Uncle Sam's ugly faces.

Ronald Reagan's Honduras — The Atrocities of "Battalion 316"

Under U.S. President Reagan, Honduras was transformed into the major regional headquarters for U.S. counterinsurgency operations throughout Central America and Latin America.

The U.S. military and CIA trained, financed, and covered up the crimes of "Battalion 316"—a Honduran military death squad which carried out a campaign of torture, murder, and state-sponsored terror against the Honduran people during the 1980s. At least 184 Hondurans—including labor leaders, students, religious activists, and others the Honduran military considered political opponents—were stalked, kidnapped, brutally tortured, disappeared, and murdered by Battalion 316. Countless others were captured and tortured before ultimately being let go.

Battalion 316 was created under CIA supervision by General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, Commander-in-Chief of the Honduran Armed Forces, according to declassified CIA documents. Certain units of the battalion were in charge of abductions; other units were charged with torturing prisoners; and others with executions and disposal of bodies.

Battalion 316's torture methods included suffocation, beatings, sleep deprivation, electrocution of the genitals, rape, and the threat of rape toward family members. One man's testicles were torn off with a rope before he was murdered.

"The intelligence unit, known as Battalion 316, used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations," the Baltimore Sun reported in a series based on formerly classified documents and interviews with torture survivors, a former member of Battalion 316, and U.S. and Honduran participants. "Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."