In the 1980s, Honduras was ground zero for US operations in Central America—it was the primary point from which the US would wage its proxy wars and launch its interventionist operations across the region in the name of “fighting communism.” The 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, which we explored in Episode 2 of Under the Shadow, was staged from Honduras. It was the main base of operations where US forces trained, funded, and backed Contras in their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. And today, Honduras is home to the Soto Cano Air Base, previously known as Palmerola, the largest US military base in Central America. One of the largest in Latin America.
Within Honduran society itself, that meant squashing any revolutionary activity that could destabilize this key US ally and its strategic importance for US imperial operations. The impact on the country was tremendous: massacres, disappearances, many at the hands of an elite US-trained death squad known as Battalion 316. “There was a lot of repression. A huge military presence,” says Karla Lara, a Honduran journalist and well-known singer.
In this episode, host Michael Fox takes us to present-day Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, then we descend back in time to one of darkest periods in Honduran history. Fox visits Honduran family members of the disappeared and walks right up to the walls of the Soto Cano Air Base.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened — a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.
Guests: Bertha Oliva, COFADEH
Adrienne Pine
Karla Lara
Grahame Russell, Rights Action
Edited by Heather Gies.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Voice Actors: Andalusia K. Soloff
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Follow and support journalist Michael Fox or Under the Shadow at https://www.patreon.com/mfox
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi, I’m your host, Michael Fox.
Before we get started, I wanted to say that many portions of today’s episode deal with harsh themes from 1980s Honduras, including killings and forced disappearances. If you’re sensitive to these things, or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen.
OK. Here’s the show.
I’m standing in the middle of Merced Plaza. It’s right in front of the Merced Church in downtown Tegucigalpa. Pigeons fly by, buses swing by, people yelling. It’s right in front of the National Congress, just down the way, a big orange building that’s lifted up high. There are just a ton of people here. People hawking things in the streets. It’s this massive mixture of humanity.
And it’s called the Merced Plaza, but it’s also known by another title, and that is the Plaza of the Disappeared. Because it is here that the family members of the disappeared have been coming and protesting and marching since the early 1980s.
“We have been marching there since 1982,” says Bertha Oliva, the founder of COFADEH, the Committee of the Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras. “We’ve been demanding justice there every first Friday of the month for forty years,” she says.
In images from the ’80s, a group of mostly women carry signs and banners demanding the return of their loved ones. The organization and their protests are reminiscent of Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the iconic group of mothers of the disappeared that was founded in 1977 in response to the dictatorship’s kidnapping of their children and grandchildren.
In fact, the family members of victims in Honduras were inspired by Argentina’s madres. Bertha Oliva calls them the pioneers.
In the 1980s, Honduras wasn’t immersed in war like its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. But the government was authoritarian. Repressive. Violent — Even though the country was supposedly transitioning to democracy after years of dictatorship.
And the United States was playing a tremendous role in the violence, both within Honduras and across its borders. In fact, Honduras was the staging ground for the US military involvement in the region.
Professor Adrienne Pine has spent years researching and working in Honduras.
Professor Adrienne Pine: During the 1980s, in diplomatic circles in the US, they started calling Honduras the USS Honduras because so much money was being poured into it, and because it served as the military base for the United States for all of its operations that it was carrying out throughout Central America
Michael Fox: More on that in a minute.
[Under the Shadow theme music]
This is Under the Shadow — A new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire.
I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today.
In the last episode, I went in search of the archives of Radio Venceremos. That was the grassroots guerrilla radio that broadcast throughout El Salvador’s conflict in the 1980s. They denounced violent state repression and inspired a nation.
This episode, we travel due east, across the border into 1980s Honduras. I’ll look at the state repression, disappearances, and the overwhelming presence of the United States.
This is Under the Shadow. Season 1: Central America. Episode 6: “USS Honduras”.
[Music]
Think of Central America. Maybe Guatemala comes to mind. El Salvador. Nicaragua, of course. But Honduras is often left behind. Forgotten.
I first traveled to Honduras in 2004. If you heard the last episode, you might remember that I mentioned I broke my arm in a tractor-trailer accident. That was here, on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, the capital city.
I was hitchhiking east. Our brakes went out on a steep downhill. The rig flipped over onto my side. The driver and I walked away. I was taken to a local public hospital where a nurse picked glass out of my fingers for what seemed like hours.
The name Tegucigalpa… My mom loves the sound of it, even though she’s never been here. It’s said to come from the Indigenous Nahuatl language. Researchers say it could mean “painted rocks” or “homes of sharp stones.”
That last translation might be the most fitting description today. Tegucigalpa is the third largest city in Central America. A concrete jungle. A twisting maze of humanity. In the traffic-choked city center, fast food joints line the street — Every US chain you can think of. Overlooking the downtown, cinder block homes dot the hillsides. It reminds me of Caracas, or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
But unlike those places, Tegucigalpa isn’t on a lot of people’s radars.
News Report: Tonight, border towns in Honduras, overwhelmed by a surge in migrants, shelters at full capacity, women and young children sleeping on the ground…
Michael Fox: Sure, Honduras has been in international headlines more in recent years, mostly because of drug trafficking, gang violence, and migration. But historically, compared to its neighbors, it’s received much less attention from scholars or journalists.
On my latest trip to Tegucigalpa — Or Tegus, as it’s called — Honduran social leaders told me that, in the 1980s, they had a hard time denouncing the violence and human rights violations on the international stage because first they needed to explain the whole backstory in the country and what was happening.
And that was complicated because Honduras seemed to be a success story in a region that was falling apart. All of its neighbors were in the middle of bloody conflicts, with the United States propping up authoritarian regimes or, in the case of Nicaragua, backing the Contras, a violent paramilitary force.
Meanwhile, in 1981, Honduras held its first democratic elections in decades. There was even hope that the government might even try to tackle the tremendous poverty plaguing roughly 60% of the population. From the outside, things looked alright.
From the inside, however, it was another story.
In many ways, what was happening in Honduras was just a continuation of the same thing we’ve seen throughout this series. The same playbook: violence, disappearances, human rights violations, backed by the United States in the name of fighting the so-called communist threat.
But Honduras was also different. In large part because, for the United States, Honduras was perhaps the most important country in the region.
The US had a long history here, invading at least six times in the first decades of the 20th century. Honduras was a quintessential banana republic. United Fruit, the massive Boston-based banana corporation, reigned supreme. In fact, the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala that we talked about in Episode 2, well, that was staged from Honduras.
By the 1980s, this was the place the United States would use to wage its proxy wars abroad, to train its paramilitaries and military officers, to launch its operations and to roll out its strategy across the region. And within Honduras, that meant squashing any revolutionary activity that could destabilize this important ally. The impact on the country was tremendous.
“There was a lot of repression. A huge military presence,” says Karla Lara. She’s a Honduran journalist and a well-known singer. We heard from her briefly in the last episode.
She says there were incipient movements for armed struggle in the country — Nothing like the mass revolutionary rebellions in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. But still, the Honduran movements were hit hard, she says.
Massacres. Disappearances. Many at the hands of an elite US-trained death squad known as Battalion 316, which I will get to later in this episode.
Remember, this is the beginning of the 1980s. The Sandinistas are in power in Nicaragua after their revolution overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. Guatemala and El Salvador are in the throes of civil war and counterinsurgency, with military support streaming in from the United States under President Ronald Reagan.
As we have heard in almost every episode of this podcast, ruling elites, authoritarian governments, and Washington were prepared to pull out all the stops in the name of anticommunism — This time, in Honduras, the goal was to prevent a repeat of the revolutionary uprisings already happening across Central America before it even started.
Karla Lara: They cut the heads off the possibility of a larger movement and infiltrated spaces of organizing. Those who did organize did so from a place of silence.
Michael Fox: This is important to understand. See, like elsewhere in the region that we’ve seen so far, US-backed death squads here in Honduras operated with impunity, disappearing activists, teachers, students, and those pushing for change.
But in Honduras, you don’t have the sheer number of victims like in Guatemala or El Salvador. The official figure is that, throughout the 1980s, 184 people were disappeared in the country. But those disappearances still had their desired effect — Instilling fear. The death squad picked people up in broad daylight, only for them to never be seen again. It was psychological terror.
And, as we will see throughout this episode, the impact was huge. The disappearances shocked people into silence, as Karla Lara and so many others talk about.
That doesn’t mean people stopped pushing back. But they did so from the underground. Growing up, for instance, Karla’s family offered their home as a safe house for Salvadoran rebels.
Karla Lara: We said the guerrilla companions were our tíos, our uncles. I was tiny, and there were always a lot of uncles around the house. And it made sense, because in Honduras, many families have relatives from or in El Salvador.
Michael Fox: Karla says that silence she speaks about, it runs deep. Even today.
Karla Lara: I still know people from that time who would never say publicly that they participated in revolutionary processes. They would never say it. They are still afraid.
Michael Fox: But even in the face of so much terror, there were still some who were willing to break the silence.
There is perhaps no better place to understand the profound impact of the brutal level of state repression and violence in Honduras in the 1980s than the offices of COFADEH, the Committee of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras.
The COFADEH headquarters is in a big, old, two-story colonial building near Tegucigalpa’s central square. Just a short walk from Merced Plaza, where they’ve been holding their monthly demonstrations to demand justice for their disappeared loved ones for more than 40 years. The place where I began this episode.
Bertha Oliva is the director. She’s also a co-founder and the most prominent and outspoken figure of the group. She meets me on the main floor and we walk upstairs. She’s 68. She wears a blue-striped white shirt. She has short, gray-brown hair and a profound stare.
In front of her office, in an open corner of the building, is COFADEH’s own memorial to the disappeared. Bertha calls it her shrine or temple.
The walls are covered with black and white pictures of dozens of those who were disappeared in Honduras in the 1980s. Some are even from the United States. Along the far wall hang several banners depicting the faces and names of many of the disappeared. At the top are written the words in Spanish: “You took them alive. We want them back alive.” If you remember, this was the same chant from the family members of victims in El Salvador.
Since Bertha appears often in this episode, we’ve asked a voice actor to play her part in English.
Bertha Oliva: This place is sacred. When I’m feeling tired or weak, I come here and I find strength. I communicate with them.
Michael Fox: Among the photographs on the wall is a picture of her husband, Tomás Nativí Gálvez. In the image, he’s 30-something, staring into the camera. Dark eyes. Short hair. Mustache. A profound stare that matches Bertha’s own. Below his picture read the words: Kidnapped June 11, 1981. Leader of the Revolutionary People’s Union. He was 33 years old when they took him.
He and Bertha had only been married for four months. She was three months pregnant.
Bertha Oliva: I was there when they took him away from me. I am a witness to the brutality. I am a survivor of that moment.
He taught me not to cry, but to fight. The last thing he said to me was, “Be strong. Be strong, my love. And maybe they’ll let you live so you can fight for me.”
And that’s what I’m doing. I’m fulfilling his last wish. I’m not saying that I’m that strong, because I get tired sometimes. But I don’t give in. I persist.
Michael Fox: Bertha walks around the room, pointing to the faces, saying their names, describing who they were, the places they came from, and the situations in which they were kidnapped, taken, and disappeared.
Bertha Oliva: All of them were young. All of them.
Michael Fox: She says it was a brutal period.
Bertha Oliva: The region was on fire. It was a time where there was a whole dynamic of civil wars across the region. But in Honduras, it was different. They had designed silence as a method against the insurgent movements in the region.
And the silence that we families and the Honduran people faced was so brutal. That almost nothing was said about Honduras, what we were facing. The forced disappearance. The political assassinations. The political exiles. The contempt for life.
Michael Fox: She says that’s when the family members of victims decided they had to organize. She says they faced stigma, threats, persecution, and an atrocious government, but they would not remain quiet.
Bertha Oliva: We had to denounce it, and we had to demand the return of our family members alive. Our family members had been disappeared here due to the criminal policies of the government, the intervention from the United States, and the implementation of the Doctrine of National Security.
Michael Fox: That doctrine was the essence of the United States’s presence in Latin America at the time. The military strategy to contain the communist threat. At its core, the National Security Doctrine saw a country’s citizens as a potential threat. It was widely embraced by South America’s dictatorships, including Argentina. And in the words of one scholar, it provided Latin American military leaders and officials with a “justification to enforce their version of the national security state”.
That Honduras did, with the help of both the United States and Argentina.
That in a minute.
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Alright, thanks for listening. Back to the show.
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Michael Fox: I’m standing on the side of a major highway here in central Honduras, just outside of the town of Comayagua, about an hour north of Tegucigalpa. It’s just before dark. Cars are rushing by with the lights on. Just across the way is the new international airport, Palmerola International Airport, where almost all of the major flights now fly in on.
It’s really, really windy. The sun is setting here in the west. You can see the new air traffic controller tower. It almost looks like the drone from Star Wars, the Star Wars II. Like on the planet of Hoth. You know, the frozen one.
There is a huge, huge fence here, barbed wire all across the top of it, because right beside this international airport is Soto Cano…
The Soto Cano Air Base, previously known as Palmerola, is the largest US military base in Central America. One of the largest in Latin America.
And this was the major spot for US operations in the region. Remember that you had the ongoing scorched earth policies from authoritarian governments in Guatemala, and the civil war happening there, which the US was, of course, supporting those authoritarian governments. The same thing happening in El Salvador. And most of that support throughout the 1980s was happening from Honduras, and was happening from this base.
It was a base of operations for the US-trained, funded, and backed Contras in their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. And a staging ground for CIA missions in the region. Conservative estimates say anywhere between 2,000 to 5,000 US troops were stationed at Soto Cano and other US military bases in Honduras in the 1980s.
But, as researcher Alex Sanchez would point out years later, that “probably does not include former Green Beret forces or CIA operatives who served as advisers to the Contras.”
In the town of Comayagua, locals also felt the US military’s presence in other ways.
Karla Lara: There is this terrible venereal disease that happens in the 80s with the arrival of the Soto Cano military base. It’s called the flower of Vietnam. And it really became a pandemic in Comayagua.
The flower of Vietnam is the evidence of how unpunished the passage of US military personnel was. They transformed Comayagua into a huge brothel for their base. They spread their disease onto the local community.
Michael Fox: Comayagua was a former capital of Honduras. Colonial streets. Historic buildings. A proud population. Karla says that the arrival of the North Americans disrupted everything.
Karla Lara: It’s shameless. Today it’s just a large store with a bunch of signs in English. Shameless.
Michael Fox: Soto Cano was just one of numerous US military bases constructed throughout the country.
David Vine: Since the end of World War II and the early days of the Cold War, when the United States built or acquired most of its overseas bases, Amricans have considered it normal to have US military installations in other countries, on other peoples’ land.
Michael Fox: Anthropologist David Vine writes in his 2015 book, Base Nation, that the United States pretty much had carte blanche to build whatever it needed.
According to Vine’s count, in the 1980s there were “at least thirty-two Contra bases alone in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and even Florida. There were also at least 16 bases for Honduran forces, and at least nine US bases, in addition to Soto Cano and several secret CIA installations.”
But Soto Cano was the largest and the most important.
This was the base of the US presence throughout the 1980s, continues to be throughout Central America, and has been for the last 40 years. It’s right here. It’s hard to take in what that all means. It’s hard to take in the breadth of all that. How many policies have been developed? How many people have been trained? And how much support for the authoritarian regimes and the authoritarian policies have passed and happened through those doors, on that base itself?
[Music]
President Ronald Reagan [recording]: President Suazo and I have just concluded a very useful exchange of ideas…
Michael Fox: In December 1982, President Ronald Reagan met with his Honduran counterpart, Roberto Suazo Córdova. He was Honduras’s first democratically elected president after nearly two decades of mostly military rule. And he was the first to serve under Honduras’s new 1982 constitution, which had been drafted in part with the help of the United States. He and subsequent governments would remain staunch allies of the US.
President Ronald Reagan [recording]: We are in agreement that we must work together to oppose those who seek to disrupt the promise of economic progress and political stability that is the legacy of peace in the Americas.
Michael Fox: The US had encouraged democratic and social reforms as a way to stop Honduras from falling down the revolutionary rabbit hole of its neighbors. And it helped to sell Honduras’s image of democratic stability and prosperity as a good example for the region.
President Ronald Reagan [recording]: I’ve expressed my administration’s support and my nation’s admiration for President Suazo’s efforts to ensure for the Honduran people the benefits of a democratic government elected on the principles of the rule of law.
Michael Fox: Grahame Russell is the director of Rights Action. He has worked with local communities and human rights defenders throughout Central America since the mid-1980s. We’ve heard from him often in previous episodes.
Grahame Russell: Reagan came, took over from Carter, and said — I honestly compare it to what’s going on in the Middle East today — It was just like whatever the F you need. And the regimes in Honduras, Guatemala, in El Salvador, said give it. Give us all. Give us everything you’ve got in your arsenal. Give us all the money you need, give us all your intelligence. It’s open war. These are generalizations, but that’s what happened.
But I do think it was no holds barred, and the countries that got it the so-called “worst” would be probably, in a sense, Guatemala and El Salvador, in terms of straight full-on massacres. Nicaragua got hit all over the place, but they had an army. They fought.
And then Honduras was, what did they call it, USS Honduras’s enterprise. Honduras became the staging ground for the US, so the number of people outright killed in Honduras was a lot less, but the model of repression was identical to El Salvador and Guatemala. Each country plays itself out, always slightly differently, because there’s always many differences, but the model’s the same.
Michael Fox: This is really important. US intervention in Central America in the 1980s cannot be seen on a country by country basis. It has to be understood as a regional policy.
Grahame Russell: It was just one region, and it had four pieces for the US. That whole late ’70s early ’80s, all through the ’80s, it had four pieces: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. They have to be absolutely understood together.
Michael Fox: That wider context is exactly where Honduras comes in. For the United States, Honduras was the lynchpin. The piece that held the region together.
Grahame Russell: The US was operating out of Honduras to support the military regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and to support the Contras in Nicaragua. And they were arming them, training them, sending their advisors in, etc.
Michael Fox: There’s a place I want to take you that really drives this home. On a hill overlooking downtown Tegucigalpa is a tall, beige, 12-story building known as the Hotel Honduras Maya. Today, it’s still one of the nicest 4-star hotels in central Tegucigalpa. But back in the 1980s, it was the spot.
Author Stephen Kinzer wrote about it in an excellent 2001 piece for The New York Review. You’ll remember I spoke with Kinzer in Episode 2 about the 1954 CIA United Fruit coup in Guatemala. In the 1980s, he was a correspondent for The New York Times in Central America.
About the Hotel Maya, he writes:
“When a country finds itself at the center of world history, it begins attracting spies, mercenaries, war profiteers, journalists, prostitutes, and fortune-seekers. Often they gravitate to a particular hotel. In Honduras, which was shaken from its long slumber in the 1980s and turned into a violent staging ground for cross-border war, the Maya was that hotel.
“Counterrevolutionaries hatched bloody plots over breakfast beside the pool. You could buy a machine gun at the bar. Busloads of crew-cut Americans would arrive from the airport at times when I knew there were no commercial flights landing, spend the night, and then ship out before dawn; they said they didn’t know where they were going, and I believed them. Friends told me that death squad torturers stopped in for steak before setting off on their night’s work.
“But in those days, much of what anyone said in Honduras was a lie. That was certainly true at the Maya, and equally so at the American Embassy a couple of miles away.”
As Kinzer points out in the piece, “Between 1980 and 1984, United States military aid to Honduras increased from $4 million to $77 million. Economic aid surpassed $200 million by 1985, making Honduras, with its 4 million people, the eighth-largest recipient of American foreign aid.”
Throughout the 1980s, more than $1 billion US dollars in taxpayer money flowed into the Honduran military.
Reporter: It was an impressive show of force as US paratroopers filled the skies over central Honduras. The 800 infantrymen hit the ground running, fully aware of the circumstances that brought them here, and deadly serious about carrying out their mission.
Infantryman: I’m here to train. I’m here to do what they tell me to do.
Michael Fox: Honduras was key. It would prove to be ground zero not just for staging the cross-border war, but for launching the careers of several prominent right-wing US officials — Figures who cut their teeth on Honduras and who would go on to serve longstanding careers through the Bush administrations, and even to Trump.
Roger Noriega [recording]: Indeed, I can remember when I first began my professional career in the 1980s…
Michael Fox: Roger Noriega, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, and above all, John Negroponte. He served as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. Important years. Negroponte is who Kinzer was writing about in this 2001 New York Review article. President George W. Bush had nominated him to be US ambassador to the United Nations.
Kinzer writes, “[Negroponte] saw, or professed to see, a Honduras almost Scandinavian in its tranquility, a place where there were no murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine jails or cemeteries.”
Years later, Negroponte was asked if the US was too slow to criticize human rights abuses by allies.
John Negroponte [recording]: Well, I’m in the category of those who prefer to work these issues through quieter diplomacy. I’m not sure you gain much — In particular if it’s an ally — In terms of retaining their confidence if you publicly embarrass them somehow. You might even undermine them.
Michael Fox: Negroponte would go on to serve as George W. Bush’s ambassador to Iraq in 2004, US Director of National Intelligence, and deputy Secretary of State.
Professor Adrienne Pine.
Professor Adrienne Pine: So, Negroponte was key in training death squads in Honduras during that period. We’re talking about the early Reagan years. The years, again, in which the Contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua really gets started. Tremendous violence. Negroponte is pulled in to support the efforts of repressing any opposition that might happen in Honduras at that time.
He allies with Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who is a general in the Honduran military, who really puts together this incredibly infamous and dangerous death squad called Battalion 316.
Michael Fox: Here’s an old news reel from the 1980s:
News Report: General Alvarez was the administration’s man in Honduras. He supported Pentagon policy, he gave the CIA a free hand there, and the White House smiled on his anti-communist rhetoric. During his two years as Honduran chief of staff, the United States built a half a dozen airfields, two radar sites, and a training base.
Michael Fox: That’s Gustavo Alvarez in a military uniform speaking about their fight against communists and subversives. Alvarez was trained at the Argentine Military College and then at the US School of the Americas. At least 19 top members of battalion 316 were trained at the School of the Americas.
A mini-documentary produced in 2016 looked at the actions and the impact of the battalion.
“There were clandestine offices throughout the country,” says Dr. Ramon Custodio in the film. He’s a founder of the Honduran Committee in Defense of Human Rights. “We knew those who made up 316 in each region and where they functioned,” he said.
The documentary shows images of some of the detention and torture centers today. Boarded-up homes in the countryside. A former military barracks, which today serves at-risk youth.
Like we’ve heard in previous episodes of this podcast, the traumatic and violent episodes of the past aren’t buried, they’re hidden in plain sight — Forgotten, and then repurposed and reused. Or left to rot and fall apart. The memories living on in the nightmares of those survivors who passed through those doors and who have lived to tell their stories.
Like this man — A former student leader interviewed for the documentary.
Man: They took us to this place on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, a place they used for clandestine captures. We were tortured that night, and one of our companions was almost killed.
Michael Fox: And torture like this was trained and supported by the United States, though the truth would only surface years later.
In the mid-90s, The Baltimore Sun ran a series of remarkable stories detailing how the US Central Intelligence Agency was “instrumental in training and equipping Battalion 316.”
Investigative reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson wrote, “Members were flown to a secret location in the United States for training in surveillance and interrogation, and later were given CIA training at Honduran bases.”
A CIA officer based in the US Embassy frequently visited a secret jail where torture was conducted.
Their reporting was based on interviews, research, and Freedom of Information requests filed by The Sun. Among the declassified documents they received was a US torture training manual from 1983. It’s still available at George Washington University’s National Security Archives. It is shocking.
Three years later, under widespread pressure, the CIA declassified another report that proved the agency at the time knew about the hundreds of human rights abuses and killings by the Honduran military but did nothing, and did not report on them to Congress.
Bertha Oliva says the United States needs to be held accountable.
Bertha Oliva: We have pointed out the role of the United States, the responsibility of the US government for everything that took place in our country. How they snatched the lives of so many people. How they maintained an irregular army here in Honduras — The Contras.
We have shown that they ruined our country. We want all the information declassified without sections blocked out because if you have something blacked out, you’re still trying to hide something. You have to tell the truth.
You have to point out the responsibility of the United States. You have to point out what Negroponte did in the entire region, because he was ambassador in Honduras, who was essentially authorized to intervene in all of Central America. And his intervention was to implement a National Security Doctrine.
Michael Fox: By any means necessary.
I want to highlight something here that hasn’t received a lot of attention. The training and advisory support for military actors, and particularly the Contras in Honduras, was not just happening through Washington, but through military officials from Buenos Aires.
Remember, in the late ’70s into the early ’80s, Argentina was in the middle of its own devastating dictatorship. 30,000 people were killed or disappeared in the country’s reign of terror.
According to a 1993 landmark human rights report by Leo Valladares, a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Argentine officials were active in Honduras from 1980 on. He writes that the courses were “taught by teams of up to ten Argentine officers and lasted from three to six months.”
According to The Baltimore Sun, it was paid for with secret funds from the United States.
Valladares writes, “The Argentine experience in the Dirty War had a decisive role in the training of ‘the Contras’. They were carried out in training camps across Honduras until early 1984, when the Argentines were replaced by instructors from the United States, most of them Vietnam veterans, and Latin advisors, mainly Cuban-Americans.”
Researchers believe that Argentina’s interest in training the Contras and Central America’s militaries was to support the fight against the spread of communism, and also to locate leftist Argentines who had fled the country’s repressive regime.
You know, we talk about Plan Condor — The US-backed pact that linked South America’s brutal dictators in communication and repression. But we forget that it also spread far beyond the borders of South America.
There’s one more thing I want to show you.
About a four-and-a-half-hour drive northeast of Tegucigalpa, there is a small airport known as El Aguacate. There’s not much there. A small runway. A couple of buildings. But back in the day, this was a former US base and Contras training camp.
In a powerful 2005 Norwegian documentary film titled The Ambassador about former US ambassador John Negroponte, the film crew visits the site of the former camp with Dr. Juan Almendares, a physician, human rights activist, and former dean at the Honduran National Autonomous University.
Dr. Juan Almendares: This was also a prison and torture center. This was an important base. We believe it was visited often by General Alvarez Martinez, and we’re sure that it was visited at some point by Ambassador John Negroponte.
Michael Fox: Almendares drives down a dirt road, jungle stretching up on either side. The narrator explains that the base was inactive and the installations dismantled.
But there is a building that Almendares has visited in his work helping torture survivors overcome the horrors of the past.
Dr. Juan Almendares: It served as one of the models of torture that Honduras applied in the 1980s. We are sure that they used the CIA torture manual here, which they are now applying in Iraq.
Michael Fox: In the early 2000s, Bertha Oliva’s COFADEH, together with specialists from Guatemala’s Forensic Anthropology team and Honduran forensic doctors, unearthed the remains of 28 people. They were never able to identify any of the bodies.
But COFADEH has had victories.
Bertha tells me the story of labor leader Gustavo Adolfo Morales. He was disappeared in 1984, but he hid his ID card in the fold of his clothes before he was killed. She says they found his remains. They brought the casket to the Plaza of the Disappeared, where they held a ceremony. Then they drove him to his hometown in the interior of the country for a funeral and a wake.
Bertha Oliva: Wherever we went, the people came out to pay their respects. The schools. Everyone.
Michael Fox: She says the local officials asked if they could hold his wake in the community’s main cultural building.
Bertha Oliva: And that’s what we had: music, theater, art, all night long. I told his family, now he belongs to the people.
Michael Fox: Most of the disappeared have not been found. And that is why his discovery and identification was so important for so many people, especially his loved ones.
Bertha Oliva: He had been disappeared for 13 years. And once we found him, it changed the lives of the family. It changed the lives of his children.
Michael Fox: Bertha says their organizing in the 1980s also helped bring a case against the government before the Interamerican Human Rights Court. And they won. Honduras was the first country to be condemned by the court for its role in forced disappearances.
In December 2023, Bertha and COFADEH inaugurated a new museum north of Tegucigalpa. It’s called the Museo Contra el Olvido — The Museum Against Forgetting. It’s in a former clandestine detention center where people were held, tortured, executed, and disappeared.
That’s part of a video made for the inauguration. In the video, Bertha sits along a white wall with tiny marks on it.
Bertha Oliva: When we did the tests, we found that what you’re seeing here are blood stains. They have hidden the past from us. They have denied us the truth. And at this moment that we are narrating this story, it’s like we are opening the windows.
Michael Fox: The museum’s inauguration was a long time coming. This is another one of these memorials for the past — For historical memory, like we’ve seen previously in this podcast. Places that once stood for the horrors of the present transformed to shine light on the past, to denounce the abuses in honor of the victims.
Like Bertha’s temple at the COFADEH office. There, the faces of the disappeared stare out at those in the present, demanding a better world.
Bertha Oliva: Love and hope move me. For the changes that can be made in my country and in the region. And no one is more authorized to speak out than the victims and their families.
Michael Fox: The silence that was imposed with violence would continue to weigh heavy on the population. Honduras would remain a staunch ally of the United States and become a playground for US and other corporate interests. It took decades before change seemed to be on the horizon… Only for the country to once again be pushed back into violence.
Hondurans would be silent no more.
In the next episode, we’ll fast forward to 2009, to the coup that shattered Honduras’s fragile democracy and again sunk the country into violence and repression — And to the people fighting back.
That’s next on Under the Shadow.
Before I go, I wanted to let you know that you can find pictures of Bertha Oliva and the COFADEH office’s memorial for the disappeared on my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
Under the Shadow is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. This is Michael Fox.
See you next time.
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