The truth America owes Honduras

In July the Honduran government filed charges against 10 active and retired military officers, among them seven colonels, accused of attempted murder and the illegal detention of six Honduran citizens. The soldiers were part of the notorious Battalion 316, a unit the CIA financed and trained in the early 1980s. Honduran investigators believe Battalion 316 was responsible for the disappearance of 140 people whose bodies have never been found.

If the trial opens as expected this fall, Honduras will become the first Latin American nation to try a group of powerful, active-duty military officers for human rights violations against their own people.

The armed forces, now led by the general who once commanded Battalion 316, responded by sending tanks into the street for a day as a show of muscle. Potential witnesses and government officials pushing the investigation have been threatened.

Both to give a signal to the military and to provide evidence for the trial, the United States should provide the Hondurans with any secret reports CIA and American Embassy officials sent back to Washington about Battalion 316's crimes. Although the first request to the United States for declassification was made nearly two years ago, Washington has so far provided only four heavily censored CIA documents.

Clinton administration officials say a special declassification effort has now been approved to speed the flow of information to Honduras. It will handle both State Department and CIA materials on Battalion 316, as well as other matters under investigation in Honduras. The work must commence as quickly as possible and give the Honduran government wide access to materials.

Credit for the trial goes to some courageous and determined Honduran government officials, among them President Carlos Roberto Reina, Special Prosecutor for Human Rights Sonia Dubon de Flores and Human Rights Ombudsman Leo Valladares. Since taking office in early 1994, Reina has ended the abusive forced recruitment of soldiers and has begun to remove various police agencies from military control. Valladares, who cheerfully admits that he was appointed ombudsman in 1992 because he was expected to make no waves, began to investigate Battalion 316 after one of its members came forward to confess his involvement in murders.

Battalion 316 grew out of the billion-dollar collaboration between the Reagan administration and the Honduran military in the early 1980s to support wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Its purpose was ostensibly to catch Hondurans running guns to the Salvadoran guerrillas. But the Valladares report, released in 1993, found that Battalion 316 became a death squad that tortured and killed peaceful leftists.

Valladares' findings are now widely confirmed. Some of Battalion 316's members have provided detailed accounts of participating in murder and torture. As part of a 14-month investigation, The Baltimore Sun won the declassification of some U.S. government documents showing that officials in Washington knew of the killings and disappearances but misled Congress and the public.

Considering the sordid history of Battalion 316 and other secret American operations in Honduras, releasing the documents as quickly as possible is the least the U.S. government can do.

-- The New York Times