Orlando Sentinel

Report: DEA gave false story on 2012 Honduras shooting

- By Joseph Tanfani and Tracy Wilkinson

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 the victims were cocaine trafficker­s who had shot first and that DEA agents were present only as advisers.

Those claims were not true, according to a scathing report released Wednesday after a joint investigat­ion by the Inspectors General of the Justice and State Department­s.

During the nighttime encounter on the Mosquito Coast, the 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 said 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 329page 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 joint U.S.-Honduran antidrug efforts.

Human rights activists, who said Wednesday they felt vindicated by the report’s findings, called for those responsibl­e to be punished.

The report “exposes the deceit and the cover-up perpetrate­d by the DEA,” said Annie Bird, a veteran environmen­tal activist who works in Honduras and who had pressed for an official investigat­ion.

Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., said the report “exposed egregious events and conduct, as well as the subsequent efforts to hide the truth about what happened.”

Most of the senior leadership at 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, however. Over the last five years, it said in a statement, “the DEA has made significan­t and numerous changes.” It said the foreign advisory and support team involved in the shooting “no longer operates overseas and now contribute­s to our training mission.”

In 2012, the State Department estimated that 79 percent of all cocaine smuggled to the United States moved through Honduras from Colombia, and most of the flights landed in the remote Mosquito Coast.

Operation Anvil was planned to intercept those flights, part of a larger anti-drug effort organized by the Defense Department.

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.

The river shooting occurred during an operation intended to recover a small boat loaded with cocaine that drug trafficker­s had abandoned on the river.

When it drifted into an open canoe-like river taxi, two Honduran agents opened fire, killing four passengers, including a 14year-old boy, and injuring four. No drugs were found on the passenger boat.

Fearing the Honduran agents were under attack, a DEA agent flying overhead ordered the door gunner to open fire. There is no evidence he hit any of the victims.

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