United States Foreign Relations Honduras

U.S. and Honduran troops began their latest round of joint military maneuvers Saturday in this country's tense southern border region not far from the scene of recent fighting between Nicaraguan troops and anti-Sandinista rebels. About 220 soldiers from the 27th Engineers Brigade of the U.S. Army's 20th Combat Airborne Force based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., parachuted from C-141 transport airplanes for an exercise that will upgrade the U.S.

In a 37-year foreign-service career, John D. Negroponte has glided through sticky episodes with such aplomb that U.S. diplomats call him "the Teflon Ambassador." But there is one thing he can't seem to shake: his tenure in Honduras in the 1980s. Now that Negroponte is the Bush administration's nominee for the prominent post of ambassador to the United Nations, questions from that era are again being raised.

More than 1,000 students marched on the U.S. Embassy on Thursday and burned 20 automobiles to protest the expulsion to the United States of a reputed drug kingpin before being turned back by gunfire and tear gas. Police said at least one demonstrator was killed but local radio stations put the number of casualties at four dead and two wounded. The privately owned Honduran Radio Nacional and Radio America said at least four people had died from gunshots fired from inside the embassy annex.

If anyone could shed light on the controversial history of U.N. ambassador nominee John D. Negroponte, it is Honduran Gen. Luis Alonso Discua Elvir. Discua helped form a U.S.-trained intelligence unit, Battalion 316, blamed for the torture and killing of more than 100 Hondurans during Negroponte's tenure as ambassador to the country in the 1980s. And while Negroponte may not have known Discua, the general claims he knows plenty about the extent of the U.S.

Honduras lifted a five-day state of emergency aimed at quelling anti-American violence in which five Hondurans died, but two schools where the protests broke out remained closed and guarded by troops. The emergency was imposed after 2,000 protesters--enraged over the arrest of suspected drug baron Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros and his subsequent expulsion to the United States--attacked the U.S. Consulate and U.S. Information Agency office on April 7.

A remote Honduran island in the Caribbean has reportedly become the main depot for a CIA-run military operation supplying rebels fighting to oust the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Rebel sources and military observers, who asked that they not be further identified, said Americans are overseeing rebel supply operations on one of the Swan Islands, once a support base for the abortive CIA-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

The United States is prepared to provide up to $3 million to an international commission to begin planning the voluntary relocation of Nicaraguan Contras to their homeland if democratic conditions exist, it was announced Friday. State Department deputy spokesman Richard Boucher said the funds would be given to a commission composed of United Nations and Organization of American States officials.

Tegucigalpa's Roman Catholic archbishop deplored recent anti-American rioting and called on Hondurans to work together for peace. Hector Enrique Santos, head of the Honduran Bishops' Conference, urged Hondurans "to cooperate to heal the wounds" opened by recent unrest. "No one can be a Catholic if he is overtaken by hatred, and no one can be a true citizen if he violates the laws of the nation," Santos said at a Mass.

President Reagan devoted most of his regular weekly radio address Saturday to the issue of Nicaragua, castigating Congress for halting aid to the Contras and declaring that the incursion by Sandinista troops into Honduras proved that the Managua regime is a regional threat.

The Sandinista attack along the Honduran border was a calculated risk aimed at crippling the Contras militarily and forcing them to negotiate an end to their 6-year-old insurgency.

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.

A U.S.-built military base in Honduras contains cramped metal cells apparently used to torture and kill political prisoners, a top Honduran official said. The cells, along with dozens of possible grave sites, were discovered at El Aguacate air base in eastern Honduras, which the United States built in 1983 for Nicaraguan Contra rebels, who fought a U.S. proxy war against the leftist Sandinista government in their neighboring country. Forensic experts from the U.S.

Honduran Supreme Court Judge Marco Tulio Alvarado denied a U.S. request to extradite former Haitian police chief Lt. Col. Michel-Joseph Francois, who is accused of helping Colombian cartels ferry at least 33 tons of drugs into the United States. Alvarado said U.S. authorities had failed to provide credible evidence supporting the petition for extradition. Francois is wanted by a U.S. federal court in Miami on drug-related charges. Francois could be released from prison soon if the U.S.

CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz has reopened an investigation into the failure of agency clandestine officers to report allegations of torture by a CIA-supported Honduran military-intelligence unit in the mid-1980s, according to agency officials and congressional sources.

As Cuban refugees took to the seas again in large numbers Tuesday, the Clinton Administration won agreement from Panama, Honduras and another nation to accept up to 17,000 more Cuban migrants if detention camps at the Guantanamo Bay naval base fill up. The Coast Guard said its cutters had picked up 1,234 migrants by 6 p.m. EDT, following the recovery of 112 on Monday.

The soldiers stopped the crowded bus on its busy morning route the other day and ordered the young male passengers to step off, new "recruits" for the Honduran army. Then something went wrong. A youth tried to escape through a rear door and the soldiers opened fire, killing a 22-year-old woman and wounding two Hondurans and a Canadian citizen.

The presidents of five Central American countries, ignoring direct appeals from President Bush to go slow, agreed in principle Sunday to start dismantling the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebel army within weeks. "The presidents have reached a consensus that this plan should go forward right away," President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua said during a break in the talks in this Caribbean banana port.

Some Orange County teen-agers experienced a different way of life and learned a lesson in values when they spent a week this summer working at Rancho el Paraiso in San Esteban Olancho, Honduras. "I saw a big difference between kids in the states and kids in Honduras," said Camie Velin, who will be a junior at Orange High School this fall. "The kids in Honduras have nothing, yet they think they have everything.

Even after the kidnaping of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain set off howls of protest from Mexico, officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration refused to rule out further abductions to bring the suspected killers of agent Enrique Camarena to justice in the United States. "The mission is simple," one official declared. "Track down and eliminate all persons involved in the kidnap, torture and murder."