The Ham in the Sandwich

Honduras takes steps to protect its borders

Because Honduras is bordered on the south by revolutionary Nicaragua and on the west by strife-torn El Salvador, Hondurans like to call their country "the ham in the sandwich." Leftists at both ends of the sandwich last week accused the ham of interference in their affairs, warning that a new policy of Honduran militancy could touch off a region-wide conflagration.

In El Salvador, leaders of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N. in its Spanish abbreviation), an umbrella organization that includes El Salvador's five guerrilla groups, angrily charged that Honduras had infiltrated its troops into El Salvador "so that they could clash with F.M.L.N. forces." In Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, officials claimed that armed anti-Sandinista exiles had crossed into the country from Honduras. Minister of National Defense Humberto Ortega Saavedra said that 60 anti-Sandinista fighters and 40 Nicaraguan soldiers died last week in armed clashes. Honduras in turn charged that Nicaraguan troops had violated its border. Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova, a popular country doctor who came to power last January after Honduras' first presidential election in ten years, allowed, however, that some Honduran troops might have crossed the border while repelling the Nicaraguan army.

The fussing at Honduras follows a decision by President Suazo Cordova and his military chief, Brigadier General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, to take a hard line against the F.M.L.N. The guerrillas had been shipping weapons across Honduras and using the country as a safe haven. Alvarez and Suazo Cordova have concluded that the F.M.L.N. is behind 35 bank robberies and several major kidnapings in Honduras, crimes that have helped finance the group's El Salvador insurrection.

Convinced that the F.M.L.N. poses a long-term threat to Honduras, Alvarez has put aside his country's traditional rivalries with El Salvador's government to mount coordinated antiguerrilla operations in a pocket of territory on the northern border of El Salvador's Morazan department that both countries have claimed as their own. Earlier this month, guerrillas escaped the kickoff campaign, a Honduran-Salvadoran effort to trap guerrilla bands in their border stronghold. Honduran soldiers nonetheless destroyed barracks capable of housing 400 guerrillas and came upon a cache of bullets for G3 rifles, U.N. medical supplies and six cows that had been stolen from local ranchers.

The F.M.L.N. reacted swiftly. Within days, men dressed as power-plant workers entered two generating substations in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, and left behind satchels of TNT. They exploded minutes later, plunging the city into darkness.

The U.S. has provided military training for Honduran officers and sent about 50 military advisers to Honduras to teach local troops counterinsurgency techniques, but has otherwise kept a low profile. Faced with depressed prices for exports like meat and metals, the ailing Honduran economy is hard pressed to finance helicopters and other military equipment required to push the antiguerrilla campaign. President Suazo Cordova journeyed to Washington last week to seek an increase in the level of U.S. military assistance (currently $10.6 million) and economic aid ($48 million). President Reagan told Suazo Cordova that he hoped to give Honduras $17 million in supplementary military aid this year. After embracing Suazo Cordova warmly, Reagan declared that "the people of Honduras should be able to rely on their friends for help. And they can count on us."

One obvious danger in Honduras' new antiguerrilla campaign is that Suazo Cordova and Alvarez will seek to suppress subversion too zealously while trampling on the citizenry. Some Hondurans are already alarmed at Decree 33, an antiterrorist law that Suazo Cordova has pushed through the National Assembly. A countervailing danger is that antiguerrilla efforts by the 14,000-member Honduran armed forces will prove ineffective, leading to an increase in guerrilla activities within the country. "Honduras is poor," notes one prominent diplomat in Tegucigalpa. "If [its leaders] want to play this game, they'd better be damn sure they can win."

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