U.S. Special Forces crawl through the dense jungles of the Panama Canal Zone in simulated warfare. Forty-five ships, three times the usual Navy contingent, crowd the Caribbean’s waters. Three Marine battalions are called out of reserve and posted at Guantanamo, the U.S. naval base inside Cuba. And military bases in Miami and Puerto Rico are readied to support quick interventions.’ Part of a futuristic nightmare? Or the rhetoric of the Reagan Administration put into practice? The logic of that rhetoric contains a built-in es-
calation clause. If El Salvador is only one battle
in a larger war against Soviet designs, then the
“El Salvador Solution” must now be applied to
Guatemala as well, where public protest is now
going underground and merging with a grow-
ing guerrilla army. Resumption of U.S. mili-
tary aid to Guatemala is already in the works.
If Somoza was first on the Soviet “hit list,”
and if Nicaragua now serves as a “foothold” to
spread revolutionary fires, then the U.S. defeat
there must not be treated as irreversible. As Sec-
retary Haig stated before a Congressional sub-
committee, “We are clearly going to have to do
something in the very near future.” 2
And if Cuba is the most dangerous source of
unrest in the region, then Cuba must be dealt
with as well. Deputy Secretary of State William
Clark, stated recently, “We intend to go to the
source with whatever means may become rea-
sonably necessary” to stop the arms flow from
Cuba. 3 Drawing the line in El Salvador is no
longer enough.
All of the above flows from a refusal to ac-
knowledge the legitimacy, and the autonomy, of
movements that have galvanized hundreds of
thousands of people to fight for a better life. “In
order to maintain their Manichean vision,”
Tom Farer writes of those now in charge of U. S.
policy, “they must practice a heroic indifference
Militia women, Nicaragua, 1981.
to detail. The revolutionary who haunts thei,
hysterical prose never acquires a face. Neocon-
servatives ask no questions about the particulars
of time, place and program, about why a man or
woman has assumed the awful peril of rebellion;
they never ask because for their crabbed pur-
poses, they have all the necessary answers. Hav-
ing taken up arms-some of them Cuban or
Russian or otherwise tainted-against an anti-
communist government, the revolutionary is
either a totalitarian communist or a foolish tool,
not to mention a ‘terrorist.’ “4
To save Central America from the Soviets,
the Reagan Administration is prepared to aid
any “lesser evil”-be it a government that in-
flicts unlimited terror on its own people, in the
case of El Salvador or Guatemala; be it a band of
bitter assassins, such as the ex-Somoza Guards-
men now training in Honduras, Guatemala,
Florida and California; be it a paranoid Army in
Honduras, intent on replacing Somoza’s Nica-
ragua as the new regional gendarme.
This is the imperial ideology of noblesse oblige
and national security that led us into Vietnam.
It hides the real quest for raw materials, invest-
ment outlets, military bases and strategic canals.
And it threatens to provoke a regional war that
could dwarf Vietnam as an American trauma.
May/June 1981 21NACLA Report
This article focuses on this wider war, by look-
ing first at Honduras, previously known only as
a vast fiefdom of United Fruit. But today,
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador form
part of an “Iron Triangle,” committed to
holding the line against communist subversion
by coordinating their own military and paramil-
itary forces.5 Officers of the three armies meet
regularly at Ocotepeque, where the borders
come together. But Honduras is the key part-
ner-the only one not fully absorbed by the fight
against revolutionary forces within its own bor-
ders. Honduras is still comparatively tranquil;
its Army can look outward.*
Not content with joining forces to counter fu-
ture revolutions, Central America is now abuzz
with plans to subvert an existing one. Nicaragua, as it approaches the second anniversary of its suc-
cessful insurrection, is now the target of efforts to
turn back the clock and play on the vulnerabilities
of a country still ravaged by the effects of civil war, and still experimenting with new political forms.
And finally, the country that is already talked
about as the next El Salvador by reactionaries and
revolutionaries alike. In Guatemala, an Indian
population of four million is now emerging from
centuries of resignation and isolation from other
exploited sectors. Their incorporation into the
revolutionary struggle will pose a powerful chal-
lenge to U.S. policy toward the region.
The Administration’s new talk of a mini-Mar-
shall Plan for Central America and the Caribbean
is intended to shed a benevolent light on U.S. ef-
forts to imprison people within its own sphere of in-
fluence, and within the same social structures that
engendered revolution in the first place. Surely
Reagan’s aides will come up with a catchier name
than the Alliance for Progress. But the basic
strategy-counterinsurgency with a sugar coating
-remains the same.
*Space doesn’t permit us to examine the internal dyna- mics of Honduras, which will be the subject of a future Report.
1. See Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1981, on U.S.
Navy build-up; The Nation, March 14, 1981 on Marines in
Cuba; and Third World, No. 7 (March 14, 1981) on general
U.S. military build-up toward the region.
2. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings,
March 26, 1981.
3. Washington Post, February 22, 1981.
4. Tom J. Farer, “Reagan’s Latin America,” New
York Review of Books, March 19, 1981.
5. For a detailed analysis of this notion, see Philip E.
Wheaton, “The Iron Triangle: The Honduran Connec-
tion;” copies available from EPICA, Washington, D.C.
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