Much of his account was confirmed by three American and two Honduran officials and may be the fullest given of how army and police units were authorized to organize death squads that seized, interrogated and killed suspected leftists.
He said that while Argentine and Chilean trainers taught the Honduran Army kidnapping and elimination techniques, the CIA explicitly forbade the use of physical torture or assassination.
"Caballero said his superior officers ordered him and other members of army intelligence units to conceal their participation in death squads from CIA advisers.
"They prepared me in interrogation to end the use of physical torture in Honduras - they taught psychological methods," Mr. Caballero said of his American training.
had access to secret army jails and to written reports summarizing the interrogation of suspected leftists, according to Mr. Caballero and two American officials.
In 1995, "The special prosecutor for human rights brought charges in July against eight retired and two active-duty members of the armed forces for their role in the kidnapping, torture, and attempted murder in 1982 of six student activists....
They survived their captivity in a clandestine prison because two of those abducted were the daughters of a government official....With the exception of one suspect, those under investigation were connected with Battalion 3-16, a secret Honduran military unit whose members were instructed by and worked with CIA officials...Although Human Rights Watch/Americas has pressed for several years for an accounting of U.S. involvement, the Clinton administration did not take steps to begin to examine the complicity of the United States in Honduran abuses until 1995.
Deutch stated that the investigation, which he characterized as an "independent review," would yield "new information" and "lessons about how not to do things while I'm director and in the future."
The IG did verify that a Honduran hostage rescue force had captured and executed one individual who had been freed under an amnesty; it was unclear from the report if he had rejoined an insurgency.
Another case concerned Father James Carney, a priest who had renounced his U.S. citizenship, and died under questionable circumstances while being pursued by the HRF.
During 1997 and 1998, at the request of the Honduran government, the U.S. declassified thousands of pages of official documents detailing alleged human rights violations that occurred in Honduras during the 1980s.
Despite inexplicable delays, I continue to hope that the release of these documents will occur in the near future.”[12] Doctor Valladares also emphasized that the human rights content of the information available to him had been scant and inadequate.
In early 1998, a Honduran court determined that Lieutenant Colonel Juan Blas Salazar Mesa, despite being implicated in the abduction, mistreatment, and killing of students in 1982, was eligible for amnesty under legislation passed in prior years.