The United States, Honduras, And The Crisis In Central America

Donald E Schulz,Deborah Sundloff Schulz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975400
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

Prior to the 1980s Honduras was an obscure backwater, of little public or policy concern in the United States. With the advent of the Reagan administration, however, Hondurans found themselves at the center of the US-Central American imbroglio, a launching pad for the administration's contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and for counterinsurgency operations against guerrillas in El Salvador. Placing events in the context of Honduran history, the authors provide penetrating insights into the causes of revolution in Central America and the sources of stability that enabled Honduras to escape the civil strife that consumed its neighbors. At the same time, the work offers a fascinating account of Honduran domestic politics and of the personalities, motives, and maneuvers of policymakers on both sides of the U.S.-Honduras relationship—too often a tale of intrigue, violence, and corruption.

1
Introduction

Some years ago Thomas Anderson remarked that trying to organize Honduran politicians was like trying to herd mice.¹ We were reminded of his comment in spring 1985, with the start of that year's election campaign, as Honduran political parties began splintering into a blinding array of factions, most of them in rebellion against the administration of President Roberto Suazo Córdova. At one point Congress removed five of the nine members of the Supreme Court, swearing in five new members in their place, in an attempt to prevent the president from manipulating the electoral process for his own benefit. In turn, Suazo charged the new court with treason. The new chief justice was arrested; the others went into hiding. On the president's orders, riot police surrounded the court and Congress. Momentarily, at least, the trappings of Honduran democracy had been stripped away, revealing something far less attractive underneath.

The crisis was finally resolved when the military intervened and a compromise agreement was worked out that allowed all aspiring presidential candidates to run in the forthcoming elections. The campaign that followed bore more resemblance to a Roman Circus than anything. There were no fewer than eleven National Party and five Liberal Party candidates, though these eventually boiled down to four Liberals and three Nationals—plus of course the candidates of the Christian Democratic Party and the Innovation and Unity Party. The campaign was marred by mutual recriminations and petty squabbling. Its most interesting aspects bordered on the bizarre: At one point, the president's supporters in Congress attempted a "technical coup," proposing that the elections be postponed for two years while the legislature transformed itself into a constituent assembly and wrote a new constitution. The debate that followed ended in a fistfight on the floor of Congress—at which point the military once again intervened.

"Why don't they behave like us?" a U.S. official once asked. It seemed at the time that the United States was as culture-bound in Central America as it had been in Vietnam. Honduras is not like the United States and should not be expected to behave as if it were. Honduran politics is a history of dictatorship, tempered by anarchy and ameliorated by corruption. In the 155 years between independence and 1994, there have been 129 different governments and 14 constitutions. Even today, wags sometimes refer to the capital city of Tegucigalpa as "Tegucigolpe," a pun on the Spanish word for coup.

Moreover, the more one learns about Honduran political culture the more one is struck by its surrealistic qualities. Where but in Tegucigalpa could one find a statue of the national hero, Francisco Morazán, that (so the story goes) is not of Morazán at all but of Napoleon's famous Marshal Ney, having been purchased secondhand in Paris?² Where else would a president (Roberto Suazo Córdova) indicate his interest in extending his term in office through the public proclamation of an obscure soothsayer? Or a dictator (Tiburcio Carías) outlaw baseball out of fear that his enemies might use the bats as weapons? (And then rescind the ban after being convinced by his nephew that pitching would be good practice for soldiers learning how to throw hand grenades?)³

We use these examples not to ridicule but rather to emphasize the dramatic gap between el estilo hondureño—the Honduran political style—and the U.S. style. One cannot understand Honduras through a North American frame of reference. The institutions and constitutions may be similar, but the values and attitudes underlying them more often than not are profoundly different, and this makes for very different political behavior. There is appearance, and there is reality. It is important that the two not be confused.

Unfortunately, illusions sometimes die hard. U.S. misconceptions about Honduras stem from a variety of sources. North Americans have a tendency to project their own values onto others and interpret the unknown in terms of stereotypes. Few U.S. citizens know anything about the country. (Peter Davis's Where is Nicaragua? might even more appropriately have been written about Honduras) Nor have policymakers been much better informed. Until the 1980s, Honduras was a backwater of a backwater, hardly the object of high-level government concern. Until 1981, the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa was ranked class four, the lowest class. (It was subsequently promoted to class two.) The last major English-language study of Honduran politics was published in 1950.⁴ Even today, experts on the country are scarce. After all, why until recently should anyone have been interested? Central America seemed stable enough until the late 1970s, and even when things began to disintegrate in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Honduras continued to be an "oasis of peace."

Beneath the surface, however, there were rumblings of discontent. Problems of poverty and social injustice continued to be as serious as anywhere else in the hemisphere—with the exception of Haiti, which was in a class by itself. Social unrest and repression were growing, and U.S. policy seemed aimed more at keeping the lid on the pressure cooker than at addressing the causes of the trouble. Most disturbing, U.S. policies seemed to be aggravating Honduran problems. The push to militarize the country had strengthened the very forces that most threatened democracy and wasted scarce resources that would have been better invested in economic development. Then too, there was the specter of war, either through domestic revolution, invasion or subversion from Nicaragua, or other developments. The creation within Honduras of a veritable state within a state, composed of thousands of armed Nicaraguan exiles was ominous. Increasingly, Hondurans began to worry that the rebels might turn on them should they become frustrated by their inability to overthrow the Sandinistas.

What follows is the story of how Honduras, through a twist of fate, became a staging ground for U.S. Cold War operations in Central America during the Reagan-Bush years. On the one hand, we will examine how Hondurans sought to cope with a massive, multifaceted North American presence. On the other, we will seek to explain how this quintessential "banana republic," the most underdeveloped and seemingly fragile country in the region, managed to avoid the kind of revolutionary turmoil that devastated its neighbors. But first, a bit of history.

Notes

1. Thomas P. Anderson, The War of the Dispossessed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. 44.

2 Michel Ney (1769-1815), duke of Elchingen and marshal of France, distinguished himself during Napoleon's Russian campaign. After Waterloo, however, he was shot for treason. When a Honduran commission was sent to Europe to order a statue of Morazán, it is said, it ran out of funds and was reduced to purchasing the Ney monument on the cheap.

3. The Morazán and Carías stories were passed on to us by William Krehm and seem to be myths. A Honduran historian has located in the French National Archives a contract signed by the Honduran government and the sculptor Durini, the creator of the statue of Morazán. We could not disprove the Carías story, but one would think that Mario Argueta, the leading biographer of the dictator, would know of the incident if it occurred, and he does not. Respected Honduran intellectuals such as Victor Meza, Ramón Oquelí, and Marco Tulio Zepeda are skeptical. We consider the story apocryphal.

4. See William S. Stokes, Honduras: An Area Study in Government (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1950). This is not to say that no other books of substance have been published. Particularly noteworthy are James A. Morris' Honduras: Caudillo Politics and Military Rulers (Boulder: West view Press, 1984) and James D. Rudolph's edited volume, Honduras: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1984).

2
The Land of the Midnight Coup

The history of Honduras can be written on the space of a tear.

—Folk saying

Power abhors a vacuum, and nowhere in Central America is the truth of this maxim more evident than in Honduras. Here internal weakness has time and again tempted more powerful external forces to interfere in domestic affairs. Only rarely have Hondurans been united and strong enough to withstand such incursions. Rather, chaos, confusion, and violence have undermined the Honduran polity from its inception. The structure of Spanish colonialism had been too loosely drawn and too carelessly administered to provide much cohesion once independence was established. Thus, authoritarian centralization quickly degenerated into anarchy. Power struggles between local caudillos, liberal and conservative factions, and the cities of Comayagua and Tegucigalpa took the place of a national political discourse. Indeed, no national consciousness existed. Though Hondurans had a common language and religion, they had no common history. Instead, geographic barriers (mountainous terrain), lack of communications, territorial disintegration, and an absence of national classes and an internal market produced myriad local allegiances, and the fact that there had been no real struggle for independence left Hondurans without the kind of heroic experience that might have created a sense of solidarity and community.

Consequently, there was no agreement on what should replace colonial rule once the Spanish empire collapsed. In 1824 Hondurans opted for membership in a Central American Federation, but the effort was short-lived. The old rivalries continued to undermine domestic tranquility. Moreover, to internal Honduran conflicts were now added the larger struggles of the federation. Turmoil in the provinces led to repeated federal intervention. When civil war broke out, the greatest of all Central American leaders, Francisco Morazán (a Honduran), led the liberals to victory, but, as always, the attempt at unification was only temporarily successful. By 1838, the federation was dead. Nor did matters improve much with the attainment of statehood. Over the next sixty-one years (1839-1900), there would be sixty-two Honduran presidencies and ten consejos de ministros (councils of ministers). Anarchy became a way of life. There was no national nucleus, no unifying force that could bring together the various factions vying for power. Under these circumstances, foreign intervention became commonplace. Sharing borders with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Hondurans found themselves in a geopolitical trap. The liberal-conservative conflicts that consumed the isthmus inevitably spilled over onto Honduran soil. Liberal regimes viewed conservative neighbors as a threat and tried to overthrow them, and vice versa. Exiles gathered in countries run by their political allies and waged war against their homelands. To make matters worse, the British also made demands, intervening from time to time to bombard fortresses, seize coastal cities, or extort money from local governments. Foreign intervention only aggravated and perpetuated domestic instability. Between 1862 and the inauguration of Marco Aurelio Soto in 1876, there were thirty-two transfers of power. One president, José María Medina, was in office on eleven separate occasions.

By the 1860s it had become evident that Honduras could not escape underdevelopment without foreign help. By itself, the country seemed doomed to backwardness. Growth was impeded not only by civil strife and outside intervention but also by lack of transportation, capital, and technology. The various regions were still largely isolated, joined only by primitive mule trails. As late as the first decade of the twentieth century, one observer commented that travel from the north coast to Tegucigalpa was virtually unchanged since the colonial period except that the roads were worse.

Thus it was that Honduras became a country in quest of a railway. Throughout much of this period, many Hondurans saw rail transport as their best chance for opening up the interior and developing the economy. As early as 1853 the Honduran Congress granted the exclusive right to construct such a line to George Squier, a former U.S. chargé in Central America. Two "loans" of US$20,000 each were extended to the Honduran government. Several years later Squier's company failed without having laid a single section of track. His charter was sold to a group of British investors, but they made no more progress. By this time, however, the Honduran government had become psychologically committed to the enterprise. In one of the most dubious transactions in financial history, it contracted a series of British and French loans, totaling some £6 million, for the purpose of constructing the route: "The money stuck to the fingers of politicians and bankers, and to top it all, Honduras made the grievous mistake of paying the contractors by the mile. The railway wriggled imaginatively in the easy lowlands, and got winded before it had penetrated too far inland. By the time fifty miles had been built, the funds had evaporated in the tropical heat."¹

By 1871, the track extended ninety-two kilometers, from the Atlantic coast past San Pedro Sula. At that point, the British investors withdrew their profits and went home. Subsequent attempts to extend the route led to nothing more than the accumulation of additional debts. By the end of the decade, what tracks had been laid had fallen into disrepair and been abandoned. Although the line to San Pedro was eventually reactivated with the rise of the banana trade in the 1890s, the debts acquired had accumulated to such an extent that Honduras had the highest per capita foreign debt the world had ever known. (By 1909 the total debt amounted to US$120 million. That same year, Honduran government revenues came to only US$1.7 million.) Not until the administration of Juan Manuel Gálvez in 1953—eighty-six years after the first major loan had been contracted—was the obligation finally paid off.² As for the dream of opening up the interior by means of a railroad, suffice it to say that even today Tegucigalpa has no links of this kind with the outside world.

Dependency and Development: The Birth of a Banana Republic

The railroad scandal was an omen. Greed, corruption, and incompetence had bankrupted the republic. Yet such was the state of the country's dependency that it had little choice but to continue seeking foreign investments. Neither the state nor the private sector had the resources to build a primary export economy. The society was still in a precapitalist, semifeudal stage. Political chaos and economic stagnation had prevented the formation of a strong national state and a dynamic national bourgeoisie, based in coffee or cattle, that might have responded to the "new demands of the external market" or been able to "form a productive system with significant national participation."³ Instead, Honduran landowners remained inward-looking and status-quo-oriented, afflicted by the "myopia that resulted from their isolation, insecurity, limited business capacity, [and] scarcity of capital."⁴ Lacking the motivation and means of participating in the mining and export agriculture booms that occurred from the 1880s onward, they would be largely irrelevant to the country's economic development So it was that the Honduran economy "had to link up with the world market ... as an enclave economy, with the productive sectors of the local economy under direct control of foreign capital."⁵

Before this could occur however, there had to be leaders willing to resurrect the ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Map
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Land of the Midnight Coup
• 3 The Strategy of Conflict
• 4 The Backlash
• 5 The United States and Honduras: From Crisis to Crisis
• 6 A Journey into the Depths: Economic Crisis and Social Decay
• 7 The United States, Honduras, and the End of the Contra War
• 8 The Invisible Country
• 9 How Honduras Escaped Revolutionary Violence
• Abbreviations
• Selected References
• About the Book and Authors
• Index