THE WIDER WAR
Butler, Judy
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...
...be it a band of bitter assassins, such as the ex-Somoza Guardsmen now training in Honduras, Guatemala, Florida and California...
...Deputy Secretary of State William Clark, stated recently, "We intend to go to the source with whatever means may become reasonably necessary" to stop the arms flow from Cuba...
...Three Marine battalions are called out of reserve and posted at Guantanamo, the U.S...
...1. See Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1981, on U.S...
...copies available from EPICA, Washington, D.C...
...But Honduras is the key partner-the only one not fully absorbed by the fight against revolutionary forces within its own borders...
...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...
...military build-up toward the region...
...The Nation, March 14, 1981 on Marines in Cuba...
...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...
...3 Drawing the line in El Salvador is no longer enough...
...All of the above flows from a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy, and the autonomy, of movements that have galvanized hundreds of thousands of people to fight for a better life...
...As Secretary Haig stated before a Congressional subcommittee, "We are clearly going to have to do something in the very near future...
...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 paramilitary forces.5 Officers of the three armies meet regularly at Ocotepeque, where the borders come together...
...Surely Reagan's aides will come up with a catchier name than the Alliance for Progress...
...2 And if Cuba is the most dangerous source of unrest in the region, then Cuba must be dealt with as well...
...May/June 1981 21NACLA Report This article focuses on this wider war, by looking first at Honduras, previously known only as a vast fiefdom of United Fruit...
...policy toward the region...
...But the basic strategy-counterinsurgency with a sugar coating -remains the same...
...The Administration's new talk of a mini-Marshall Plan for Central America and the Caribbean is intended to shed a benevolent light on U.S...
...5. For a detailed analysis of this notion, see Philip E. Wheaton, "The Iron Triangle: The Honduran Connection...
...Their incorporation into the revolutionary struggle will pose a powerful challenge to U.S...
...The logic of that rhetoric contains a built-in escalation clause...
...The revolutionary who haunts thei, hysterical prose never acquires a face...
...And it threatens to provoke a regional war that could dwarf Vietnam as an American trauma...
...Resumption of U.S...
...naval base inside Cuba...
...Nicaragua, as it approaches the second anniversary of its successful 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...
...military aid to Guatemala is already in the works...
...This is the imperial ideology of noblesse oblige and national security that led us into Vietnam...
...efforts to imprison people within its own sphere of influence, and within the same social structures that engendered revolution in the first place...
...4. Tom J. Farer, "Reagan's Latin America," New York Review of Books, March 19, 1981...
...And finally, the country that is already talked about as the next El Salvador by reactionaries and revolutionaries alike...
...It hides the real quest for raw materials, investment outlets, military bases and strategic canals...
...Having taken up arms-some of them Cuban or Russian or otherwise tainted-against an anticommunist 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 inflicts unlimited terror on its own people, in the case of El Salvador or Guatemala...
...be it a paranoid Army in Honduras, intent on replacing Somoza's Nicaragua as the new regional gendarme...
...In Guatemala, an Indian population of four million is now emerging from centuries of resignation and isolation from other exploited sectors...
...Or the rhetoric of the Reagan Administration put into practice...
...Navy build-up...
...And military bases in Miami and Puerto Rico are readied to support quick interventions.' Part of a futuristic nightmare...
...defeat there must not be treated as irreversible...
...Honduras is still comparatively tranquil...
...Neoconservatives ask no questions about the particulars of time, place and program, about why a man or woman has assumed the awful peril of rebellion...
...and Third World, No...
...its Army can look outward.* Not content with joining forces to counter future revolutions, Central America is now abuzz with plans to subvert an existing one...
...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 growing guerrilla army...
...7 (March 14, 1981) on general U.S...
...Space doesn't permit us to examine the internal dyna- mics of Honduras, which will be the subject of a future Report...
...to detail...
...2. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, March 26, 1981...
...3. Washington Post, February 22, 1981...
...they never ask because for their crabbed purposes, they have all the necessary answers...
Vol. 15 • May 1981 • No. 3
