Scathing report says DEA lied in probe of deaths in Honduras
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 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 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 summerof 2012.
The shootings sparked furyin Honduras, where protesters burned government buildings and demanded the expulsion of DEA agents. The controversy temporarily derailed U.S.-Honduran anti-drugefforts.
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 cover-up perpetrated by the DEA,” said Annie Bird, a veteran environmental activist who worksin Honduras and who hadpressed for an official investigation.
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, and said in response that it had shut down the Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team program, in which commando-style squads of American agents were sent to Honduras to disrupt drug smuggling. The DEA report came at the same time that another unflattering report was released by Amnesty International.
According to a government audit from 2016 that was released by Amnesty International on Wednesday, the U.S. Army failed to properly keep tracks of hundreds of humvees, tens of thousands of rifles and other pieces of military equipment worth more than $1 billion that was sent to Iraq.