A CONTRA'S STORY
Drucker, Linda
A CONTRA'S STORY / first met Miguel in 1983 while I was accompanying the contras on a military mission into Nicaragua. Months later, I ran into him again in the airport at San Salvador after he had...
...The card, stamped with the official Honduran seal and bearing the signature of Hernandez, says Miguel is on a "special mission" for the DIES...
...There is no better communist than a dead commmunist," Alvarez told the group...
...Are you going to let him go...
...By his own admission, he helped organize a secret Death Squad in Honduras, with the approval and collaboration of the U.S...
...And you'll be risking your own head...
...Besides moving the players around, the CIA administered lie-detector tests to all FDN commanders to ensure they were loyal to the cause...
...And if it was not important, you were killed...
...It was my imagination...
...Miguel also looks to the U.S...
...He always dressed in casual civilian clothes and carried a brown briefcase...
...Lau, however, had become a liability by mid-1983 because of his unsavory reputation for human-rights abuses...
...It was Raymond who notified the officer then serving as chief of the counterintelligence unit that he was being reassigned to a military command so that Lau could assume control of the Death Squad operation...
...Then Miguel gave the signal, and Javier shot him in the head...
...There a Honduran soldier handed over two young men, Eduardo Lanza and Felix Martinez...
...Lanza told Miguel he was a leader of a student federation at the medical school in Tegucigalpa...
...Definitely I'm not going to do anything to him...
...But our man did it badly, as if he was afraid, and the kid screamed," Miguel recalls...
...Lau went to Raymond, the CIA agent...
...It was as if the Hondurans had said, "I'm going to let you kill inside my house, but only if you kill the ones I want killed," Miguel says...
...We had the documents and everything, as if we were part of them...
...If this man says something that compromises the Hondurans, the FDN, or us, it's not going to be his head that rolls, it's going to be yours," Raymond told him...
...I'll go to work for you people...
...Not even the CIA can do work like that9 The contras continued south on the Concepcion de Maria highway toward a village named Las Pintadas...
...I cupped my hands and put them in the water to fill them up so I could drink, and I saw my hands full of blood...
...But it was not just Miguel's doing...
...When the prisoner was confronted with the allegations against him, he continued to insist he was innocent and demanded that his accuser be brought in front of him...
...And if it was not important, your were killed9 Many interrogations were conducted at a contra safe house in the fashionable suburb of Valle de Angeles, where the screams of victims could be drowned out by the revving of a motorcyle engine outside...
...Members of the squad shadowed suspects and made notes on them in cheap little red notebooks...
...Two CIA advisers were present at the meeting at Casamata, the Honduran police headquarters, when the Honduran military agreed to this arrangement...
...These suspects included not only gun-runners, but also political dissidents, trade unionists, student leaders, and human-rights activists...
...He's not going to live five minutes after you turn him loose...
...There were no shots, no fighting, nothing...
...Miguel acknowledges that he participated in assassinations...
...BY LINDA DRUCKER Miguel has come forward with his haunting experiences because he feels the Hondurans betrayed him and tried to make him a scapegoat...
...Those who weren't simply killed were interrogated first by the contras and then by the Hondurans at the DIES...
...To find out where the weapons from Nicaragua were being shipped, who the contacts were, and then to capture and interrogate the suspects...
...And if I have to give him my pistol so he can defend himself, I'll do it...
...The Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras reported that Lanza had disappeared August 1, 1982...
...When they reached the top of the hill, Miguel gave the signal to Javier...
...What I wanted was that he recuperate...
...Then lime was shoveled over him...
...Our orders were that Eduardo Lanza was to vanish, to never appear again," Miguel says...
...That shook me...
...It was fast," Miguel recalls...
...The meeting concluded with an agreement that the FDN's counterintelligence unit would work directly with the Honduran DIES, the directorate of special investigations...
...It was never the contras...
...Give me a pencil and a piece of paper so I can write a note to my mother...
...He and the contra Death Squad worked hand in glove with the Honduran military and the CIA...
...That hurt me...
...Miguel received an identification card from the Special Investigations Directorate that identified him as a second lieutenant in the Honduran army...
...I'm innocent...
...The gringos knew," Miguel says, mentioning a CIA officer known to the contras as Colonel Raymond, who served as their contact...
...He was all skinny...
...In early 1982, when Honduran strongman General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez came under pressure from the Reagan Administration to interdict Nicaraguan weapons shipments to neighboring El Salvador, Alvarez approached the FDN for assistance...
...His body was never discovered...
...As time goes by," says Miguel, "the longer you work in this business, you start to realize who is lying and who isn't lying...
...I'm not going to kill him," Miguel told Lau...
...I knew that I was going to do it, and that he was innocent...
...I'll never forget it...
...What's more, at least on one occasion, the Agency took a more direct role in contra brutality...
...I'd give him cigarettes...
...It was a beautiful day...
...Christian law says in its commandments, 'Thou shalt not kill.' But even American democracy has given powers to judges—who are men—to kill people with an electric chair...
...He drove a small gray car, never using a chauffeur or bodyguard...
...And I decided to free him...
...He had yellowish hair, green eyes, and lots of freckles, Miguel recalls...
...Lau would update Raymond on the activities of the counterintelligence squad since, according to Miguel, the Americans wanted comprehensive information about everything the unit had done and how much it had spent...
...The contras were told to meet a Honduran military jeep on a freeway near Tegucigalpa...
...When the troops knelt down beside a river to fill their canteens, the Sandinista machine-gunned them from behind...
...The primary mission of the FDN's counterintelligence unit was "to investigate and investigate and investigate," says Miguel...
...The contra Death Squad members would pick up any Central American they considered subversive...
...One time Raymond congratulated me," Miguel says...
...The three of them drove along the highway toward San Pedro Sula, stopping at a hill not far from the entrance to the Santa Rosita mental hospital...
...I don't want to go back to that...
...What we wanted was that he be identified, that it be known that it was him," Miguel recalled...
...My name is Eduardo Lanza," he said...
...I thought it wasn't water but blood...
...And they prided themselves on killing only communists, and not the innocent...
...Miguel responded...
...It was necessary to eliminate whoever they were," Miguel says...
...On his left wrist, he wore a black Casio watch...
...Yes...
...You're either on the side of God or on the side of the devil, you understand...
...As for Felix Martinez, he was to be found dead, and to have died in such a brutal way that no communist who saw him would want to be in his skin...
...Raymond called Miguel...
...The Hondurans referred to the two men only as "the skinny one" and "the bigger one...
...and who the fuck are you...
...Y vos quien puta sos...
...The Hondurans assigned themselves the task of controlling the major cities, while the contras were given the entire length of the Nicaraguan border to patrol...
...For Miguel and his associates, killing had become routine, part of their way of life...
...When someone was captured and interrogated, he didn't realize he was in the hands of the contras...
...If they thought it was important to keep you alive, they kept you alive," Miguel says...
...Don't kill me, don't kill me," Icabalzetawete pleaded...
...To carry out their tasks, the contras were given Honduran army uniforms and official Honduran military identification cards...
...They tried to rationalize it in various ways...
...It looks as if the buzzards ate him," Miguel says...
...Hernandez told Miguel there were "two packages to be picked up...
...the particular nationality of the suspect did not concern them...
...Felix got down on his knees and took my hand, my left hand, and said, 'Don't kill me,' " Miguel recalls...
...He's innocent...
...Don't kill me...
...The guy is innocent...
...You know, so there wouldn't be a bad smell...
...It was Felix Martinez's turn...
...Lanza was emaciated after forty days of detention and torture by Honduran authorities...
...So I took him back to my office where I kept him four or five days...
...As soon as an investigation was completed, a study was made," Miguel says...
...Linda Drucker is a staff writer for the Albuquerque Journal...
...he thought he was in the hands of the Honduran G2 [military intelligence]," Miguel says...
...The man would take baths...
...The Honduran government agreed to host the Death Squad and provide it with cover, since the group would kill Honduran dissidents at the government's request...
...Morally, that shook me...
...You blew it," Hernandez said...
...I decided against my own principles, against my own will—I was forced to decide—that he had to be eliminated," Miguel says...
...It was something ugly, horrible...
...Months later, I ran into him again in the airport at San Salvador after he had narrowly escaped from Honduran military authorities who had ordered his arrest...
...One of the contras was handed a knife and instructed to kill him...
...Miguel was a contra commander with the Nicaraguan Democratic Front (FDN...
...Miguel relented...
...The investigation implicated the contra Death Squad in eighteen disappearances but at no point was the role of the Honduran military in the killings officially acknowledged...
...It did not matter where they were from, Panamanian, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, from wherever...
...Raymond, the supervisor of all CIA agents working with the contras, was about forty-five years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing some 170 pounds...
...Lau was not pleased at this treatment, but Miguel defended it...
...There were some houses at the edge of the hill...
...it was always the G2...
...One evening in the summer of 1982, Miguel received a call from Alexander Hernandez, a Honduran army captain who was chief of the Direction de Investigaciones Especiales—known by the acronym DIES—a clandestine anti-communist intelligence network...
...I got my hands all bloody, and I went and washed my hands and face," Miguel recalls...
...But despite the rationalizations, the horror of killing eventually got to Miguel...
...system of justice as precedent for killing...
...They then sent the reports on to Hernandez at the DIES...
...My interviews with the commander are all tape-recorded in Spanish...
...He was later recaptured and brought to Miguel...
...So four or five bullets were fired into his head using a pistol with a silencer...
...Was this guy worth capturing to get more out of him, or was it worthwhile to simply grab him and kill him—not to make him disappear, just simply to kill him...
...I gave him food, treated his wounds...
...Miguel said...
...But he can't be killed...
...So," Raymond asked Miguel...
...The communists are atheists and as a result, they are against God...
...The FDN was accustomed to filing written reports on all investigations, captures, and killings it had committed, but Raymond specifically ordered Lau never to file written reports on the killings of people captured by the Hondurans and turned over to the contras...
...Central Intelligence Agency...
...Let him repeat it to my face," he said...
...Following FDN policy, when the Death Squad captured a group of Sandinista soldiers, the prisoners were given the option of surrendering and joining the contras instead...
...Then he was stabbed sixty-nine times but without touching his face...
...If they thought it was important to keep you alive, they kept you alive/ Miguel says...
...So if the United States does it legally, why can't we do it because we're in a war—a war that the United States has pushed us into...
...The disappearances of Lanza and Martinez created a controversy in Honduras at the time...
...Don't kill me," Lanza begged Miguel...
...Those who agreed were allowed to keep their rifles and were given ammunition...
...Raymond and the CIA were instrumental in removing him from his highly visible position on the FDN's staff and transferring him to be head of the still little-known Death Squad...
...After General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez was ousted in a coup in March 1984, newly installed commander-in-chief Walter Lopez initiated a seven-month investigation into the human-rights abuses that occurred during Alvarez's tenure...
...We agreed," Miguel says...
...Icabalzetawete was taken to an FDN safehouse in Tegucigalpa, where he was held captive in a bathroom for about ten days...
...The contras drove south from Tegucigalpa toward Choluteca, where they stopped to dig a grave on an isolated hillside...
...Finally, Hernandez, head of the DIES, telephoned the contras, Miguel recalls...
...Not even the CIA can do work like that...
...Raymond advised against releasing the captured man...
...The man was living like a king...
...In exchange, the contras could expect continued cooperation from the Honduran military and free run of Honduran territory in their guerrilla war against the Sandinistas...
...Javier, another member of the squad, was in the back seat...
...Miguel also received other false credentials from the Hondurans, including a permit to bear arms, which identified him as a technician, and a driver's license, which described him as a civil engineer...
...But from the beginning of Icabalzetawete's interrogation, something was amiss...
...One afternoon, Felix Icabalzetawete was walking along a street in the city of Danli when the contra Death Squad kidnapped him...
...Though the contras had their own autonomous unit, most of their actions were taken with the consent of the Honduran military...
...For me—for us—this is a holy war...
...Every Monday, Raymond received an oral report from the FDN intelligence chief, Colonel Ricardo "El Chino" Lau, a former member of Anastasio Somoza's National Guard...
...These were just two of the assassinations in which Miguel participated...
...This guy doesn't know anything...
...The jobs are very well done," he recalls Raymond saying...
...Without blindfolding him or tying him up, Miguel loaded Icabalzetawete into his personal car in the middle of the night...
...And that's a nation that is not at war...
...Icabalzetawete had been fingered by another prisoner shortly before that prisoner was murdered by one of the contras...
...One day, one of them was sent on a patrol with two FDN troops...
...We were on the edge of a river, and I went down to it, put my rifle aside, bent over and stared at myself in the water...
...They referred to the killings as "eliminations" or ajusticiamentos [the meting out of justice...
...He told him he wanted to see him...
...The jobs are very well done/ the CIA man told Miguel, praising him for his Death Squad actions...
...He was shot three times in the chest, on the left side," Miguel says...
...What follows is Miguel's story...
...Then he was transferred to the Special Investigations Directorate, which took him to a prison called "El Manchen" where the interrogations resumed...
...Incensed, Miguel took out his knife and tore into the man until he was dead...
...It was early...
...Hernandez told Miguel the orders came directly from the Honduran commander-in-chief, General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez...
...Honduran newspapers also carried accounts of the discovery of Martinez's mangled corpse...
...Though he spoke on the condition that he be identified only as "Miguel," he provided documentation—including a false identification card from the Honduran government and a contra manual on kidnapping techniques—that proves his identity and corroborates his account...
...Lanza was made to lie down in the grave...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
