EL AGUACATE, Honduras — Carlos. Fransisco. Rene Pinto Polaco. Prisoner Sauceda. Mario was here.
Carved roughly into the bricks of an abandoned jail cell a few yards from an airstrip that U.S. forces built in 1983, the names symbolize the mystery of El Aguacate.
The United States used this air base in eastern Honduras to supply and train Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, known as Contras, fighting their country's leftist Sandinista government in the 1980s.
But many questionable activities are also believed to have taken place here.
Are the names merely the scrawlings of bored soldiers thrown in the calaboose to sober up? Or were they the last desperate attempts for recognition made by Honduran guerrillas or by Sandinista supporters dragged back from Nicaragua to be tortured here? And are the bodies of Prisoner Sauceda and others like him buried in the unmarked graves just over the hill? Or do those graves hold the remains of Contras who died at the 250-bed base hospital from battle wounds?
Local prosecutor Gia Ridense has set out to find the answers to those questions by filing and winning a motion that will finally, nine years after the Contras left, open up the base to forensic anthropologists and other investigators looking for evidence of what went on at El Aguacate.
In the process, she has revived questions about the U.S. role in Central America, particularly support for the Contras, an intervention that both U.S. and Honduran officials first denied, then minimized and even now will not completely reveal.
Her investigation is proceeding slowly, prompting one Southern California family, which believes that a brother might be buried here, to press for guarantees of progress. During a trip to Honduras last month, relatives of Father James Francis Carney delivered to Honduran authorities a letter signed by several U.S. congressmen, urging exhumations of the graves.
Ex-Soldiers, Peasants Recount Brutalities
As the investigation takes shape, slowly, cautiously, soldiers once stationed here and peasants who lived in the shadow of the base are beginning to talk about what they saw and heard. Their tales of brutality raise issues of how the United States chooses its foreign allies and what behavior Washington will tolerate in order to accomplish its objectives abroad.
