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Honduras Accord in Nicaragua
Talks continued among the Central American presidents
as they
sought to resolve the insurgencies in El Salvador and
Nicaragua. A
series of summit meetings took place during 1989. The
presidents
agreed to a draft plan on February 14, 1989. The plan
called for
the demobilization and repatriation of Contra forces
within ninety
days, in return for elections. Nicaraguan president Daniel
José
Ortega Saavedra agreed to hold a February 1990 balloting.
A foreign
ministers' meeting also produced agreement on foreign (but
non-United States) observers to supervise the
demobilization.
The Central American leaders crafted the agreement
largely
without advice or guidance from the United States.
Although the
United States remained Honduras's leading supporter and
ally, the
United States administration gradually lost influence over
events
in Central America as the Esquipulas process played out.
Having
apparently neglected its relationship with President
Azcona, the
administration of George H.W. Bush (1989-93) turned to a
more
established connection, that between the United States
government
and the Honduran armed forces. Although Brigadier General
López had
been purged and exiled in February 1986, the armed forces
maintained a pro-United States stance. After discussions
with Bush
administration envoys, the Honduran officer corps agreed
that
nonmilitary aid to the Contras should continue despite the
February
agreement. President Azcona, reportedly persuaded by the
military,
announced that humanitarian aid to the Contras would
reduce the
security threat to Honduras and would not violate the
terms of the
February 1989 agreement.
The ninety-day timetable established by the February
1989
agreement proved unworkable. In order to avoid losing
momentum, the
five presidents reconvened in Tela, Honduras, beginning on
August
5, 1989. Once again, the presidents negotiated without
input from
the United States government. They produced a new schedule
for
Contra demobilization, with a deadline of December 5,
1989. The OAS
agreed to supervise the process. Although the Bush
administration
expressed disapproval of the new agreement, the White
House and
United States Congress agreed that the Contras' aid would
be cut
off if the Nicaraguan rebels failed to disband; the United
States
Congress approved US$49.7 million in humanitarian aid to
the
Contras to be given through February 1990.
The December 5 deadline also proved overly optimistic.
As the
date approached, the Central American leaders again
scheduled a
summit. The first site selected was Managua. That venue
changed to
San José, Costa Rica, however, after the discovery of arms
in the
wreckage of a Nicaraguan aircraft that had crashed in El
Salvador.
The Salvadoran government subsequently suspended relations
with
Nicaragua, and an aura of conflict continued to hang over
the
summit. At one point, Azcona stormed out of a session
after
Nicaraguan president Ortega refused to drop Nicaragua's
International Court of Justice suit against Honduras over
the
Contras' use of Honduran territory. The Nicaraguan
government had
previously agreed to drop the suit if the December 5
demobilization
deadline were met. As the summit broke up without
agreement, the
Central American situation once again appeared dangerously
unpredictable.
The unpredictability of events demonstrated itself once
again in
the Nicaraguan elections in February 1990. Contrary to
most
prognostications and opinion polls, opposition candidate
Violeta
Barrios de Chamorro handily defeated Ortega and the FSLN.
Having
been forced to hold free elections, the FSLN discovered
that many
Nicaraguans deeply resented the authoritarian rule of
their
revolutionary government. The Contra insurgency, which had
plagued
both Nicaragua and Honduras for years, slowly drew to a
close.
Although Honduran president Azcona had began the
process that
eventually culminated in the resolution of the Nicaraguan
conflict,
another president would occupy the presidential palace as
the
Contras abandoned their camps in Honduras and marched
south. The
elections of November 26, 1989, were free of the makeshift
electoral procedures that had rendered the 1985 balloting
questionable. The PLH and PNH nominated one candidate
each, rather
than several. Carlos Flores Facusse, a Rodista and protégé
of
ex-president Suazo Córdova, won the PLH nomination and the
right to
oppose Rafael Leonardo Callejas, who had also carried the
banner of
the PNH when he lost in 1985. Callejas's convincing
victory, by
50.2 to 44.5 percent, reflected public discontent with the
PLH
government's failure to translate increased foreign aid
into
improvements in the domestic economy. Callejas became the
first
opposition candidate to win an election in Honduras since
1932. All
signs indicated that in the early 1990s, Honduras's
democratic
transition remained on course.
* * *
No complete history of Honduras in English is
available. Several
volumes are available on the history of Central America,
the best
of which is Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.'s Central America:
A Nation
Divided. Material on pre-Columbian Honduras can be
found in
John B. Glass's "Archaeological Survey of Western
Honduras" in the
Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 4. The
period of
Spanish conquest is carefully detailed in Robert S.
Chamberlin's
The Conquest and Colonization of Honduras,
1502-1550.
Valuable material for the colonial period can be found in
Murdo
MacLeod's Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic
History,
1520-1720 and in Miles L. Wortman's Government and
Society
in Central America, 1680-1840. Honduras at the time of
independence is well covered in Louis Bumgartner's José
Cecilo
del Valle of Central America.
Coverage of the nineteenth century is quite spotty.
Mid-century
conditions are surveyed in E. George Squier's Notes on
Central
America: Particularly the States of Honduras and El
Salvador.
There is considerable valuable material in Thomas L.
Karnes's
The Failure of Union: Central America, 1824-1960.
There are
also numerous studies of the rise of the American fruit
companies
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many
of them
polemical. The best, by far, is Karnes's Tropical
Enterprise:
Standard Fruit and Steamship Company in Latin America.
The pattern of United States-Honduran relations in the
first
third of the twentieth century is included in two volumes
by Dana
G. Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the
Caribbean,
1900-1921 and The United States and the Caribbean
Republics,
1921-1933. The development of the Honduran political
system,
especially in the twentieth century, is covered in William
S.
Stokes's Honduras: An Area Study in Government. The
rise of
the military to political prominence is surveyed in Steve
C. Ropp's
"The Honduran Army in the Sociopolitical Evolution of the
Honduran
State." An excellent recent study is Robert MacCameron's
Bananas, Labor, and Politics in Honduras,
1954-1963, which
focuses on the 1954 banana workers' strike. The background
to the
1969 conflict with El Salvador is covered in William H.
Durham's
Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological
Origins of
tghe Soccer War; the causes, course, and results of
the
conflict are detailed in Thomas P. Anderson's The War
of the
Dispossessed: Honduras and El Salvador, 1969. Also
useful is
Mary Jeanne Reid Martz's The Central American Soccer
War:
Historical Patterns and Internal Dynamics of OAS
Settlement
Procedures. The immediate postwar period is described
in James
A. Morris's The Honduran Plan, Político de Unidad
Nacional,
1971-1972: Its Origins and Demise. Morris also surveys
the
situation at the start of the 1980s in "Honduras: How Long
an Oasis
of Peace?" (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1993
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