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Honduras Sleeps With One Eye Open
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14220 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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7 / 1988 |
2,679 Words |
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Michael Johns
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Until recently, the Central American country of Honduras held a comparatively low profile in a rather volatile region. To the south, in Nicaragua, the largest armed resistance movement since the Mexican Revolution fights a Soviet-supported totalitarian government. To the west, in El Salvador and Guatemala, democratic governments face threats from communist insurgencies. And at the southern tip of the region, in Panama, an indicated military strongman has seized power from a democratically elected president, dogmatically rejecting U.S. efforts to remove him.
Though Honduras has always been a poor country (even by Central American standards), it has made steady economic and political progress as the very survival of many of its neighbors was being threatened. A military government in Honduras has been replaced with a civilian democracy, and steady, long-awaited improvements have been made in public works and economic development. The past few months, however, have demonstrated that the country faces several significant challenges that will test the nation's ability to continue the upward march.
The most pressing of these challenges is how Honduras responds to a growing security threat from the Soviet-supported Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. That threat became reality last March when 2,000 Sandinista troops poured across the Honduran border at San Andres de Bocay, along the Bocay and Coco rivers, with the intention of inflicting a fatal blow on the supply center of Nicaragua's democratic resistance. During the height of the invasion, the Sandinistas "occupied between 50 and 60 kilometers of [Honduran] territory," Roberto Flores, a Nicaraguan specialist in the Honduran Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the author in April. And though the offensive--which Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega dramatically labeled "victory or death"--was a failure, it demonstrated to many Hondurans that the Sandinistas are increasingly threatening the security, sovereignty, and independence of their nation.
The March invasion by Sandinista troops was the most recent and most significant of several Sandinista violations of Honduran territory in the last few years. Earlier in March, Sandinista planes had dropped approximately a dozen 500-pound bombs on Contra positions inside Honduras, followed by shellings from 107-millimeter rockets. The Sandinistas also reportedly struck Contra positions with phosphorus artillery shells and planted land mines inside Honduran territory.
The March invasion of Honduras was treated very seriously by Honduran President José Azcona, who requested that the Unites States immediately deploy infantry troops as a sign of force. However, even then, the Sandinista dictatorship continued to defiantly defend its invasion, with Ortega bragging that "Superman was defeated in Vietnam ... and he will be defeated again in Nicaragua."
When Sandinista troops still had not departed following the arrival of 3,100 U.S. troops, Azcona gave the Sandinistas a peremptory deadline of 24 hours to remove their forces, after which the Honduran air force would launch air raids against the invading Sandinistas. He also threatened to commit conventional forces to the region, a threat that finally prompted the Sandinista forces to withdraw. Following the request for U.S. troops, the Honduran president remarked that he wanted "to show the people of Honduras that they did not have to fear in a case like this, that we could
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