIA's obscene involvement in the drug trade entitled, "A Short History of the CIA's Involvement in the Drug Trade."]
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/01/309640.shtml
==================
... Witheld information during Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned in 1992. A protege
of Reagan's UN envoy, Jeane Kirkpatrick. John Negroponte Bush choice for UN ...
Results 1 - 10 of about 15,900 for John Negroponte + Iran Contra
CLICK FOR LINKS:
=====================================
Stop Human Rights Obstructer John Negroponte
... to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress during the Iran Contra hearings and ...
we can keep out former US Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte who played ...
CLICK FOR LINKS:
====================================
On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s." This report was partly declassified on October 22, 1998, in response to persistent demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. You can read parts of the document on the National Security Archives website. Only senators and their staff who have security clearance can read the report in its entirety. It is absolutely critical that every senator read and consider the entire report before approving Negroponte’s nomination. Negroponte is highly respected in diplomatic circles as "a man who speaks five languages but knows when to keep silent." Due to his urbane temperament and broad support in the professional diplomatic field, it will be very tempting for senators to whisk his nomination through.
http://www.maryknoll.org/GLOBAL/ALERTS/no_negroponte.htm
=====================================
"Look," Negroponte says,
Fri Feb 18, 2005 00:16
"Look," Negroponte says, "any missing person is a human tragedy. For that person and their family. I've even met some of the people. My heart goes out to them. Yet, El Salvador would have more people missing in one week than occurred during the entire conflict in Honduras. They talk about 117 people missing in Honduras? [Human rights activists say the number is closer to 200.] During the height of problems in El Salvador, that happened in one week. Fifty thousand were killed in that country. It's a question of keeping things in perspective."
With the exception of four years working for McGraw-Hill, Negroponte's entire working life has been in diplomacy. "I spent 3 1/2 years of a 40-year career in Honduras. It's only a small part of my career."
As a matter of fact, when Negroponte was in Honduras, he was a fairly beloved figure. It had much to do with a Honduran baby crying by the road. And with the dazzling woman from an evening in Vietnam who had become his wife.
'One-Woman Peace Corps'
Diana's father was Sir Charles Villiers, a merchant banker who would rise to become chairman of British Steel. Villiers had a powerful social conscience. In his youth, he went to work for Tubby Clayton, a cleric who tended to the poor. The activism spilled over to his daughter. "He represented social justice for the unemployed man and their families," says Diana Negroponte. "That, along with my mother's work as a social worker in the East End of London, were elements I grew up with."
She and Negroponte met again in 1976, years after their original meeting. "I met his mother at a wedding in London," Diana says. "I asked her, 'How is your son doing?' She groans. John was 36 and unmarried. Mother got to work and mother pulled it off. Six months later we were married."
Wherever they went, he'd do the political thing, and she'd hustle off to the barrios, the slums, the tough places. "She was a one-woman Peace Corps," says Stanley Karnow. "I was down in Honduras once. She was out in the refugee camps and she came back to the capital all covered with chiggers. She's absolutely formidable."
Parents went missing during the contra war. Babies appeared on the sides of roads, in shacks, alone.
A Honduran nun told Diana Negroponte about a baby girl that had been found abandoned. The baby had been covered with ants, with worms. The nun asked Diana if she knew someone who might want to adopt the child. She did: her and her husband, Ambassador Negroponte. They adopted the child, and were hardly finished. Another child was found, and they adopted that one as well. Over the years, five Honduran children would be adopted by the Negropontes -- Marina, now 22, Alejandra, now 20, John, now 16, George, now 14, and Sophia, now 11.
The revelations about Battalion 316 had yet to surface and many Hondurans were wildly taken with the Negropontes. "She did more for diplomatic relations by adopting those children than anyone in the world," says her brother-in-law, Nick. "John and Diana turned the American residence into a nursery. The special forces troops there became sort of like nannies."
When President Bush nominated Negroponte to become ambassador to the United Nations in 2001, the revelations about what had happened in Honduras were more fully known and opponents tried to derail the nomination. But Negroponte wasn't sailing alone. "As he became a favorite target of the left," says Birns, "he became a revered figure to the right."
The confirmation hearings got underway in September 2001. They came to an abrupt halt as planes barreled into the World Trade Center. When they resumed, it was against the backdrop of a rattled nation, struck by terror, with a pronounced urgency to get a U.N. ambassador in place.
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) allowed as to how he did not wish to relive the Honduran situation, but had no choice inasmuch as the committee, in earlier hearings with Negroponte, had been "flying blind." But now, with new information, that was no longer the case. "Based upon the committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government-perpetuated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports. . . .
"Finally, I would say a word of caution to other career foreign service officers, particularly junior officers, that they not consider this nominee's lack of candor before the committee as a model to be emulated," Dodd said.
Still, Negroponte won confirmation -- as well as Dodd's vote.
Negroponte has received good reviews on his U.N. posting, from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, among others. When President Bush announced Negroponte's nomination to Iraq, the hot lights came on once again.
Harkin's recitations from the Senate floor took on a familiar ring: the death squads, evasion, the lack of candor. Harkin summoned again the name of the Rev. James Carney, an American priest presumed killed by the death squads. Carney's body has never been found. "I am not suggesting Ambassador Negroponte was responsible for Father Carney's disappearance," Harkin said. "What I am saying, however, is Ambassador Negroponte was in very close contact, perhaps almost on a daily basis, with Gen. Gustavo Alvarez, the commander in chief of the Honduran military, and the architect of Battalion 316. For Ambassador Negroponte in 1982 to say it is simply untrue that death squads have made appearances in Honduras -- this is going to be our ambassador to Iraq at this time?"
"I should have raised my voice louder than I did," Harkin says about opposing Negroponte's nominations. "I've been amazed at how this individual -- from what he did in Central America, where under his watch hundreds of people disappeared -- has moved up. He falsified reports and ignored what was happening."
Harkin adds: "I feel a certain sense that I let people down because I haven't kept on this guy."
The Negroponte loyalists have heard it all before.
"I know the circumstances," says Diana Negroponte, who teaches history at Fordham University in New York. "The dilemma is: Should you be explicit in your condemnation of human rights? John had a different tactic. His tactic was to go quietly to the president and the chief of the armed forces and say 'Stop it.' He did not go public. I know that he protested because he'd come back and tell me about the meetings."
Nick Negroponte has watched his brother's rise in the foreign service with awe. He attributes a good part of his brother's success to "professional silence."
To Diana Negroponte, her husband's critics emerge at intervals as if from behind a velvet curtain. "It's an old battle," Diana Negroponte says. "I want to say to these people: 'Haven't you moved on?' To keep fighting all of that is old hat."
"I visited him in Honduras," recalls Richard Holbrooke. "He denies the charges. I do not know what happened there."
"I have no idea what happened in Honduras," says Anthony Lake, who served as national security adviser under President Clinton. "I have no reason to believe John hasn't been honorable." He lauds the Negroponte appointment. "I can't think of a better appointment to Baghdad. I have opposed this [administration's] policy, but every American has a stake in its success and I can't think of a better person than John to be representing the U.S. in Baghdad."
"It's going to be difficult," Negroponte says of Iraq. "There are many challenges to face. I'd like to say two things: I am very committed to the proposition that a free and strong Iraq can be realized. I see no reason why Iraq shouldn't be able to realize its aspirations of peace with itself and its neighbors."
'I Wanted to Call Him a Liar'
Zenaida Velasquez Rodriguez is on the phone from San Jose. She is a political refugee, having fled Honduras in 1988. Her brother went missing and is presumed dead. In less than three minutes of conversation, her voice has already begun to crack.
Manfredo Velasquez was a schoolteacher and a protester. He was in the marketplace of Tegucigalpa, the capital, when eyewitnesses saw men hustle him into an automobile. The date was Sept. 12, 1981. "As of today, we don't even have a vague idea of where his remains could be," his sister says. "It's like having an open wound that is bleeding all the time."
Manfredo had a wife and three kids.
As more and more people began to go missing, Zenaida Velasquez helped found the Committee of Families of the Disappeared. "It was a state of terror," she says of Honduras during the contra wars. "We were very afraid. We were paying for ads in the newspapers to talk about the disappearances."
Manfredo's son, Hector, 7 years old at the time, taped one of the ads directed to Gen. Alvarez and the army. The boy's words: "General, my father is Manfredo. He was detained by members of your Army. Please release him. I want to have Christmas with my father."
Zenaida pleaded with the U.S. Embassy for a meeting to inquire about her brother, to ask for an investigation. Ambassador Negroponte agreed to see her.
"Finally, he received us, some family members and families of others who had disappeared as well. He denied completely any knowledge of what was going on. But we knew every day he was meeting with the chief of the army, Alvarez. Honduras is a very small country."
She catches herself, then goes on: "You know what? He doesn't even
THE QUESTION IS:
Technically, when, how did John Negroponte become a United States Citizen?
INFO AND LINKS:
John Negroponte
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
John Dimitri Negroponte (born July 21, 1939) (pronounced neg-row-pontee) is the current United States ambassador to Iraq and the nominee as the first U.S. Director of National Intelligence. A career diplomat who served in the United States Foreign Service from 1960 to 1997, Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from September of 2001 until June 2004. As ambassador to Iraq, Negroponte oversees the largest American diplomatic facility in the world.
He is a controversial figure because of his involvement in covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua (see Iran-Contra Affair) and his covering up of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras in the 1980s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte
==============================
Bush to name John Negroponte as national intelligence chief
... Bush on Thursday named John Negroponte as the first national intelligence director to coordinate the work of all 15 intelligence agencies of the United States. ...
John Negroponte Named for US Intelligence Chief Sofia News Agency
Bush taps Negroponte as new spy overseer Turkish Press
Bush Nominates Negroponte As Intel Chief Guardian
ABC News - Ireland Online -
all 310 related »
http://nicaragua.newstrove.com/
Bush named Lt. Gen. Mike Hayden, who has served as director of the National Security Agency since March 1999, as Negroponte's deputy. He is the longest serving director of the secretive codebreaking agency and has pushed for changes, such as asking longtime agency veterans to retire and increasing reliance on technology contractors. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike," Bush said, "we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise." Negroponte, 65, was at the United Nations when he was tapped to take on the delicate job of transforming the U.S.
http://nicaragua.newstrove.com/
Bush names first national intelligence director
Published in Dailybreeze.com - Indexed on Feb 17, 2005 Similar pages
Relevance:
Responding, Negroponte called the new job "the most challenging assignment I have undertaken in more than 40 years of government service." Said Bush: "He understands the power centers in Washington." Bush named Lt. Gen. Mike Hayden, who has served as director of the National Security Agency since March 1999, as Negroponte's deputy. He is the longest serving director of the secretive codebreaking agency and has pushed for changes, such as asking longtime agency veterans to retire and increasing reliance on technology contractors.
http://nicaragua.newstrove.com/
==============================================
... Congressional investigations into Iran-Contra, and with the expose by Gary Webb
of the ... he just an "old friend?" Or is he like John Negroponte, "uniquely suited ...
... possessed; they are communist." Negroponte will now ... Managing Director, Riverside
Holdings: John Lancaster Managing ... Like Moore, Gary Webb, a former reporter for ...
=======================
On December 10, 2004 former investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News Gary Webb - who had been on the CIA's "black list" ever since he broke the story of the agency's VILE involvement in flooding the poor black neighborhoods of L.A. with cocaine in the early 1980s - was found dead in his Sacramento area home, an apparent suicide according to the coroner. There was a gunshot wound through his head. No! - make that TWO (possibly three) gunshot wounds, apparently from his father's old .38 caliber revolver. [Please see our articles, "The Drug Epidemic, Viruses, Ebola, and AIDS" and "Material Developed by Gary Webb on the Importation of Drugs into the Neighborhoods of the Poor" for a "run-down" or synopsis on Webb's article, "Dark Alliance;" please also see our story as to why the elites (and the CIA) targeted the poor black neighborhoods of the country in this fashion, "The Utility of Police Brutality in the Elite's War Against the Poor;" finally, we urge you to read our article on the CIA's obscene involvement in the drug trade entitled, "A Short History of the CIA's Involvement in the Drug Trade."]
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/01/309640.shtml
==================
... Witheld information during Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned in 1992. A protege
of Reagan's UN envoy, Jeane Kirkpatrick. John Negroponte Bush choice for UN ...
Results 1 - 10 of about 15,900 for John Negroponte + Iran Contra
CLICK FOR LINKS:
=====================================
Stop Human Rights Obstructer John Negroponte
... to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress during the Iran Contra hearings and ...
we can keep out former US Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte who played ...
CLICK FOR LINKS:
====================================
On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s." This report was partly declassified on October 22, 1998, in response to persistent demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. You can read parts of the document on the National Security Archives website. Only senators and their staff who have security clearance can read the report in its entirety. It is absolutely critical that every senator read and consider the entire report before approving Negroponte’s nomination. Negroponte is highly respected in diplomatic circles as "a man who speaks five languages but knows when to keep silent." Due to his urbane temperament and broad support in the professional diplomatic field, it will be very tempting for senators to whisk his nomination through.
http://www.maryknoll.org/GLOBAL/ALERTS/no_negroponte.htm
=====================================
"Look," Negroponte says,
Fri Feb 18, 2005 00:16
"Look," Negroponte says, "any missing person is a human tragedy. For that person and their family. I've even met some of the people. My heart goes out to them. Yet, El Salvador would have more people missing in one week than occurred during the entire conflict in Honduras. They talk about 117 people missing in Honduras? [Human rights activists say the number is closer to 200.] During the height of problems in El Salvador, that happened in one week. Fifty thousand were killed in that country. It's a question of keeping things in perspective."
With the exception of four years working for McGraw-Hill, Negroponte's entire working life has been in diplomacy. "I spent 3 1/2 years of a 40-year career in Honduras. It's only a small part of my career."
As a matter of fact, when Negroponte was in Honduras, he was a fairly beloved figure. It had much to do with a Honduran baby crying by the road. And with the dazzling woman from an evening in Vietnam who had become his wife.
'One-Woman Peace Corps'
Diana's father was Sir Charles Villiers, a merchant banker who would rise to become chairman of British Steel. Villiers had a powerful social conscience. In his youth, he went to work for Tubby Clayton, a cleric who tended to the poor. The activism spilled over to his daughter. "He represented social justice for the unemployed man and their families," says Diana Negroponte. "That, along with my mother's work as a social worker in the East End of London, were elements I grew up with."
She and Negroponte met again in 1976, years after their original meeting. "I met his mother at a wedding in London," Diana says. "I asked her, 'How is your son doing?' She groans. John was 36 and unmarried. Mother got to work and mother pulled it off. Six months later we were married."
Wherever they went, he'd do the political thing, and she'd hustle off to the barrios, the slums, the tough places. "She was a one-woman Peace Corps," says Stanley Karnow. "I was down in Honduras once. She was out in the refugee camps and she came back to the capital all covered with chiggers. She's absolutely formidable."
Parents went missing during the contra war. Babies appeared on the sides of roads, in shacks, alone.
A Honduran nun told Diana Negroponte about a baby girl that had been found abandoned. The baby had been covered with ants, with worms. The nun asked Diana if she knew someone who might want to adopt the child. She did: her and her husband, Ambassador Negroponte. They adopted the child, and were hardly finished. Another child was found, and they adopted that one as well. Over the years, five Honduran children would be adopted by the Negropontes -- Marina, now 22, Alejandra, now 20, John, now 16, George, now 14, and Sophia, now 11.
The revelations about Battalion 316 had yet to surface and many Hondurans were wildly taken with the Negropontes. "She did more for diplomatic relations by adopting those children than anyone in the world," says her brother-in-law, Nick. "John and Diana turned the American residence into a nursery. The special forces troops there became sort of like nannies."
When President Bush nominated Negroponte to become ambassador to the United Nations in 2001, the revelations about what had happened in Honduras were more fully known and opponents tried to derail the nomination. But Negroponte wasn't sailing alone. "As he became a favorite target of the left," says Birns, "he became a revered figure to the right."
The confirmation hearings got underway in September 2001. They came to an abrupt halt as planes barreled into the World Trade Center. When they resumed, it was against the backdrop of a rattled nation, struck by terror, with a pronounced urgency to get a U.N. ambassador in place.
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) allowed as to how he did not wish to relive the Honduran situation, but had no choice inasmuch as the committee, in earlier hearings with Negroponte, had been "flying blind." But now, with new information, that was no longer the case. "Based upon the committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government-perpetuated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports. . . .
"Finally, I would say a word of caution to other career foreign service officers, particularly junior officers, that they not consider this nominee's lack of candor before the committee as a model to be emulated," Dodd said.
Still, Negroponte won confirmation -- as well as Dodd's vote.
Negroponte has received good reviews on his U.N. posting, from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, among others. When President Bush announced Negroponte's nomination to Iraq, the hot lights came on once again.
Harkin's recitations from the Senate floor took on a familiar ring: the death squads, evasion, the lack of candor. Harkin summoned again the name of the Rev. James Carney, an American priest presumed killed by the death squads. Carney's body has never been found. "I am not suggesting Ambassador Negroponte was responsible for Father Carney's disappearance," Harkin said. "What I am saying, however, is Ambassador Negroponte was in very close contact, perhaps almost on a daily basis, with Gen. Gustavo Alvarez, the commander in chief of the Honduran military, and the architect of Battalion 316. For Ambassador Negroponte in 1982 to say it is simply untrue that death squads have made appearances in Honduras -- this is going to be our ambassador to Iraq at this time?"
"I should have raised my voice louder than I did," Harkin says about opposing Negroponte's nominations. "I've been amazed at how this individual -- from what he did in Central America, where under his watch hundreds of people disappeared -- has moved up. He falsified reports and ignored what was happening."
Harkin adds: "I feel a certain sense that I let people down because I haven't kept on this guy."
The Negroponte loyalists have heard it all before.
"I know the circumstances," says Diana Negroponte, who teaches history at Fordham University in New York. "The dilemma is: Should you be explicit in your condemnation of human rights? John had a different tactic. His tactic was to go quietly to the president and the chief of the armed forces and say 'Stop it.' He did not go public. I know that he protested because he'd come back and tell me about the meetings."
Nick Negroponte has watched his brother's rise in the foreign service with awe. He attributes a good part of his brother's success to "professional silence."
To Diana Negroponte, her husband's critics emerge at intervals as if from behind a velvet curtain. "It's an old battle," Diana Negroponte says. "I want to say to these people: 'Haven't you moved on?' To keep fighting all of that is old hat."
"I visited him in Honduras," recalls Richard Holbrooke. "He denies the charges. I do not know what happened there."
"I have no idea what happened in Honduras," says Anthony Lake, who served as national security adviser under President Clinton. "I have no reason to believe John hasn't been honorable." He lauds the Negroponte appointment. "I can't think of a better appointment to Baghdad. I have opposed this [administration's] policy, but every American has a stake in its success and I can't think of a better person than John to be representing the U.S. in Baghdad."
"It's going to be difficult," Negroponte says of Iraq. "There are many challenges to face. I'd like to say two things: I am very committed to the proposition that a free and strong Iraq can be realized. I see no reason why Iraq shouldn't be able to realize its aspirations of peace with itself and its neighbors."
'I Wanted to Call Him a Liar'
Zenaida Velasquez Rodriguez is on the phone from San Jose. She is a political refugee, having fled Honduras in 1988. Her brother went missing and is presumed dead. In less than three minutes of conversation, her voice has already begun to crack.
Manfredo Velasquez was a schoolteacher and a protester. He was in the marketplace of Tegucigalpa, the capital, when eyewitnesses saw men hustle him into an automobile. The date was Sept. 12, 1981. "As of today, we don't even have a vague idea of where his remains could be," his sister says. "It's like having an open wound that is bleeding all the time."
Manfredo had a wife and three kids.
As more and more people began to go missing, Zenaida Velasquez helped found the Committee of Families of the Disappeared. "It was a state of terror," she says of Honduras during the contra wars. "We were very afraid. We were paying for ads in the newspapers to talk about the disappearances."
Manfredo's son, Hector, 7 years old at the time, taped one of the ads directed to Gen. Alvarez and the army. The boy's words: "General, my father is Manfredo. He was detained by members of your Army. Please release him. I want to have Christmas with my father."
Zenaida pleaded with the U.S. Embassy for a meeting to inquire about her brother, to ask for an investigation. Ambassador Negroponte agreed to see her.
"Finally, he received us, some family members and families of others who had disappeared as well. He denied completely any knowledge of what was going on. But we knew every day he was meeting with the chief of the army, Alvarez. Honduras is a very small country."
She catches herself, then goes on: "You know what? He doesn't even
