Deborah Sundloff Schulz - The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America

The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America

Gilbert W. Merkx
Series Editor

The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America, Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Sundloff Schulz

Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and Radical Christianity in the Argentine "Dirty War," Frank Graziano

Land, Power, and Poverty: Agrarian Transformation and Political Conflict in Central America, Charles D. Brockett

FORTHCOMING

The Women's Movement in Latin America: Participation mid Democracy, Second Edition, edited by Jane S. Jaquette

Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Sundloff Schulz

Thematic Studies in Latin America

The views expressed in this book are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of the Army or the U.S. Government.

First published 1994 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1994 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schulz, Donald E., 1942
The United States, Honduras, and the crisis in Central America /
Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Sundloff Schulz.
p. cm. (Thematic studies in Latin America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-1324-4 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8133-1323-6 (paperback)
1. HondurasPolitics and government1982 2. Honduras
RelationsUnited States. 3. United StatesRelationsHonduras.
4. Central AmericaPolitics and government1979 I. Schulz,
Deborah S. (Deborah Sundloff) II. Title. III. Series.
F1508.3.S34 1994
972.83053dc20 93-45691
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-1323-8 (pbk)

To Deborah's parents, Dorislee Nicholls and Fredrick Douglas Sundloff, who did a fine job of getting her to this point, and to Mndez and the muchachos at Toncontn

The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the "Banana Republics"
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera.

Pablo Neruda "The United Fruit Company"

Much water has flowed under the Guanacaste bridge since this book was first conceived in the summer of 1984. Back then it seemed appropriate to write a short, pithy tale of a small, dependent country corrupted by the overwhelming power and influence of the "Colossus of the North." In the process of researching the study, however, we found a history and society much richer and more interesting than that. Having lived in Honduras for two years and visited it on numerous occasions, we came to love it even as we were appalled by its weaknesses. This affection may not always be apparent in the pages that follow. Inevitably, if one is focusing on the causes of a crisiswhether current or chronicone must dwell on the negative: poverty, corruption, subservience to foreign interests, and so on. Such realities tend to overshadow the positive traits of a people. Yet we have grown to appreciate the strength and courage of the many ordinary Hondurans who continue to live their lives under the most trying of circumstances: mothers attempting desperately to survive and keep together the remains of their families after fathers have left home, peasants still seeking to eke out a living though the land they work cannot support them, schoolteachers trying to survive on a salary that is not nearly enough to sustain a decent living. There is much here to respect, as well as much to criticize.

Above all, we have come to understand that Honduras is not a one-dimensional society. Though the country is best known to North Americans through stereotypes, it is not simply a "banana republic" (Today, in fact, bananas account for only about one-third to one-half of the value of Honduran exports.) Nor is it quite the "constitutional democracy" that the Reagan administration designated it or the "land-based aircraft carrier" that was the object of so much ridicule from the political left during the 1980s. Although all these images capture part of Honduran reality, they are essentially political cartoons; they oversimplify and distort to the point of caricature. Behind them there is a complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory society that has largely defied North American efforts at classification.

Indeed, Honduran politics often has a surrealistic quality about it: It is a politics of indirection, resembling in some respects the swirling, convoluted back roads of Tegucigalpa, which often lead the unwary traveler in directions not anticipated. (Here the shortest distance between two points is often a semicircle.) And so constitutions and civilian institutions are largelythough not entirelya facade, masking the source and exercise of more fundamental powers in the armed forces. The normal way of transferring power substantive poweris not by elections but rather by subterranean intrigue and provocation. Nor is this a simple matter of brute force. In Honduras, military hegemony relies as much on the submission of civilians as on the threat or exercise of violence. For all the congratulatory and self-congratulatory rhetoric that attended the restoration of procedural democracy (elections) in the early 1980s, civil-military relations since then have not changed much. The civilians are still subordinate to the armed forces. Perhaps they like it that way; they seem to be comfortable in their position of established inferiority.

Beyond this, perhaps the most striking feature of the political culture is its contradictions. If the society has glaring weaknesses, it also has unexpected strengths. In fact, some of the weaknesses are, paradoxically, sources of strength. Thus, the very underdevelopment that would seem, on the surface, to make this country a prime candidate for revolutionary turmoil has contributed to its continuing stability. (In contrast, in the more economically advanced El Salvador, development-generated social and political changes played a major role in plunging the country into civil war.) The armed forces, though repressive and plagued by corruption and incompetence, have also been a source of stability: They have been flexible enough to allow a certain amount of reform and to avoid the kind of massive human rights violations that in El Salvador and Guatemala pushed so many people into the arms of the extreme left. Similarly, socioeconomic and psychological dependency, passivity, inefficiency, and corruptiondeadweight on economic development and modernizationhave provided much of the glue that has held this society together.