POOR GEORGE
ORWELL.
WITH THE YEAR
just two months old, every camp from neocon-
servative to Marxist has been trying to appropriate the
pessimistic English socialist as its own. But sometimes
the temptation to invoke him is irresistible; the reality of
1984 outdoes Orwell, and nowhere more so than in Cen-
tral America.
If ever a country deserved the title of Airstrip One,
which Orwell bestowed on Great Britain in 1984, it is
surely Honduras, which has become the home base for
CIA and contra assaults on the Sandinista government
and the site of at least seven improved airstrips-four
more than Congress approved funding for. One group
which recently failed to make it any further than the air-
strip was a coalition of 150 North American church-
women who tried to enter Honduras in early December
to pray for peace at the U.S. military installations of
Palmerola, San Lorenzo and Choluteca.
One contingent failed even to board their SAHSA
flight at New Orleans; the other was prevented from dis-
embarking at Toncontin airport in Tegucigalpa. Airline
officials read them an extraordinary banning order
issued hours earlier by the Honduran government.
“From now on,” read the document, “it is prohibited
to transport the nuns of the Jesuit religion or Maryknoll
to the Republic of Honduras.” Not only were there no
Maryknoll members on the delegation, but Jesuit nuns?
The breathtaking ignorance of the Honduran
government, like its subservience to what it imagines to
be Washington’s desires, appears to know no bounds.
After banning the entry of the religious women, official
government spokesman Amilcar Santamaria provided
an explanation worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
(Santamaria is, by the way, a devotee of the Moonie-
backed CAUSA Internacional, whose leaders were en-
thusiastically welcomed into Honduras last year to stage
their extravagant anti-communist media seminars.)
“One does not have to be very imaginative,”
declared Santamaria, “or have a doctorate in propa-
ganda to understand that their] essential objective
[was] to block the highway and make it necessary for the
police to forcibly remove them. The evident objective
was to have this removal filmed and photographed, and
subsequently shown abroad, creating the image that
nuns and priests are persecuted here.” In view of all
this, he concluded, the nuns “consciously or un-
consciously, were coming to help the expansionist ob-
jectives of international totalitarianism.” Chalk one up
for democracy.
THIS KIND OF INANITY HAS BECOME THE
dominant discourse of politics in contemporary
Honduras, as it has long been in El Salvador and
Guatemala. Logically enough: to justify any action in
the name of anti-communism is a local mirror image of
Reagan Administration attitudes toward Central
America. Nor is there any sign that those attitudes will
change in an Administration that has replaced knowl-
edgeable diplomats with crisis managers. The Kissinger
Commission Report, unveiled with much pomp and
ceremony in January, constructs an elaborate “bipar-
tisan” rationale for more of the same-unworkable
policies centered on a military defeat of the Left.
While Kissinger offers misperceptions that will lead
inevitably to wrong prescriptions and military escala-
tion, a number of scholars with wide experience of
regional realities have come together to form a group
called Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Cen-
tral America (PACCA). Their report, a kind of “Anti-
Kissinger,” provides a clear-headed and logical set of
options to current policy. Where Kissinger frames the
conflict in terms of an East-West power play, PACCA’s
“Blueprint for Peace” stresses its local origins and its
North-South significance. PACCA’s authors remind us
of Kissinger’s long-standing contempt for Latin
America. As he told Chilean Christian Democrat leader
-then Foreign Minister–Gabriel Valdes in
Washington in 1969, “You come here speaking of Latin
America, but this is not important. Nothing important
can come from the South. History has never been pro-
duced in the South. The axis of history starts in Mos-
cow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and
then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no
importance.”
The Kissinger Commission Report has finally
woken up to the unpalatable fact that history of great
importance is being made in the South. But it is riddled
with the fear of revolution that has left U.S. policy
hostage to the very dictators and oligarchies that block
all avenues to change save violent revolution. As the
PACCA Blueprint puts it: “Since U.S. commitment to
defeat revolution has been equated with fighting the
Soviets, the very notion of the Left winning is viewed as
the equivalent to a major Soviet victory. Thus the nation
faces a tragic choice of its own making-a self-pro-
claimed defeat of major proportions or a direct U.S.
military intervention in El Salvador or Nicaragua.”
FINALLY, BACK TO HONDURAS. THE HON-
duran authorities do not need to make up double-
think and newspeak for themselves; they are being
coached by masters of the art. Investigations of the
death of U.S. helicopter pilot Jeffry C. Schwab on the
Honduras-Nicaragua border turned up one gem from
Col. James Strachan, who performs the thankless task
of public affairs officer for U.S. Southern Command in
Tegucigalpa. In one of an enterprising series of articles
from Bob McCartney of The Washington Post,
Strachan denied the presence of U.S. troops in the
border zone:
“‘We have no military personnel that have been out
there; that’s a no-no.’ He suggested that the [local]
residents had seen Americans wearing military fatigues
and assumed they were soldiers.” Foolish Hondurans;
they will jump to conclusions.
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