False DEA story exposed
Inquiry discredits claims made after a 2012 Honduras raid that killed civilians.
WASHINGTON — When a botched drug raid led to the shooting deaths of four civilians, including a teenage boy, on a Honduran river in May 2012, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials insisted that the victims were cocaine traffickers who had shot first and that DEA agents were present only as advisors.
Those claims were not true, according to a scathing report released Wednesday after an investigation by the inspectors general of the Justice and State departments.
During the nighttime encounter on the Mosquito Coast, the lengthy report found, a DEA agent flying in a helicopter overhead ordered a Honduran door gunner to open fire with a machine gun on what turned out to be a river taxi carrying passengers, not drugs.
The shooting continued even after the passengers jumped in the water, investigators found.
The report says the DEA failed to properly investigate the incident, frustrated attempts to find the truth and stuck to an inaccurate version of events despite inquiries from members of Congress and the Justice Department.
“Not only was there no credible evidence that individuals in the passenger boat fired first, but the available evidence places into serious question whether there was any gunfire from the passenger boat at any time,” the 329-page report says.
The report also faults the DEA for slipshod investigations of two other fatal shootings by its agents in the impoverished Central American country in the summer of 2012.
The shootings sparked fury in Honduras, where protesters burned government buildings and demanded the expulsion of DEA agents. The controversy temporarily derailed U.S.-Honduran anti-drug efforts.
Human rights activists said Wednesday that they felt vindicated by the report’s findings and called for those responsible to be punished.
The report “exposes the deceit and the coverup perpetrated by the DEA,” said Annie Bird, a veteran environmental activist who works in Honduras and who had pressed for an official investigation.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (DVt.), who has also sought answers in the case, said the report “exposed egregious events and conduct, as well as the subsequent efforts to hide the truth about what happened.”
He scolded DEA and State Department officials for “uninformed arrogance” and for perpetuating “a selfserving narrative that was fundamentally flawed and demeaned the lives of the victims and the reputation of the United States.”
Most of the senior leadership at the DEA has been replaced since 2012, and an agency spokeswoman did not answer questions about whether anyone else had been disciplined.
The DEA did not dispute the report’s findings. It said in a statement that the team involved in the shooting “no longer operates overseas and now contributes to our training mission.”
In 2012, the State Department estimated that 79% of all cocaine smuggled to the United States moved through Honduras from Colombia and that most of the flights landed in the remote Mosquito Coast.
Operation Anvil was planned to intercept those flights, part of a larger antidrug effort. DEA agents were supposed to provide intelligence and advice to Honduran security officials. But the report found the agents gave orders during the operations even though few of the DEA agents spoke Spanish and the Hondurans spoke little English.