Juan Lopez Grijalva, 62, is a former head of the Honduran secret police and a former army chief of staff who was a key member of an Army unit identified by human-rights groups as a death squad. He went underground shortly before a judge in the city of Choluteca ordered his arrest in 1996 on charges of killing two suspected leftists in 1982. Honduran human rights groups say Lopez Grijalva subsequently moved to Miami, where he helped the Honduran armed forces to acquire weapons and equipment.
Sources tell NEWSWEEK that Lopez Grijalva subsequently applied to the U.S. State Department for temporary protected status (TPS), a special immigration category that is usually reserved for foreign nationals already living on American soil whose countries have been hard hit by acts of God like earthquakes and typhoons. The State Department extended TPS to citizens of Honduras who were living in the U.S. in July 1999 after Hurricane Mitch devastated large portions of the central American nation’s Caribbean coast.
Lopez Grijalva was reportedly granted TPS by U.S. officials despite the existence of the arrest warrant that was issued against him by Judge Celino Aristides Martinez on June 26, 1996, in connection with the murders of Honduran Adan Aviles and Nicaraguan Amado Espinoza. The victims were arrested on July 12, 1982 by Honduran army soldiers during an anti-leftist campaign that was being waged by the government of the day in Tegucigalpa. Their bodies turned up five days later in a vacant lot in the southern Honduran city of Choluteca.
It remains unclear whether the State Department was aware of the arrest warrant’s existence at the time that Lopez Grijalva was granted TPS. The warrant was later annulled by a Honduran judge for unspecified reasons last November.
Lopez Grijalva would have remained out of the spotlight were it not for the unstinting efforts of retired State Department official Richard Krieger. A longtime Nazi-hunter and former specialist in U.S. refugee policy who left government service in 1993, the 67-year-old Krieger has set up his own non-profit group called International Education Missions to lobby for the deportation of modern-era war criminals, torturers and other human rights abusers who are living on American soil. Working out of the cluttered den of his home in the south Florida suburban community of Boynton Beach, Krieger has assembled a list of about 800 suspected foreign-born persecutors who are now believed to be hiding out in America.
They come from all over the world-including Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean-and among the individuals who recently came to Krieger’s attention was Juan Evangelista Lopez Grijalva. Krieger received a tip about the former army officer’s presence in Miami from Honduran human rights activists earlier this year, and he duly passed on the information to officials assigned to the Florida district office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
Krieger played an instrumental role in the recent decision of the State Department to revoke the diplomatic visa of one of Lopez Grijalva’s old army buddies, a retired Honduran general named Luis Alonso Discua. Discua commanded and helped organize a CIA-trained death squad called Battalion 316 that has been blamed for the disappearance of at least 184 suspected leftists in the early 1980s. Lopez Grijalva was an active member of Battalion 316.
Discua-who has never been charged with a crime-lost his visa after Krieger provided U.S. officials with evidence that he was no longer serving any diplomatic function for the Honduran government and was therefore violating the terms of his residence status. In Lopez Grijalva’s case, however, Krieger says that INS officials have concluded they “cannot touch” the onetime fugitive from Honduran justice for now because he is a legal resident of the United States under the TPS provision. “Lopez Grijalva is among the leading violators of human rights in Honduras,” says Berta Oliva de Nativi, the president of the Honduran Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared and a widow of one of the first victims of Battalion 316’s anti-leftist operations. “And to this day, none of those violators has ever been brought to justice.”
INS spokeswoman Patricia Mancha said earlier this week that Lopez Grijalva is “legally” residing in the United States. But she declined to confirm or deny reports that Lopez Grijalva had applied for and been granted TPS, citing privacy concerns. Mancha also declined to state whether Lopez Grijalva had entered the U.S. legally or illegally. Looking for Bad Guys: Richard Krieger hunts foreign thugs hiding in this country. And he’s on a winning streak
NEWSWEEK attempted to contact Lopez Grijalva at his west Miami condominium earlier this week but was told by a young Honduran man living at the address that the occupant of that dwelling was an elderly Honduran man who goes by a different-but similar-surname.
