Book Review: In Search of Hidden Truths
by Sarah Paoletti
In Search of Hidden Truths, written by Honduran Human Rights Commissioner Dr. Leo Valladares Lanza and Susan Peacock, a fellow at the National Security Archives in Washington, D.C., is a critical examination of the U.S. government's procedures for declassifying documents pertaining to human rights violations. In trying to uncover the truths in Honduras' past, the authors inform the readers about the mask of secrecy that persists in U.S. government entities such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense and the Department of State. As illustrated in the report, the released documents provide solid evidence that the U.S. government was aware of human rights violations committed in Honduras by the Honduran military in the 1980s -- in particular, illegal detention, torture and disappearance. Yet many of the documents released to date are heavily edited, raising more questions than they answer.
Since his appointment by the Honduran Congress in November of 1992, Dr. Valladares has worked tirelessly as Honduras' first Commissioner on Human Rights to uncover the truths about his country's past. While Honduras did not endure a civil war, unlike the neighboring countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, it did endure more than a decade of gross human rights violations. Furthermore, unlike countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, in which truth commissions were established to investigate past human rights violations, Honduras has only the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. The Commissioner works together with the Public Ministry and the Attorney General to serve as a truth commission -- providing peace and reconciliation through investigation and recognition of past rights violations.
In 1994, Dr. Valladares published The Facts Speak for Themselves: A Preliminary Report on the Disappeared in Honduras 1980-1993. In this report, Dr. Valladares provided the chronology of events in Honduras and other countries which impacted the internal affairs of Honduras. The report identified 184 people disappeared between 1980 and 1993, giving detailed accounts of 14 cases of disappearance. Dr. Valladares called for further investigation into the decade of disappearances, the role of the Honduran military, and the role of the United States and Argentine governments in the commission of human rights violations. When he began investigating The Facts Speak for Themselves, Dr. Valladares sought the cooperation of the governments of Honduras, Argentina, and the United States. In spite of pledges from each government to cooperate, Dr. Valladares' requests for information have resulted in little information beyond that which he had already gathered from the newspapers. After the location of an archive in the military intelligence offices in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, investigators arrived to discover empty file cabinets. They were told that military files are burned every five years for reasons of space. Argentina, whose agents were closely tied with the Honduran military, and who trained Nicaraguan contras in Honduras in the early 1980s, has turned over only a slim file of useful documentation. The Human Rights Commissioner, therefore, has focused his energies over the past four years on seeking the declassification of documents from the U.S. government. In Search of Hidden Truths documents the investigatory efforts undertaken by Dr. Valladares and others since the publication of The Facts Speak for Themselves.
In Search for Hidden Truths instructs readers on the process of obtaining records from the U.S. government through Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") requests, and government-to-government requests. It details declassification efforts made by the Commissioner, The Baltimore Sun, former Ambassador to Honduras Jack Binns, and the family of Father James Carney, an American Jesuit priest who disappeared in Honduras in the summer of 1984. Included in the report's extensive appendices are copies of communications between Dr. Valladares and President Clinton, as well as letters from members of Congress to President Clinton regarding the declassification of U.S. government documents. The authors comment that, while the Clinton Administration has repeatedly vowed to cooperate with these requests, "the response has been excruciatingly slow, and the amount of substantive human rights information gleaned from the documents released to date has been bitterly disappointing." Dr. Valladares h received thousands of pages of declassified documents, but many of them are heavily, if not totally edited, and most of the information that has not been blacked-out is information that was already available to the Human Rights Commissioner.
In addition to providing an overview of the declassification process and the efforts made on behalf of the disappeared in Honduras, In Search for Hidden Truths closely examines the information which the United States government has been willing to provide in the case of Father Carney. Father Carney had served for nearly twenty years in a Jesuit mission in Honduras. In 1974 he became a naturalized Honduran citizen. Viewed as a controversial figure by the Honduran military government, he was expelled from Honduras in 1979, and his Honduran citizenship was revoked. He became a parish priest in Nicaragua, and in July of 1983, Father Carney re-entered Honduras as the chaplain of a small guerrilla column of the Central America Revolutionary Workers Party. He disappeared in September 1983. In October of 1983, and again in August of 1984, Father Carney's siblings submitted FOIA requests seeking information about the disappearance of their brother. When Dr. Valladares was appointed Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras, he joined in their efforts by filing a government-to-government request, which included a solicitation for any information the U.S. government might have regarding Father Carney's case. In analyzing the documents declassified by the U.S. government since Father Carney's disappearance, the authors raise critical questions about gaps in information, as well as inconsistencies in the facts that the U.S. government has provided. They conclude that "[t]he paucity of documents and the abundance of black ink belies the U.S. government's clear reluctance to release human rights information on the case of Father Carney." The remaining question is: "Why is there so much resistance to providing this information to Honduran authorities and to the U.S. public?"
In Search of Hidden Truths concludes with reflections on the efforts the Human Rights Commissioner, the Public Ministry, the family of Father Carney, and others have made to uncover the dirty truths behind the disappearance of 184 people in Honduras during the 1980s, and the roles played by the Argentine military forces and the U.S. government in these disappearances. The authors conclude: "While there is no doubt that the CIA, the Pentagon, and other U.S. agencies have numerous classified records relating to Honduran intelligence operations and the human rights violations that were committed, the most important of these documents have not been provided." While In Search of Hidden Truths provides the reader with a glimpse of the arduous job the Human Rights Commissioner has undertaken and the frustrations encountered in the process, the authors express in the conclusion their fervent and optimistic hope that the Clinton Administration will honor its commitment to fully support and assit the Commissioner's investigative work, emphasizing the importance of full access to U.S. government documents to "the search for truth and justice".
Dr. Valladares has garnered the attention and support of many members of Congress, who have joined in his battle for the truth. In October of 1997, members of Congress introduced "The Human Rights Information Act," which seeks to assure prompt and complete declassification of documents pertaining to human rights abuses in both Honduras and Guatemala.
* In Search of Hidden Truths is available in English and Spanish from the National Security Archives, in Washington, D.C.
** For more information on "The Human Rights Information Act," please contact the offices of Senator Dodd (D-CT), Congressman Lantos (D-CA) or the Latin America Working Group (lawg@igc.apc.org).
The proper citation for an article in the Human Rights Brief Volume 5, Issue 2, beginning at page 51 would be: 5 No. 2 Hum. Rts. Brief 51 (1998).
