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The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency covered up its role in a shocking 2012 massacre in a remote Indigenous region in Honduras that killed four innocent civilians, including two pregnant women and a teenager, and actively lied to Congress and the Justice Department about the incident, a scathing new bipartisan report revealed Wednesday.
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The 424-page report, prepared by the inspectors general of the Justice and State Departments, exposed as a lie the DEA's longstanding claim that it played a "supportive" role in the 2012 operation in Ahuas, located in Honduras' far-flung northeastern Mosquitia region. Serving a devastating blow to the agency's attempt to absolve itself of responsibility, the investigation found that the DEA was indeed in control of the operation when agents opened fire at a passenger boat carrying 15 people, massacring four of them.
“This report vindicates eyewitnesses’ account of the events and exposes the deceit and the cover-up perpetrated by the DEA,” Annie Bird, director of Rights and Ecology and coauthor of two reports on the events of the Ahuas massacre cited in the new government investigation, said in a statement. “The next step is to obtain some measure of justice for the victims and their families.”
A DEA-led helicopter opened fire on a passenger canoe on May 11, 2012, killing four people, including two pregnant women and a 14-year-old boy, and injuring four others. The deadly counternarcotics operation — paired with a botched Honduran investigation with limited U.S. cooperation — sparked international outcry.
The 90-day mission in 2012, dubbed Operation Anvil, led to three separate fatal shooting events, of which the Ahuas incident attracted the most attention. The Ahuas operation, carried out by three Honduran officers and one DEA agent, was ostensibly aimed at seizing cocaine in the area as par tof U.S.-backed counterinsurgency strategy in the country.
The investigators found that a DEA officer in the helicopter had directed a Honduran gunner to fire on the passenger boat. "From the beginning, DEA officials should have taken more seriously the allegations that the operation resulted in deaths of innocent civilians and should have ensured a thorough investigation of the incident," the investigators said in the report.
The new report also found that DEA and U.S. State Department officials "made inaccurate and incomplete" statements about the mission, laying bare that the official claim that people on the passenger boat had fired first was untrue. Federal investigators also found issues with the preparedness, training, ground support and coordination with Honduran authorities for the execution of the mission.
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Alexander Main, senior associate for international Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and coauthor with Bird on two definitive reports on the Ahuas massacre, argued that the damning new report proves that "DEA agents abroad can literally get away with murder."
"Not only did the DEA fail to hold agents accountable for their role in the killing of innocents, they appear to have knowingly deceived the public about what actually occurred during the Ahuas operation,” Main continued in a statement. "Alarmingly, despite these revelations, there is no indication that the agents or those that protected them within the DEA will be sanctioned in any way.”
Five years after the incident, families of victims have not seen justice for the massacre.
“There have been no convictions against U.S. or Honduran agents involved in the operation," explained Karen Spring of the Honduras Solidarity Network in a statement. "There have been no remedies for the victims’ physical and emotional injuries, or for the resulting social and economic hardships sustained by the victims and their families.”
Meanwhile, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat from Vermont, called the new report “nothing less than a wholesale indictment of the DEA and Honduran police," the New York Times reported. Leahy called for compensation to the families of the victims, saying the report unmasked “egregious events and conduct” and a subsequent cover-up that “demeaned the lives of the victims and the reputation of the United States.”
Under the operation, the DEA's Foreign Advisory and Support Team, or FAST, partnered with the Honduran National Police known as the Tactical Response Team, or TRT, to carry out a 90-day pilot project that was set in motion to disrupt drug trafficking from South America to Honduras. FAST operations were expanded to Latin America in 2008 to help fight transnational drug smugglers after received military-style training to combat alleged Taliban-linked opium traffickers in the Afghanistan war zone.
Aside from the Ahuas massacre, the report also covered two other DEA shooting incidents during Operation Anvil, finding that although the investigations into the cases were more thorough than the May 11 mission, flaws still caused concern.
In a June 23, 2012, incident, the DEA narrative claimed that a DEA officer killed a man at Brus Laguna, Honduras, as he reached toward a handgun in his hip holster while lying face down. At the time, the officers were on a hunt for drug suspects who had mostly fled. A Honduran police report claimed that multiple suspects had fired first and officers returned fire, without mentioning FAST's deadly use of force.
In a July 3 shooting, DEA officers responding to a plane crash in Catacamas, Honduras, fired multiple rounds at a pilot who ignored their commands and tried to re-enter a plane that had crashed landed.
The investigators found that although the follow-up reports for the June and July incidents were handled more thoroughly, the investigations were still plagued with omissions and lacked important details.
The federal investigators expressed concern that the DEA accepted inconsistent and inaccurate statements from the Honduran officers who participated in the mission.
The DEA has accepted the report’s observations and recommendations.
Mary B. Schaefer, the agency’s chief compliance officer, said the agency “has disbanded its FAST program.” It had its last deployment in 2015 and was subsequently renamed.
Schaefers said in a statement, “The loss of life and injuries which occurred between May and July of 2012 were tragic. DEA acknowledges that its pre-mission preparation was not as thorough as it should have been and that the subsequent investigation lacked the depth and scope necessary to fully assess what transpired that night.”
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