The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  It was theater.

  Jackson recalls that he never encountered anyone as stubborn as McBride in his life. Meanwhile, McBride’s own recollection of the journey avoids any mention of its real purpose—to discover if there were large-scale human rights violations by the Goran tribesmen—and instead focuses almost entirely on the challenges of driving through the difficult terrain.

  At this point the embassy station chief was frequently laughing. Eventually some nearby villagers, who had not fled to Sudan, came with ropes to haul the car to the other side.

  Gersony said they should “drive to Dodge,” that is, to Guereda, since the desert was no place to be at night. Ignored by McBride, they kept driving and around ten p.m. unrolled their sleeping bags on the desert, waking up in the morning, not bitten by scorpions or snakes, but with flies all over their faces. All Gersony wanted to do at this point was escape into a nice hotel room, bathe, clean his gear, have a soft drink, and sleep properly.

  At the station chief’s recommendation, the group drove to Adré, a market satellite of El Geneina, on the border with Sudan, where there was an official crossing point. Again, at McBride’s insistence, they met with the subprefect there, who had invited almost two dozen people to the meeting, including the local field representatives of the international relief charities. Everyone denied that there were any problems with the Goran. Gersony praised the subprefect for his hospitality and information, and then asked him for a tour of the town and the displaced persons camp. Gersony assumed that once they started walking around, the group would gradually break up and he or Tony could talk individually to the local aid workers who had come to the meeting. Jackson, of course, was quick to pull aside the representative of Médecins Sans Frontières, who immediately and profusely apologized for staying silent about the Goran at the meeting. But he asked for understanding since he had to live and work in the town, and needed the subprefect’s cooperation. He then talked about the Goran in the same way as did the old man, the other subprefect, and everyone Gersony had interviewed on the other side of the border.

  On the plane back from Adré to N’Djamena, the day before the Muslim Friday holy day, the station chief assured Gersony that he wouldn’t change as much as a comma in the cable that Gersony would soon write about the trip, as long as Gersony downplayed the number of people affected by the ethnic cleansing, since the station chief believed that the number was closer to 30,000 rather than the figure of 120,000 that Gersony had used in his cable from Khartoum. Gersony agreed, even though he still thought the number was closer to 120,000.

  Back in N’Djamena, Gersony immediately went back to his hotel, showered, put on a suit, and went to see the chargé, Ralph Graner, to ask for permission to work over the weekend in the embassy writing his cable. Graner said no. So Gersony appeared at the embassy two days later, wrote his cable, which he had composed in his head and with notes over the weekend, and sent it to Washington, with copies going to the Africa bureau and the embassy in Khartoum. Not a comma was changed.

  CHAPTER 7

  Honduras

  1985–1986

  “That Camp’s Got to Be Moved.”

  When Bob Gersony returned to Washington from Sudan in the fall of 1985, Gene Dewey immediately had yet another assignment for him.

  “A real hot one,” Dewey said. “Honduras.”

  Gersony lifted his eyes in dismay. On the one hand, he was being temporarily dragged back into Central America, which he didn’t like; on the other hand, Central America was the center of the action for the Reagan administration—and to a significant extent for the world—during the 1980s, with the ongoing conflicts between the Sandinistas and the contras in Nicaragua and between the right-wing death squads and leftist revolutionaries in El Salvador: in short, here was the Cold War in all its inhumane, zero-sum extremes. For all anybody knew at the time, the Cold War was destined to go on forever. Eastern Europe might have been undergoing subtle changes throughout the 1980s, pointing to the end of the conflict. But that was not the case with Central America. And the Reagan administration saw the leftist provocations in Central America as the Soviet-inspired counter in America’s backyard to what the Americans were doing in the Soviet backyard of Afghanistan.

  Mountainous, relatively tranquil Honduras was trapped in the middle of it all: located between densely populated El Salvador, which even before the 1980s had one of the highest murder rates in the world, and Nicaragua with all of its ideological madness. Honduras became the rear base for the CIA-supported contras. Also by then, the drug wars were beginning to come to Honduras, along with their attendant gangs, whose leaders the Honduran military literally fed to the sharks.

  Gersony was world-weary about the whole subject. He spoke fluent Spanish and had spent the better part of a decade living in Central America. So it was the one place where he was an expert. And he knew that when it came to Central America, “everything was just so polarized, there was almost nothing and no one between Mussolini and Lenin.” You either were a committed and bloody Cold Warrior against the communists, or a morally preening leftist committed to the struggle against American imperialism.

  After all, the region had been an ideological battleground even before the arrival of the Soviets, the Cubans, and Ronald Reagan. Gersony hated the entire debate, since for him, Central America was so much more than that. Indeed, concealed within this narrow land bridge connecting the North and South American continents was a truly baroque political geography.

  To start with, there were the highlands in the middle and the north toward the Atlantic (or Caribbean) coast, where most of the labor was: the small peasant farmers who grew corn, beans, onions, garlic, and squash. The bottom lands near the Pacific coast were defined by a sugar and cotton agro-industry, as well as by shrimp and tilapia farms. Tension—real historic animosity—lay between the inhabitants of these two geographical belts. The peasants in the northern highlands, who barely scraped by, sold their labor to the wealthy agro-businesses on the southern coast on a seasonal basis. The country capitals—Guatemala City, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Managua—were generally part of the Pacific-based power structure, which these northern highland peasants deeply resented.

  There were, too, cultural differences. The Indians of Mayan extraction were among the poorest in the highlands. Meanwhile, the Ladinos of mixed European and Indian blood, who ambitiously identified with the modern Spanish culture, were the teachers and shopkeepers in the cities closer to the Pacific; and they also composed the army officer corps and senior enlisted ranks, which were sometimes complicit in murder, drug smuggling, and corruption. Above them was an authentic German-Spanish oligarchical elite from the colonial era. On the periphery were the Miskito Indians and descendants of black migrants or slaves of the thinly populated, riverine Atlantic coast. These blacks and Indians were culturally influenced by a two-century-long British protectorate, and had become further marginalized by the ideological upheavals inland and toward the Pacific.

  Also on the Atlantic coast were the maquilas or maquiladoras, processing plants for export goods that paid salaries and benefits. These factories were hated by the Latin American Left as pillars of ruthless capitalism, even as every peasant wanted a job in one. Central America’s core geography was thus a place of complex economic and social divisions, which provided a somewhat obscure foundation for the far more visible ideological divisions that the world and Western journalists were so obsessed with.

  To make matters more complicated still, there was the split between the traditional Catholics and the fast-multiplying Protestant evangelicals, who would ultimately compose as much as a third of the population, making Central America one of the most dynamic areas for the evangelical movement in the whole world. The fact was that traditional Catholicism, with its fatalistic sensibility and emphasis on having lots of children, was a prescription for poverty in Central America, and the population, buffeted by the battle of pol
itical ideologies as well as by creeping social and technological change, was becoming more ambitious by the day.

  Protected from much of this turbulence, as Gersony also knew, were Costa Rica and Panama: the former being largely middle class without the big plantations of the other countries; while the latter had been part of Colombia for much of its history and whose highly entrepreneurial population serviced the isthmus of Panama—a geographical feature conquered by mule packs and rail lines long before the Panama Canal. Indeed, it was the Panama Canal that truly anchored America’s interest in all of Central America, especially during the Cold War. The Spanish oligarchies of the region protected American interests. And these oligarchs were themselves protected by the right-wing militaries. These elites basically told the Americans: Don’t worry, we’ll take care of things here for you.

  Gersony processed all of this in his mind in an instant as Dewey repeated himself: “I need you right away in Honduras. You’ve got to move Colomoncagua.”

  Colomoncagua?

  Colomoncagua, named for a nearby town of the same name, was a refugee camp within walking distance of Honduras’s southern border with the north-central part of El Salvador, making it practically part of El Salvador’s civil war. The province of Morazán, which made up this northern part of El Salvador, was the most radicalized province in that entire country. It was home to the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (the “People’s Revolutionary Army”), the most extreme faction of the leftist FMLN (the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front). There was also another refugee camp in Honduras near the Salvadoran border, Mesa Grande. But Mesa Grande, far to the west of Colomoncagua, was not quite as close to the international frontier and faced a less politically extreme region of El Salvador. Thus Colomoncagua was the real problem: an important rear base for the left-wing Salvadoran guerrillas that was a refugee camp in disguise.

  “Do not come back to Washington until you’ve moved Colomoncagua further away from the border,” Dewey ordered Gersony in his trademark, eyes-lowered military style.

  Gersony couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He, a lone contractor, was supposed to convince the Honduran government together with UNHCR to move a refugee camp of 8,000–10,000 people? But the big shots in the bureaucracy were hot and bothered, it turned out. Edwin Corr, Deane Hinton’s replacement as ambassador in El Salvador, was now effectively beating the war drums against Colomoncagua. Corr claimed that if it were not for Colomoncagua providing a rear base for leftist Salvadoran guerrillas, the Salvadoran army might be doing much better in the field than it was.1 According to this narrative, Colomoncagua was a transit point for arms coming to the Salvadoran guerrillas by way of Cuba and Nicaragua. The camp maintained a factory for explosives, and provided medical help and rest-and-relaxation facilities for the guerrillas, who were also getting food and fertilizer siphoned off from the refugees. Colomoncagua, in its own little way, was the heart of the Cold War.

  Consider that the year before, a military helicopter was shot at by Salvadoran guerrillas from the vicinity of Colomoncagua. Aboard were two Democratic senators, Lawton Chiles of Florida and Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, as well as Diana Negroponte, wife of John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras at the time. So Dewey and Corr were not alone in their opinions. Consider Elliott Abrams, who had moved jobs from being assistant secretary of state for human rights to the more critical, line-bureau post of assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Abrams bluntly told Gersony that he had just informed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Poul Hartling, that if Colomoncagua was not moved, UNHCR risked losing its funding from the United States, which would cripple the organization. This was the Cold Warrior Reagan administration—and this was high policy. Gersony had been selected as the point man for these bureaucratic heavy hitters and their threats to withhold money from the United Nations.

  The fact was, Gene Dewey simply trusted him, not only because of his record thus far, but because in Dewey’s eyes and also in Gersony’s own, Gersony fit in well with George Shultz’s State Department: Gersony, like Shultz, was a moderate conservative with moral convictions, lacking the ideological blinders that would later destroy conservatism. Indeed, Shultz’s genius was to nuance and further humanize Reagan’s own foreign policy inclinations. Shultz helped Reagan win the Cold War by supporting anti-communist guerrilla groups around the world, otherwise known as the Reagan Doctrine. But he also paid close attention to refugee and other human rights matters. The fact that Reagan is now considered a great president, lionized by old-fashioned Republicans and accepted by Democrats, is significantly due to Shultz’s influence.

  As for Gersony, he describes his own belief system thus: “I came from a family steeped in business and the grain trade. My father was a real hustler. It was the commodity trade that formed me. In Guatemala I ran what I would describe as a business, not a charitable institution. I was helping to conserve a culture with its many languages, not leading a revolution. Though I came back from Vietnam knowing that the war could not be won, I was alienated from the antiwar movement because of its disrespect for the soldiers. And then there was Ed Koch’s influence on me. Koch was a Scoop Jackson Democrat, that is, a real hardline anti-communist who was pro-Israel. And though Koch was a liberal in everything else, he was sick and tired of being bullied by the Left to waste money on programs that just didn’t work. He hated cant.”

  But now Gersony really felt the pressure from those he considered his allies. “I was really nervous about Colomoncagua.”

  He well understood that the Salvadoran guerrillas were a ruthless bunch of people. But it wasn’t as if they didn’t have cause to hate their government and its army. As Gersony would later tell me, “The massacres at El Mozote [so famously detailed by The New Yorker] were a world-class atrocity. It was a real radicalizing experience for the population and the guerrillas in northern El Salvador.”

  In the back of his mind he knew that the ground-level reality would prove to be far more complicated than the State Department’s polarized view, and far more intractable. So he already dreaded the translating he would have to do for his superiors once he returned from Honduras. Gersony may have been a conservative, but he was one who never let that get in the way of what he found in the field.

  * * *

  —

  Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Cool, hilly, picturesque, high mountains in the background. So quiet and safe, with the feeling of a backwater by the standards of the congested, war-torn core of Central America. A panorama of clay tile roofs. The Honduras Maya Hotel sits at the top of a hill with a bar and swimming pool, where CIA contractors mingled with the Honduran upper class giving their kids swimming lessons. The contra war was being run out of not only the U.S. Embassy and the border areas, but also from this hotel. It was the kind of place—paradise with a hint of sex and danger—where you might have filmed an early James Bond movie. Gersony had no appreciation for the setting, though. He was a nervous wreck, his thoughts screwed tight in preparation for his embassy briefings. Following his meeting with the ambassador, John Ferch, who had replaced John Negroponte, Gersony met with the deputy chief of mission, Shepard Lowman.

  “Shep” Lowman was a legend, Gersony knew. It had been Shep, along with Lionel Rosenblatt and Hank Cushing, who had stretched Henry Kissinger’s State Department instructions beyond the breaking point in order to rescue hundreds of Vietnamese employees and friends of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, as South Vietnam was being overrun by the communists a decade earlier, forever earning the gratitude of the Vietnamese-American community and human rights advocates in general. But Shep offered Gersony no sympathy. Like Ambassador Ferch, the DCM said, “That camp’s got to be moved.”

  Joe McLean, the embassy’s refugee coordinator, a straightaway likable guy who reminded Gersony of Tony Jackson, was more tentative in his beliefs. Caught in the vortex of demands by Shep, Ferch, Ed Corr, Elliott Abrams, and Gene Dewey, the
refugee coordinator was actually glad that Gersony was there to relieve him of some of the burden. As for the local UNHCR office, the people there felt caught in the middle, too: because Colomoncagua was located in Honduras, UNHCR-Honduras felt that it had to defend the status quo and leave the camp in place.

  As usual, Gersony had learned relatively little in the Honduran capital, which in terms of insights had been an extension of Washington. So he left for Colomoncagua itself to spend the better part of a month.

  The town of Colomoncagua was nestled in the mountains, composed of about fifty adobe houses with clay-tiled roofs.

  The local UNHCR representative took Gersony from the town to the camp, and warned him at first that “people are not allowed in and out. Even I am not allowed to speak with anyone inside. I can’t even approach people. That is the decision of the camp committee. They run the camp. They hire anybody who needs hiring.”

  In that case, Gersony asked to meet with the camp committee. The setting was a small building of processed lumber and corrugated iron, like the other dwellings, all lined up in military style. Everything in the camp was neat and pristine, though dusty, and with no greenery. There were six members of the committee, headed by a woman. It was a radicalized group. Some were actual survivors of El Mozote and similar massacres. “They had every good reason not to like me, though they were also seized with their own authority,” Gersony says.

  “They were not friendly,” he goes on. In fact, “they were seething with hostility. They refused to answer my questions about conditions in the camp. They had been warned about me, and so there was only one issue for them: you’re not moving this camp.” The whole meeting was punctuated by long, embarrassed silences. “I asked if I could walk around the camp and talk with the refugees. I was told no. I walked around anyway with the UNHCR guy. People averted their eyes and walked away from me. UNHCR told me that the same rules applied to them and the other NGOs. They always had to be accompanied by a member of the camp committee. Food was only distributed by the committee. The camp was like a gulag, under strict enforcement. The monopoly of power was clear.”