Among other evidence, Dodd cited a cable sent by Negroponte, in 1985, that made it clear that Negroponte was aware of the threat of "future human rights abuses" by "secret operating cells" left over by General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces, after he was forcibly removed from his post by fellow military commanders in 1984.The cables reveal that Negroponte repeatedly urged reform of the Honduran criminal code and justice system to replace arbitrary measures taken by the Honduran government after events such as the blowing up of the nation's main power plant at Tegucigalpa and the kidnapping of the entire business establishment of San Pedro Sula, the second largest city, in 1982. Negroponte's predecessor as Ambassador, Carter appointee Jack Binns has acknowledged that human rights abuses carried out by the Honduran military were fostered by military assistance from the Argentine junta and the C.I.A. during the Carter administration, and that neither the Honduran government nor the CIA kept the embassy informed of what it was doing. The scale of the carnage in Honduras was limited to less than 300 'disappearances' during the five years of the Negroponte and Binns ambassadorships as compared with 70,000 lost lives as a result of civil war and repression in El Salvador, notwithstanding that Honduras was involved in a low-level civil war punctuated at times by invasions of its territory.