March of the Sandinistas and Honduras
Somewhere near Murra, Nicaragua
12 December 1977
The border did not really exist out here, among the trees and underbrush. That may have made Omar Cabezas feel better about the direction that the remnants of the FSLN were taking.
The counterinsurgency campaign had come suddenly. Only two months after the new constitution was adopted by a parliamentary vote and validated by overwhelming support in a popular referendum, National Guard forces had struck FLSN positions throughout the country. Equipped with recently delivered U.S. military surplus from Vietnam -including helicopters- the guerrillas were devastated. The FSLN’s fighters, who had built networks among the peasantry, were forced to go into hiding or retreat into the highlands. Many were killed in the initial attacks, although most of the National Directorate escaped unscathed.
Pursued by government forces, the mountain provided both refuge and an advantageous battlefield against the National Guard’s more heavily equipped units. The initial defeat launched a wave of recrimination and accusations. Fonseca, ever the radical, blamed their unpreparedness on ‘defeatism and collaborators among the peasantry’. Jaime Wheelock and his ‘Proletarian’ faction, based in Managua, formally split from the FLSN to form the urban-guerrilla 'Workers’ Revolutionary Front'. Sandinista forces attempted to infiltrate down out of the mountains, but National Guard units defeated column after column.
Yet, between constant ‘search-and-destroy’ missions in the mountains patrols in the foothills and coastal lowlands, and rising casualties, the Guard was overstretched. Chamorro ordered the Guard to focus on its campaign in the highlands, replacing their presence in the countryside with the Nicaraguan National Police. Lightly armed, trained to use the carrot as well as the stick, and accompanied by social workers and state officials, police units moved to protect peasant communities from attacks by either the guerrillas or landowners and their hired thugs. This protection was even extended to union organizers and other political dissidents. The peasantry rewarded the government for its policies: when a snap election was called, Chamorro’s coalition of Conservatives, Christian-democrats and moderate leftists managed to win a narrow majority in the National Assembly.
Still, the war dragged on, and the nearly bankrupt country couldn’t handle the financial strain. In response, Chamorro reached out to the FSLN through back channels, making contact with the National Directorate through guerrilla Joaquín Cuadra’s father, a prominent corporate lawyer. Cuadra became the principal intermediary between the National Directorate and the President’s office. Eventually, a rough plan was worked out. In exchange for amnesty and the release of all captured fighters, the FSLN would lay down its arms and surrender to the Nicaraguan police. The FSLN itself would remain a banned organization, but the fighters would be allowed to participate in politics under a different banner. Facing declining popular support, starvation in the hills and potential military defeat, the National Directorate –after much debate- reluctantly agreed to the deal.
The column continued marching. The men and women were tired; most had not seen their families or friends outside of the group for years. The guerrilla column was their family now; they were a school of fish within the sea of the people. Their rust-tarnished rifles bounced against their backs, food rations in ripped canvas packs. Most wore straw sombreros to protect against the scorching sun, although some wrapped their heads in red or black bandanas.
The split had been as amicable as possible; the Ortega brothers –the principal supporters of the peace deal– promised to provide political cover to ongoing peasant organization and guerrilla training, while Fonseca’s radical faction agreed to limit military operations within the country. More than half of the organization’s remaining fighters had gone with them: Daniel Ortega already talked of organizing a Sandinista political party, using the guerrillas’ tattered rural support networks as a base. The Sandinista National Directorate would continue to exist, meeting secretly whenever possible. The struggle was now dual, with the organization pursuing both ‘democratic and armed popular struggle against feudalism and crypto-fascism’.
Still, many of the guerrillas wanted to fight on, which was why some of them –those who chose not to lay down their arms– were so close to the Honduran border. Fonseca himself had joined them, personally leading a column near the Atlantic coast. The FSLN’s fighters were ‘evacuating’ to Honduras, where the government was weak and the population was ripe for revolution.
After close to an hour of marching, the guerrilla column halted. The sun was high in the sky, and a lucky or watchful Honduran patrol might detect movement. Moreover, they had reached the location of their armed camp. Forward scouts had spent two weeks building shelters and camouflaging them in the dense scrub and forest. Cabezas, a section commander, ordered his men to spread out and find their shelters. Patrols would start later in the day, as would planning for revolutionary activities. The Honduran people tired of their regime, and the forces of popular resistance were on the upswing.
Tucking his bedroll beside a tree root, Cabezas sighed. There was much work to do, and so far away from home.
“Of the successor states to the first Central American federation, Honduras was the least prepared to be an independent republic. The country covered a sizeable expanse of territory by regional standards, but was inhabited by a tiny, dispersed and poor population. Moreover, the country had lackadaisical political leadership, as its elite battled each other for the scraps of power that existed rather than attempting to build a state. The republic’s more powerful neighbours -Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador- repeatedly dominated the weak country, intervening in its politics on a number of occasions during these early decades. For example, Guatemala invaded in 1852, installing a conservative politician in place of the Liberal President Cabañas. While the Honduran military participated in the expulsion of William Walker’s first filibuster in Nicaragua, and executed him after his second attempt to seize power, this time in Honduras itself, external interference did not stop…
Between foreign intervention and related internal strife, Honduras remained an economic and social backwater. Power alternated between the conservative National Party and the Liberal Party, often with coups or brief armed conflicts providing the decisive margin between victory and defeat for one party or another. By 1914, the country’s population was just over half a million people, overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas and a few mid-sized towns. Most economic activity came from mining, cattle ranching and the export of lumber and tropical hardwoods, although the vast majority of the population remained confined to subsistence agriculture.
All of this changed with the emergence of the banana economy. Demand for bananas in the United States prompted massive investment by the United Fruit Company and other firms into Central American land. The Atlantic coastal lowlands of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were excellent –and untapped– grounds for new production, close to American ports, with few inhabitants and weak governments that could be bent to the will of the powerful fruit conglomerates. Banana production soared, and brought new revenues for the government along with massive investment in transport and communications infrastructure. Hondurans joined foreign workers on the rapidly expanding banana plantations; while the banana harvest was backbreaking and often-dangerous work, the plantations paid wages several times higher than most other jobs.
Banana production brought many benefits to Honduras, including a new relevance to international affairs. Ports and railroads were built, and for the first time in the country’s history, the state had the resources to pay its employees and begin building a nation. At the same time, the banana companies interfered in the country’s politics even more intensely than Honduras’ neighbours had, overthrowing or eliminating unfriendly politicians and turning the country’s military into their private security force. By 1920, bananas accounted for nearly all of the country’s exports, a situation that would continue through the middle of the twentieth century…
By the beginning of the 1970s, Honduras was still a sleepy backwater, the quintessential ‘banana republic’ derided by Americans and
Americanos alike as corrupt, primitive and, worst of all, irrelevant. The country had been ruled on-and-off by military juntas since the 1950s, with periodic resumptions of civilian rule under the old two-party Liberal-National system. The economy had stalled, and the country’s elite grew increasingly corrupt. Attempts at agrarian reform, meant to challenge the power of the banana companies and local land barons as well as spark economic development, faltered in the face of elite obstructionism and corporate pressure. General Oswaldo Lopez, who had been President since 1963, briefly ceded power to a civilian government before retaking control in December 1972. Lopez’s rule was, as before, corrupt and stagnating. Social unrest began to rise, particularly among peasants, as the cost of living rose and rapacious landowners pushed them further into penury.
By the middle of the decade, even Lopez began to recognize brewing social tension. He revived the country’s land reform program, challenging local elites, although he refused to confront the power of the American fruit companies. On 19 April 1975, General Gustavo Álvarez seized power from Lopez after a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation revealed that Lopez had taken bribes in exchange for reducing the countries’ banana export tax. Álvarez sought both to protect the country’s elite from further interference and consolidate the role of the military in enforcing the peace. Álvarez, issuing decrees as Chairman of the ‘Armed Forces Junta for National Reorganization’, dissolved all pre-existing political parties, labour unions and other major social organizations. In emulation of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran military regimes, and seeking to avoid the rise of moderate reformists as in Chamorro’s Nicaragua, Álvarez formed the new, military-controlled Patriotic Republican Party, or
Partido Republicano Patriótico (PRP), which would dominate the Honduran political scene in the coming years...
Heavily rigged elections held the following year awarded the Presidency to Álvarez with 88.4% of the vote, with a similarly dominant position for the PRP in the National Congress. The new president promptly appointed his former junta comrades and powerful civilian allies to senior positions in the government. In the meanwhile, the Honduran military had mounted a campaign of repression targeting peasant associations, the small urban working class, banana worker organizers, and the clandestine Communist Party of Honduras and its various breakaway factions. Over 2000 people were killed, imprisoned or exiled in the first two years of the military government’s rule, including members of the middle class and elite who questioned the new political order. The military and intelligence apparatus began to rapidly expand, with the formation of units such as the infamous Special Battalion 19, charged with protecting the regime and Honduras from ‘revolutionary and Communist subversion’. For those leftists who escaped the government’s grasp, peaceful reform appeared to be a dead letter. Instead, to them the choice became clear: surrender, or revolution…
The Álvarez regime, more than any in Honduran history, pursued a proactive economic development strategy. The regime aggressively promoted foreign investment in a diverse array of industries, providing tax breaks and cheap land for foreign firms willing to invest to Honduras. The government, ruling under a ‘state of siege’ that allowed them to ignore constitutional and legal protections, expropriated huge areas of land, handing them over to large foreign conglomerates and their allies in the elite. Cattle ranching, cotton and coffee production expanded rapidly, and major tax incentives for ‘value-added’ industries meant that slaughterhouses and other processing plants popped up in the country’s major cities. Rail, road, port and airport infrastructure was modernized, and Honduras entered negotiations with El Salvador and Guatemala to revive the Central American Common Market…
While some of the Honduran government’s new spending was financed with higher taxes on banana and coffee exports, the Álvarez regime had to borrow significant sums on international financial markets, often at high interest rates. Desperate for new sources of funds, Álvarez authorized negotiations with an unconventional, if established, player: Colombia’s drug cartels. Under the purview of the Minister of National Defence, General Policarpo Paz García, the military’s air and naval bases became transshipment points for planes full of Colombian cocaine, opium and a small but growing amount of Honduran marijuana. Bureaucrats allowed crates full of ‘Petit Michel bananas’ onto New York, Miami and New Orleans-bound ships, where local crime syndicates would boost them from the docks. In exchange, the Colombian traffickers paid per-kilo fees on their product, and Honduran banks, real estate, agriculture and industry became prime sites for dirty Colombian money…
With Honduras descending further into a morass of corrupt repression, the new Udall administration in Washington -which aimed to fight the Cold War but was suspicious of many of its authoritarian allies throughout the Third World- lobbied the government to put the country back on ‘the path to democracy’. According to former Vice-Presidential Chief of Staff and Congressman Richard Perle’s memoirs, after a January 1978 state visit, Vice-President Henry “Scoop” Jackson told the president that not only was the Honduran government involved with the drug trade “at every level”, the Álvarez regime was a “house of cards.” That March, in the aftermath of the Trujillo Massacre, President Udall suspended military assistance to the Honduran government and expressed ‘grave concern towards the worsening situation’ there.
While these cuts were not even a rounding error in the gargantuan U.S. federal budget, the Honduran military felt the bite immediately, especially as the cuts coincided with a major escalation in guerrilla activity. The government was forced to delay new projects and slash spending to make room for higher military expenditures. Combined with rising unrest in urban areas, the Honduran Civil War was about to begin in earnest…
U. G. Pederson. Banana Republic: A History of Honduras. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press (2011).
