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Honduras Sleeps With One Eye Open
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14220 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
2,679 Words |
| Author
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Michael Johns
Michael Johns is a foreign policy analyst at the Heritage
Foundation in Washington, D.C., where he specializes in the
Third World and Africa. |
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
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