How Negroponte Changes the Ground Rules: A Salvador Option for Iraq?
The designation of John Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence recalls the Central American wars of the 1980s, where he played a critical, if deeply controversial, role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85. Despite feigning amnesia while questioned, Negroponte implicitly participated in questionable events at the time, including bribes handed down from the embassy to high ranking military and government officials and ties between Honduran death squads and the witnessed massacres of dissidents in nearby El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
For the neocons overseeing Washington’s occupation of Iraq, El Salvador was a significant success story which they hope to emulate. The recent exhumation of the phrase “Salvador Option” recalls for current and former ultra conservatives like then assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, Ollie North, Admiral Poindexter and Negroponte the glorious era when the feckless Jimmy Carter (who, of course, was overly concerned with human rights) was defeated by the Reagan-Bush ticket. In the aftermath of victory, the new administration committed itself to install freedom, democracy and free market economies throughout Central America. Given the congratulatory, if unmerited nature of the above beliefs, it’s hardly surprising that some Pentagon and White House officials are now talking openly about resurrecting the “Salvador Option” in Iraq-that is, to create “hit squads” composed of Kurdish and Shi’a paramilitaries to seek out and kill armed dissidents as well as non-violent sympathizers, just as the U.S. indirectly mobilized and financed death squads throughout Central America two decades ago.
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