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Negroponte Redux: In Honduras, It's Back to the Bad Old Days

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

Council on Hemispheric Affairs - Nov 15, 2006
http://www.coha.org/2006/11/15/washington-looks-to-cement-its-military-presence-in.../

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Washington Looks to Cement its Military Presence in Central America
by Emphasizing its Ties to Honduras

Alex S?nchez

When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya visited Washington this past June, he
had two security-related requests for President Bush. The first was to
convert the Colonel Enrique Soto Cano airbase (also commonly known as
Palmerola) into a commercial air cargo terminal, while the second was to
deploy U.S. Special Forces along the Mosquitia region in eastern Honduras
to help combat drug-trafficking along the Caribbean coast. At the time of
President Zelaya's visit, there were numerous media reports indicating that
a military facility would be built in the Mosquitia with Washington aid
that would, most likely, house some form of a U.S. military presence.

Soto Cano

The U.S. has used the Soto Cano base for several decades, saddling it with
a somewhat infamous record. During the 1980s, Palmerola was part of a
sizeable tract of land, assigned on a de facto basis, which became known as
the Contras' "unsinkable aircraft carrier." From there, raids were launched
by the U.S-backed irregulars into Nicaragua. The toll from this deadly
sport of stalk and kill amounted to over 30,000 fatalities. Recently, there
has been a growing debate about the facility's future. If Soto Cano becomes
a mixed-use civilian facility, it seems very likely that the Pentagon will
move ahead to help create the proposed replacement facility along the
Mosquitia coast, which would also have important anti-drug functions.
Should the construction of the base and transfer of U.S. personnel come to
pass, it is likely that its overarching role would be to support Honduras'
war against drug traffickers. More importantly, it is unclear what other
U.S. security operations will take place at the air base under the rubric
of safeguarding this country's national interests. But it is instructive to
remember that U.S. military ties usually do not come without long and very
binding strings attached.

Honduras' Cancer

The Honduran daily La Tribuna has quoted Colonel Alfonso Reyes Discua,
commander of the Fifth Infantry Battalion based in the province of Gracias
a Dios, as saying: "I believe that the Mosquitia is the main entry for
drugs coming into Honduras." The Mosquitia region, situated between the
Caribbean and Nicaragua, is thinly populated, with barely 70,000
inhabitants living throughout the province of Gracias a Dios. The region
contains dense rainforests and features very few roads and other means of
communication to the rest of the country. This self-isolating topography
has helped turn the Mosquitia into one of Honduras' major in-flow points
for drug trafficking. It is used by drug cartels to transport illicit
substances coming from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, into American and
Canadian markets via Mexico. According to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala,
more than 100 tons of Colombian cocaine destined for the U.S. pass through
Honduras each year. La Tribuna has expanded its belief that
drug-trafficking is the Mosquitia's major issue.

To cope with drug flow of this magnitude, the Honduran police only has
around 8,000 officers. This is a grossly insufficient figure, considering
that the force also must confront an escalating wave of non drug-related
murders and kidnappings. Drug-traffickers are often equipped with
state-of-the-art technologies, often utilizing fast boats much faster than
those employed by the country's navy. This offers yet another example of
how the Honduran security forces lack the resources to deal with the threat
posed by the local as well as external drug mafias. The country's armed
forces, which number around 10,000, lately have been engaging in joint
operations with the police. However, as the drug trafficking scenario in
the Mosquitia exemplifies, the available number of security forces is too
small and stretched too thin to adequately deal with these serious security
issues.

The U.S. Military Presence

The U.S. has had a lasting presence in modern Honduras, primarily at the
Soto Cano airbase, which has witnessed scores of human rights abuses during
the 1980s. The American troops now stationed in Honduras are known as Joint
Task Force Bravo (JTF-Bravo), a component of the U.S. Southern Command
(Southcom), which was formed in 1983 under the original name of Joint Task
Force 11. At that time, handsomely bribed Honduran officials closed their
eyes to the fact that U.S.-backed insurgents were staging sorties into
Nicaragua from Honduran territory, while Tegucigalpa concomitantly refused
to acknowledge the covert ventures. It is not entirely clear how many U.S.
troops were stationed at Soto Cano and other Honduran-based military
installations during the 1980s. Conservative estimates place that number at
anywhere between 2,000 to 5,000 troops, who were there as part of a
training mission. The estimated number probably does not include former
Green Beret forces as well as CIA operatives who served as advisers to the
Contras.

John Negroponte's Honduras

Among the U.S.-trained Honduran troops were members of the sinister
Battalion 3-16, accused of scores of kidnappings and human rights abuses
against Honduran anti-Contra dissidents. In 1999, NACLA's Report on the
Americas announced that three mass graves and prison cells had been
discovered at the former Contra military base of El Aguacate, near the
Nicaraguan border. This facility had been built by U.S. troops in 1983. It
is believed that the Contras used the grave sites to dispose of the
prisoners they had executed on political grounds. Among the hundreds of
dissidents who had disappeared during the Contra War was an American
priest, Father James Francis Carney. In a January 1984 issue of The Nation,
William LeoGrande, a professor at American University, explained that:
"[Washington's] efforts to destabilize Nicaragua have had the perverse
effect of destabilizing Honduras, where civilian authorities have been
reduced to rubber-stamping the militarization of their country under
General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez." Indeed, a strong argument can be made
that very little good - if any at all - came out of the U.S.' presence in
Honduras during the 1980s. The alleged "communist threat" posed by the
Sandinistas eventually cost 30,000 lives and caused economic ruin in both
Nicaragua and Honduras, in what soon became a U.S.-induced civil war.

Today, Soto Cano houses between 350 to 500 U.S. troops belonging to the
612th Air Base Squadron and the 1st Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment.
Since the closing of the American facilities in Panama over the last
decade, the U.S. has relied more and more on smaller bases across the
hemisphere. These include Manta in Ecuador, Comalapa in El Salvador, as
well as a comparable base in the island of Aruba. Still, Honduras' Soto
Cano continues to be the pillar of the U.S.'s Central American military
presence. With the departure of the U.S. Army's 228th Aviation Battalion
from Fort Kobbe, Panama, many aviation assets of U.S. Army South (USARSO),
Southcom's army component, were moved to Soto Cano. These include a command
and control element, CH-47 "Chinook" helicopters, as well as UH-60
"Blackhawk" and "Medevac" helicopters. Since the end of the 1980s, the
troops serving at Soto Cano have often been used for disaster relief
operations. A Joint Force Quarterly article proudly cited how JTF-Bravo
aided the populations of Guatemala and Honduras after last year's Hurricane
Stan and Tropical Storms Beta and Gamma hit the region. The base has always
been on Washington's radar, as exemplified by President Clinton's trip to
the facility in March 1999, and the recent Bush-Zelaya discussions on its
future.

The Future of Soto Cano and the Mosquitia

General Romeo V?zquez, chairman of the Honduran joint general staff,
declared on July 15 that Honduras would be building, with U.S. assistance,
a new military installation in the province of Gracias a Dios. According to
V?zquez, the proposed base would house aircraft and fuel supplying systems.
On July 23, the Honduran Defense Minister, Ar?stides Mej?a, stated that
what the government plans to build is not a military base so much as "a
refueling facility to redirect our response capacity, together with the
U.S., to the problems of drug trafficking." In spite of these attempts at
clarification, there are many skeptics who wonder what kind of facility
will actually be constructed.

Given its isolated geographical position, the denseness of the rainforest
that would surround it and the scant population in the immediate
surroundings, large numbers of troops could be housed there in relative
obscurity. The future fate of a new facility in the Mosquitia will in large
part be determined by Washington's intentions for the region, as well as by
the intended uses of Soto Cano. If it is converted into Tegucigalpa's new
international airport or a mixed-use facility, Soto Cano's strong points
cannot be denied. The facility is located in the commercially strategic,
central department of Comayagua, which is an important area for
agricultural production.

Many would like to see the base replace Toncont?n as Tegucigalpa's
international airport, which already is too small to accommodate some of
the larger commercial aircraft now using it. However, it is uncertain if a
decision will be made anytime soon regarding the future of the project. On
October 9, Mej?a observed that it would require a huge amount of work to
convert the military airbase into a commercial airport. He estimated that
these costs could range between L$1.9bn and L$3.8bn (US$100m-US$200m) and
would take much longer than initially thought.

Various Strategies at Work in Honduras

Should plans move forward to turn Soto Cano into a commercial airline hub,
it is unclear what the U.S. military will do to restructure its presence in
the region. Withdrawing from the country would be out of the question, due
to Washington's geostrategic interests and the extremely cooperative
attitude of Honduran officials. A former U.S. diplomat who requested
anonymity was interviewed by COHA and asked if a continuous presence in
Palmerola was really a vital necessity for the U.S. in the post-Cold War
world. He replied: "Probably not, but is there strong opposition to keeping
it, and if so from whom and why? ... I can't imagine that today it has any
strategic significance, or that it's essential to U.S. defense." This would
be particularly the case given the combat missions that already have been
assigned to U.S. Air Force resources stationed in Puerto Rico and Southern
Florida that were only minutes away from major regional centers.

It is more likely that Washington will push for the construction of a new
base in the Mosquitia, to which the Zelaya administration is almost certain
to enthusiastically endorse. This would occur for two reasons: the
Mosquitia is an isolated area, where the construction of a military
facility would cause little, if any, clashes with local civilian interests.
In addition, Tegucigalpa probably would want a base in the Mosquitia region
in any case, if only to deal with local drug trafficking activity. It would
be too costly for a poor Central American nation such as Honduras to build
and operate such a major military facility on its own. It would be more
cost-effective to accept Washington aid in exchange for joint use in
carrying out the two countries' anti-drug efforts.

Ironically, area experts such as former U.S. diplomat Ernesto Uribe do not
view a U.S. military presence in the Mosquitia as making an important
contribution. He explains that: "In order for a U.S. military presence to
be effective, they would need about as many troops as they have in
Afghanistan. There is simply no military solution to the drug war. The
problem with drugs is the demand for them in the U.S. You put a blocking
unit in Mosquitia and the drug operations will go above or around the
Mosquitia. An increased military presence in that swampy terrain would be
useless."

The fate of Zelaya's other request - the dispatching of U.S. special forces
to the country - is still pending. Washington will most likely be very
interested in this possibility, given that the U.S. military does not have
many choices for comparable access elsewhere in the region.

Regional Politics and Inevitable Spats

Another issue is how this "refueling facility" will affect regional
politics, namely relations between Honduras and Nicaragua. Managua
traditionally has been wary of any U.S. military presence in the region, a
legacy of the Contra-Sandinista war. With the respectable showing of
Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega in the just-concluded presidential
elections, this issue will likely involve bi-partite discussion in the near
future. In a d?marche that will hardly improve relations between Managua
and Tegucigalpa, Mej?a declared that his government had not gone out of its
way to formally notify Nicaragua about the proposed Mosquitia facility. He
argued that since it was really not a base, there had been no need to
inform Nicaragua under the terms of existing confidence-building
agreements.

Even without the U.S. military factor at work, Honduras and Nicaragua have
had to face continuous mutual security issues. The most recent tensions
stem from Managua reports alleging Honduran military incursions into
Nicaragua's southern stretch of the Coco River. Other sources of tension
arise from Tegucigalpa's decision last February to add 4,000 troops to its
armed forces, as well as an additional 1,000 police officers. Moreover,
Nicaragua's armed forces have destroyed its inventory of anti-air missiles,
while Honduras has yet to do so. The continuous strengthening of the
Honduran military is being viewed as a significant security threat by
Managua. More U.S. military aid, akin to that provided during the 1980s,
would only create more insecurity along a border which repeatedly has
witnessed armed conflict in recent decades. Ortega's electoral victory, as
well as the potential U.S military presence to be located in the Mosquitia
can be counted on to heighten Tegucigalpa-Managua tensions in the near
future.

The Future after Rumsfeld

It remains to be seen how U.S.- Latin American security relations will be
affected by the departure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. During
his tenure, Rumsfeld persistently promoted a greater U.S military presence
in Latin America and clamored for stepped-up military ties. As the
centerpiece of his hawkish policies, he increasingly labeled Venezuela a
"rogue" state which the U.S. and its regional allies had to rally against.
In order to achieve this, Rumsfeld repeatedly visited the region in search
for allies and a more aggressive policy. Last month, he attended the
three-day Western Hemisphere's Defense Ministers Conference held in
Managua, where he emphasized the necessity of regional cooperation,
particularly towards combating drug trafficking. Rumsfeld also declared
that: "I can understand neighbors being concerned, and I guess each country
has to make a judgment as to what they do, how they invest their money,
what they purchase." This was clearly a reference to Venezuela's military
expenditures (including automatic weapons from the Russian Federation),
which have been viewed by Washington with considerable unrest.

While Washington defense officials see Caracas as a potential security
threat to its neighbors, some would argue that the same accusations can be
made by Venezuelan officials regarding Rumsfeld's actions in the region.
Under Rumsfeld, the U.S. significantly expanded its military presence and
ties throughout the hemisphere. On August 2005, he was the first U.S.
Defense Secretary to visit Paraguay. The trip was widely regarded as
connected to the ongoing U.S. military exercises (13 in total from July
2005 to the present). It has been widely speculated that these talks may
have involved the consideration of permanent bases that could signify a
more permanent American military presence in Paraguay. Rumsfeld later
visited Peru during his South American tour in order to court
then-president Alejandro Toledo. Rumsfeld also was after gaining more
support for the ill-reputed, Brazilian-led MINUSTAH mission in Haiti.

An Expansive Rumsfeld

"I can't imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47s," Rumsfeld told
reporters in Brasilia during a March 2005 joint news conference, in regards
to the proposed Venezuelan purchase of rifles from the Kremlin. Rumsfeld
may have grounds to criticize such a transaction, but he lacked consistency
when he neglected to comment on the numerous Chilean military purchases.
These have led to the beginning of what may well be a multinational arms
race, raising already mounting security concerns in Lima and La Paz. On
October 22, the Chilean daily El Mercurio reported the first batch of 100
Humvee all-terrain vehicles had arrived, purchased by Santiago as part of
its aggressive military modernization campaign. According to the report,
the Chilean army plans to buy over 200 Humvees and upgrade them with 106mm
guns and a battlefield missile system. Chile also purchased a squadron of
Lockheed F-16s raising concerns regarding its growing air force. If
Rumsfeld was so concerned with the de-stabilizing effects of aggressive
weapon purchases by a western hemisphere nation, he could have used the
same language to object to Chile's recent purchases with equal
justification.

Rumsfeld is known to be a strong supporter of maintaining a U.S. presence
in Soto Cano, and would have probably advocated moving Palmolera's
operations to the Mosquitia site if necessary. With his resignation, it is
not entirely clear if Washington will continue to prioritize the
maintenance of a noticeable footprint in the area, especially if it serves,
apart from responding to natural disasters with relief assistance, very
little purpose. Former officials such as Uribe point out that there is
little need for the U.S. to maintain a presence at Soto Cano in the
post-Cold War world.

In theory, an American military presence could help Honduras' anti-drug
efforts by fortifying the country's ability to deploy its resources more
effectively. Washington's strategy to battle drug trafficking is to destroy
trade routes and processing facilities. But what some see as an ideal
scenario might not easily become a reality. Should a base be opened in the
Mosquitia, the U.S. will demand autonomy concerning operations it carries
out from there - something that the Zelaya government would be incapable,
or at least not inclined, to prevent. In any case, as the aforementioned
diplomat noted: "The U.S. military supports the Drug Enforcement Agency and
other civilian U.S. government anti-narcotics efforts, but doesn't have the
lead role." As Uribe sees it, an option would be to turn over Soto Cano "to
the Honduran Armed Forces and [for them to be] given a yearly grant to
maintain the runways and ground facilities in case the U.S. ever needs to
use it."

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