HONDURAS: "The Country of Nada" - To Understand Coup, Go Back to 1980's

[magbana]

In an attempt to get background on the Honduras coup which took place on June 28, especially about the days when John Negroponte served as the US’ ambassador in Tegucigalpa, I stumbled upon the following article entitled, “The Country of Nada.” This article was written in 1986 and covers a wide range of issues: Honduran politics, US and Honduran militaries, US ambassadors, and the abject poverty of the overwhelming majority of the people. Perhaps more than anything else I have read over the last two weeks, this article has helped me understand present-day Honduras.

If you have read and like Charlie Hardy's "Cowboy in Caracas," you'll like this article as well. I have posted the article which is quite long to my blog, but provide an excerpt here. Please visit the blog for the full article.
magbana

http://hcvanalysis.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/honduras-the-country-of-nada-to-understand-the-coup-go-back-to-the-1980s/

Excerpt from "The Country of Nada":

"Small wonder then, that an air of hopelessness, a sense of the futility of ever truly changing anything, pervades the entire country. The favorite Honduran word is “nada”—”nothing.” “El gobierno no hace nada…la Iglesia no tiene nada…no tenemos nada…yo soy nada” (”the government does nothing, the Church has nothing, we have nothing, I am nothing”)—phrases I heard everywhere. The people are passive and fatalistic, low in self-esteem. (In Spanish, Honduras means “the depths.”) Honduras was the original “banana republic,” and in some ways it still is one.
2.

Just outside Comayagua stands Palmerola, the chief American military base in Honduras, which the United States shares with the Honduran Air Force. The Honduran side of the base is surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by troops with submachine guns. I managed to talk my way inside and was impressed by what I saw. Honduras has the strongest air force in Central America (much of it trained in the United States); its officers and cadets are the elite of the armed forces, and the contrast of their circumstances with the rest of the country is stunning. They live in attractive stucco buildings, furrowroofed, with floors that sparkle of spit and polish. Their Hughes training heli-copters, American A-37s, Spanish Casa 101s, French Super Mystères are arranged in perfect rows upon the ground and one sees them flying in tight formations. They proudly display a huge sign boasting of their efficiency: DIAS SIN ACCIDENTES—299.

The Hondurans share with the Americans an 8,005-foot airstrip, built by the United States at a cost estimated at $14 million, where regularly we land C-130 and C-5 transports (the biggest we have), UH-1 and CH-47 helicopters, and even, occasionally, air force attack planes. The Palmerola airstrip is the nucleus of the immense American military base much of Honduras has become, a central element of the US strategy to surround Sandinista Nicaragua with armed and hostile states.

During the last five years, US military assistance to Honduras has (conservatively) exceeded $220 million, but that figure does not include the unknown tens (possibly hundreds) of millions more we have spent on joint maneuvers and the improvement of Honduran facilities for our own use. Operation Big Pine II, between August 1983 and February 1984, involved 6,000 American soldiers, sailors, marines, infantry units, amphibious forces, combat engineers, communication specialists who took part in artillery, naval, and field training maneuvers, parachute landings, beach landings, and practice air strikes. US Navy ships maneuver off the Honduran coast, and call regularly at Honduran ports on the Caribbean. Our vessels include submarines, destroyers, cruisers, guided-missile frigates, and the battleship Iowa.

Besides Palmerola, we have military landing rights at the Honduran bases of Trujillo, La Mesa, and La Ceiba. From San Lorenzo near the Nicaraguan border we release remote-powered drones to intercept Sandinista communications and photograph their military movements. Throughout much of 1986, the US Army Corps of Engineers will conduct a joint project with the Hondurans for training in road building over tropical and mountainous terrain similar to the topography of nearby Nicaragua.

In what seems to be an effort to prove the “impermanent” nature of our presence at Palmerola, the Pentagon has given the American side of the base an oddly ramshackle appearance—in contrast to the elegance of the Honduran establishment on the other side of the barbed fence. Since 1982, about a thousand American troops have been rotated at brief intervals (exactly 179 days for the army, 89 days for the air force) in “Joint Task Force Bravo.” This was set up to provide assistance to the other American forces participating in the nearly continuous combined training operations with the Honduran armed forces. The Americans live in crude canvas tents, in “hootches” of rude wood and galvanized metal roofs without air conditioning, they trudge over dirt trails to communal showers and latrines. Their only comforts are old videotapes of professional football games and gallons of alcohol. The officers kill the hot evenings guzzling beer, rum, and Chivas Regal, and by midnight they are stoned. However crude, this US base keeps growing larger.

On weekends the troops pour out of Palmerola into dusty Comayagua, where their dollars have attracted a horde of prostitutes and begging children. The Americans take care that the women are injected against infection, and they have even supervised the set up of their own brothel—”Rosie’s”—with private showers and a parking lot.

There are other, more edifying, results of the American presence at Palmerola. Periodically Joint Task Force Bravo flies helicopters to remote villages, where American doctors, dentists, and veterinarians treat diseased Hondurans and their animals—though many Hondurans I talked to dismiss these visits as marginal exercises in public relations. “We have no real benefit from the American military,” says Victor Meza of the prestigious Honduran Documentation Center in Tegucigalpa. “All we get is ‘cervezas y putas”‘ (”beer and whores”)."