Word: hondurans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since 1983, Honduran military officials have pressed Washington to provide them with sophisticated jet fighters. The Reagan Administration has now decided to honor that request, despite its previous refusals to supply Honduras with advanced warplanes. Instead of the U.S. F-5s that they originally requested, however, the Hondurans have opted to use U.S. military aid to buy 18 Israeli Kfir jets. "We saw problems from the American Congress in getting the F-5s," said a Honduran official...
...agencies to take responsibility for the $100 million package. The program will be administered on a day-to-day basis by the CIA and supervised by the State Department. As if to underscore that point, Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, traveled to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, where he met briefly with President Jose Azcona Hoyo and then with several senior contra leaders...
...issue has been further complicated because the presence of the contras on Honduran soil violates the principle of self-determination enshrined in the country's constitution. Honduran officials are therefore wont to deny the guerrillas' presence in one breath and, in the next, to explain that the contras are needed to defend the 508-mile border with Nicaragua. Having seen the Sandinistas invade their country in pursuit of contras only last March, some Hondurans believe the guerrillas are not preventing war so much as provoking it. "Of course U.S. economic aid helps us," says Efrain Diaz, head of the opposition...
...face of that new sense of menace, many Hondurans do not know where to turn. Although they dislike and distrust the leftist government in Managua, they are not keen to support the Sandinistas' enemies. Apart from destabilizing the area, the 15,000 contras have been charged with robbing . local campesinos and even, in a few cases, raping and killing them. Some Honduran officials fear the guerrillas are too ill prepared and misdirected to unseat the Sandinistas and will ultimately end up as refugees in Honduras. "They have no chance to win," says a local government official. "I just wish that...
Indeed, the majority of Hondurans respond to their liminal position with a paradoxical longing: that the contras be replaced by U.S. troops, and the indecisive border skirmishing by a full-scale U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. As it is, Washington currently has only 750 troops on Honduran soil in a constantly fluctuating rotation that sometimes involves as many as 5,800. "The only way to get rid of the Sandinistas," says Conchita Canales, a Nicaraguan exile now working as a cook in the Honduran border town of San Marcos, "is with the kind of action the U.S. pulled off in that...