José María Reyes Mata

José María Reyes Mata (5 October 1943 – 16 September 1983) was a Honduran revolutionary sympathizer of Fidel Castro and trained as both a doctor and in internationalist revolutionary thought in Cuba. He participated in Che Guevara's ill-fated Bolivian revolution and after surviving prison moved to Chile. With the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, Reyes Mata returned to Honduras and fought with Nicaraguan Sandinistas, hoping to gain their support for a Revolutionary United Front to be established in Honduras. In 1983, he led a group of Honduran rebels from Nicaragua into Honduras and was captured by military forces. The date of his death remains unclear and his body has never been located.

Biography José María Reyes Mata was born on 5 October 1943 in a small town called San Francisco de Yojoa, Cortés Department, Honduras to Marcelino Reyes Maldonado and Mercedes Gómez Mata. His family was of modest means, and had minimal education. "Chema" (José María's nickname) was the eldest of seven children, and knew from an early age that education was a means out of poverty.

He became a student teacher at the Escuela Normal Rural de Varones de "El Edén" (now the Escuela Normal Mixta Centroamérica the Mixed Teacher's College of Central America), in the area of Palo Pintado, in the town of Comayagua. During a student strike, he was proclaimed as leader by the students to negotiate social demands from the government and was among the founders of the Movement Francisco Morazan and signer of the Declaration of Mucuruba. He graduated with his teaching credentials and became deputy director of the school "Pedro P. Amaya" in the city of El Progreso. In Havana he married a Cuban woman, named Esperanza, and had two children, Mayda and Jose Reyes. he served with Che Guevara during his "internationalist" fight in Bolivia. Though Guevara was killed on 9 October 1967, Reyes Mata survived but was imprisoned for 11 months in La Paz. In April 1980, Reyes Mata was arrested during the run-up to the elections that year for a wave of pre-election violence and the kidnapping of a Texaco executive. He was released by a general amnesty that same year and briefly moved to Nicaragua to initiate plans for a RUF unit inside Honduras with Sandinista support. Beginning in 1981, he conducted a recruitment campaign in Honduras for the RUF unit and sent volunteers from Managua to Cuba for military training. Reyes Mata's 96 Honduran guerrillas from Nicaragua back to Honduras. Reyas Mata, who was using the alias Comandante Pablo Mendoza

The last absolutely known whereabouts of the group were near the border between Nicaragua to Honduras, on 19 July 1983, as verified in Reyes Mata's diary, which was recovered and translated into English by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), later declassified by the CIA. in an operation of Honduran and US troops called "Patuca" led by General Gustavo Alvarez. However, soldiers reported that Reyes Mata had been taken alive and was held as a prisoner at the Air base at El Aguacate for interrogation.