The Honduran government's human rights commissioner has lambasted the U.S. government for not keeping its promise to turn over classified documents relating to political disappearances during the 1980s.
      In a lengthy report, entitled "In Search of Hidden Truths," Leo Valladares recounts how he has tried for four years to uncover the secrets behind the political violence that wracked Honduras during the decade past. "We've got to know the truth in order to achieve reconciliation," Valladares said when he released the report January 23 in Tegucigalpa.
     The report describes how Honduran military officials steered Valladares to empty file cabinets, lamely suggesting they had destroyed documents because of space limitations. It also describes Valladares' futile attempts to obtain information from the Argentinian government, which sent military trainers in the 1980s to teach interrogation techniques to Honduran soldiers and Nicaraguan Contras based in Honduras.
     Yet the bulk of the report deals with what Valladares terms the "exceedingly frustrating" process to obtain secret U.S. documents. "The United States played a unique, and at times dominant, role in Honduras; and therefore has a unique knowledge of events that transpired," the report states. 
     The disappearance of Father James Carney in 1983 is one of six cases about which Valladares specifically requested information. Although more than 3,000 pages of documents on the Carney case have been released to Valladares and Carney's family by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Department of Defense, the Valladares reports complains that the information gleaned from the documents "has been scant, fragmented and vague."
     "The numerous excisions hinder the ability of human rights investigators to discern the truth about what really happened to Fr. Carney and other disappeared persons," the report states.
     In his report, Valladares suggests that a September 1997 report by CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz on CIA activities in Honduras in the 1980s is "critical to closing the wounds of abuse" in Honduras. The CIA report has yet to be turned over, despite a promise by President Bill Clinton in November that it would be handed over "before the end of the year." Valladares called failure to turn over the Hitz report "a diplomatic affront."
     Human rights activists in Honduras have announced that they may be able to exhume Carney's body this year. According to Berta Oliva, director of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras, three new informants have come forward in recent weeks with information about the precise location where Carney is believed buried. Oliva said her group is continuing to investigate, but hopes to conduct an exhumation later this year.