Word: hondurans
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Driving to the sleepy Honduran market town of Las Trojes, the visitor travels along a dirt track that hugs the Nicaraguan border. The boundary is no more than a hundred yards away in most places, marked by three strands of barbed wire clinging to rotting posts hidden in chest-high grass. At a point where the road elbows its way out of forested hills and runs through open country, a Honduran soldier on patrol warns, "The Sandinistas will shoot at anybody." No wonder. Thousands of U.S.-backed contras have infiltrated that barbed-wire border to set up a base camp...
...better part of the past year, hundreds of Sandinista troops have wandered in and out of Honduras, looking for the rebel forces known as contras. And for most of that time, the Honduran military has looked the other way. On Dec. 6, however, Honduran President Jose Azcona Hoyo shattered that arrangement by ordering his air force to strafe the Nicaraguan positions inside the country. Later that day, Azcona summoned U.S. Ambassador Everett Briggs and urgently appealed for U.S. logistical support. President Reagan responded promptly, authorizing an airlift. Last week U.S. troops flying twin- rotor Chinooks and Huey helicopters ferried hundreds...
...surface, the provocative Honduran behavior was a response to a Sandinista attack on Honduran outposts in which three Honduran soldiers were injured and two taken prisoner. Under different circumstances, Azcona might have overlooked the Nicaraguan indiscretion, just as he has ignored more than 60 other Sandinista incursions this year alone. But with the Iran-contra scandal swirling in Washington, the Honduran President was plainly seeking reassurance from the White House. His appeal for U.S. help seemed designed to gauge whether the arms scandal had shaken the Reagan Administration's support for the rebels. More important, it tested U.S. resolve...
...Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams warned, "The Central Americans are scared to death. They're scared about our staying power." Now Washington's friends are all the more concerned that they may get stuck supporting the contras without U.S. help. "We sympathize with their cause," says one Honduran official of the contras. "But without American support, they'll just become bandits...
...performance to determine if they are worth continued U.S. investment. The lastest border fighting may hurt. Since March, hundreds of Sandinistas have been inside Honduras at any one time. The inability of the 12,000 rebels in Honduras to keep those troops south of the border and away from Honduran targets continues to encourage a perception that the contras are no match for the Sandinistas...