John Negroponte Quotations

There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

Very hard, very hard to represent a country, or carry out a policy that does not have consensus support.

We negotiated with the Honduran government the establishment of a regional military training center, for training central American forces, but the primary motivation for doing that was to be able to bolster the quality, improve the quality of the El Salvadoran fighting forces.

To the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections and for democratic reform.

It should be obvious that this pattern of systematic holes and gaps in Iraq's declaration is not the result of accidents, editing oversights or technical mistakes. These are material omissions that - in our view - constitute another material breach. It is up to Iraq to prove that there is some other explanation besides the obvious one, that this declaration is just one more act of deception in a history of lies from a defiant dictator.

Considering a work program at this time is quite simply out of touch with the reality we confront.

Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years.

Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.

Beijing's biggest challenge is to sustain growth, sufficient to keep unemployment and rural discontent from rising to destabilizing levels, and to maintain increases in living standards.

The danger that it will acquire a nuclear weapon, and the ability to integrate it with the ballistic missiles Iran already possesses is a reason for immediate concern.