Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0157/01576.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 26KB | 407 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01576}
$Pretitle{351}
$Title{Honduras
Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{James D. Rudolf}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{honduras
military
united
states
nicaragua
honduran
central
forces
political
armed}
$Date{1983}
$Log{}
Country:     Honduras
Book:        Honduras, A Country Study
Author:      James D. Rudolf
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1983

Introduction

     Honduras, the poorest and least developed nation of Central America,
has until the very recent past been largely ignored by journalists,
foreign policymakers, and scholars. In one of the handful of published
English-language monographs devoted to Honduras, William S. Stokes
opened his 1950 study with a discussion of one of the most persistently
salient features of the history of Honduras since its discovery by Spanish
explorers in the early sixteenth century:

In geographical location Honduras occupies a pivotal position in Central
America which has had enormous effect on its domestic and international
politics. It is the heart-land republic of the area, the only Central
American country with boundaries facing three of the four remaining Central
American republics. With Guatemala on the northwest, El Salvador on the south,
and Nicaragua on the southwest [sic], political isolation is and always has
been an unreal concept.

Honduras' central location has made it a willing participant in, or an
unwilling victim of, all the machinations of Central American power politics.
Political exiles from surrounding countries have retreated to Honduras to
escape the wrath of militaristic regimes, frequently making the country the
military and political staging-center for their efforts at counterrevolution.

     Honduras' geographical location continued to hold the key to the most
important currents of national life in the early 1980s. The revival of public
interest in Honduras was the result of events in neighboring countries-the
1979 revolutionary victory in Nicaragua and the fierce guerrilla war raging
in El Salvador-which, in the words of one close observer of Central America,
made Honduras' position on a map of the region appear as if it were "in the
jaws of a giant nutcracker."

     Honduras' 925-kilometer-long southeast border with Nicaragua connects
the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea at the widest point in Central
America. The vast majority of this border region consists of sparsely
inhabited, mountainous terrain that harbored both Sandinista guerrillas
before their victory and anti-Sandinista guerrillas subsequent to July
1979. The genesis of the latter was several thousand Nicaraguan National
Guardsmen and others associated with the regime of Anastasio Somoza
Debayle who fled to Honduras in the aftermath of the Sandinista victory.
By 1983 their numbers had been reinforced by the flight of
Nicaraguans-including a large contingent of Miskito Indians-who had become
disillusioned enough with life in revolutionary Nicaragua to join the contras
(counterrevolutionaries). At that time, up to one-half of the estimated
20,000 to 25,000 Nicaraguan exiles in Honduras were thought to be active
participants in the counterrevolutionary war effort.

     The contras were organized into several groups, but the largest by
far was the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense-FDN),
whose political wing was led by Adolfo Calero Portocarrero and military wing
by Edgar Chamorro Coronel in 1983. The FDN was closely aligned with the exile
organization of Miskito, Sumu, and Rama Indians, known as Misura, which was
led by Steadman Fagoth Muller. Spearheaded by these groups, the contras made
repeated raids into northern Nicaragua, and by 1983 a number of their camps
had been moved from southern Honduras into Nicaraguan territory.

     The Honduran government, for its part, did little to obstruct the
activities of the contras. Critics argued that the Honduran armed forces
worked in conjunction with United States government operatives in active
support of the counterrevolutionary war. The Honduran government did have its
own reasons-fear of the growing Sandinista military force and of
Nicaraguan-sponsored subversion and ideological penetration of Honduras-to
distrust its fledgling revolutionary neighbor. As early as December 1979,
Honduras' foreign minister had declared that "the Honduran government is
preoccupied by the eventual emergence of a socialist government in Nicaragua,
because we don't want that type of regime in our neighborhood." Three years
later the government's hostility toward revolutionary Nicaragua had hardened
further: "Nicaragua is attacking Honduras indirectly and is violating
Honduran security every day. Therefore," argued Honduras' armed forces chief
in late 1982, "in its ideology and its objectives, Nicaragua is Honduras'
enemy." This concern was apparently borne out in mid-1983 when a contingent
of nearly 100 guerrillas, allegedly trained in Cuba and Nicaragua, from the
People's Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas del Pueblo-FAP), which called itself
the military arm of the newly formed Revolutionary Party of Central American
Workers of Honduras (Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores Centroamericanos
de Honduras-PRTCH), was discovered-and quickly defeated-in Honduras' remote
department of Olancho.

     Some Hondurans, such as Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga, a Christian Democratic
deputy in the National Congress, felt that their government's evolving stance
in opposition to Nicaragua was misguided: "I don't think the Sandinistas are
a real threat to Honduras . . . The government should work harder on social
problems-if we do not attack our social problems, we will have fertile ground
for revolution." Such criticism did little, however, to stem the tide of
inflammatory rhetoric by both governments and sporadic clashes that kept
tensions between Honduras and Nicaragua at or near the boiling point
throughout 1982 and 1983.

     The other "jaw of the nutcracker"-Honduras' southwest border with El
Salvador, spanning slightly over 300 kilometers-would begin closing in on
Honduras, in the minds of the nation's foreign policy and military
establisment, should the Salvadoran guerrillas, aligned with Nicaragua, be
ultimately victorious in that nation's protracted civil conflict. "If El
Salvador falls under a Marxist regime," in the words of Honduras' armed
forces chief, "Honduras will be the next to go."

     Even should the Salvadoran government defeat the insurgency, prospects
for future relations were uncertain because of lingering distrust and
hostility from the brief but vicious war fought in 1969 between Honduras and
El Salvador. A 1980 peace treaty formally ended those hostilities and set up
a joint border commission charged with resolving a number of conflicting
territorial claims along the border by 1985; chronic tensions between the two
neighbors eased somewhat. Nevertheless, the prospect of a resurgent
Salvadoran army, strengthened by victory over the guerrillas, resuming
hostilities against Honduras in pursuit of historic territorial claims
continued to haunt Hondurans. During the early 1980s, however, this concern
was subordinated to fears of victory by the guerrillas, who occupied much of
El Salvador's northern border region with Honduras.

     Guatemala-on Honduras' northwest border-also experienced an increase in
its perennial political turmoil during the early 1980s. The focus of its
insurgency, however, was distant from Honduran territory, where only about 500
Guatemalan refugees resided in 1983. In October of that year, military
leaders from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala met near Guatemala City to
lay the groundwork for the revitalization of the Central American Defense
Council (Consejo de Defensa Centroamericana-CONDECA), a military alliance that
had originally been formed in 1964 but subsequently became inoperable.
Whereas in 1964 Nicaragua had been the driving force behind CONDECA, in 1983
it was pointedly excluded. The declaration issued in Guatemala Cit