Some Reluctant Friends

By Pico Iyer.

In Honduras and Costa Rica, concern about the U.S. presence increases

Not far from the sleepy fishing village of Trujillo on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, construction workers are toiling in the sweltering tropical heat to erect dozens of elevated wooden barracks. Each of the $2,000 buildings is made to last. Those already completed make up the nucleus of the Regional Military Training Center, where 150 U.S. advisers have instructed 6,000 Honduran and Salvadoran recruits over the past 13 months. Near by, workers have constructed sandbagged guard positions and bunkers large enough to shelter every serviceman in case of attack. "These soldiers are facing a tough enemy," says an American trainer. "As long as there is trouble down here, we've got to stay."

Near the dusty cattle town of Liberia in Costa Rica, members of the Civil Guard are listlessly chasing a stray hummingbird through their armory. "Actually, most of these guns are for the birds," jokes Colonel Jose Ramon Montero, a rice farmer who prefers T shirts to camouflage and diligently observes banker's hours. "These M-1s could have seen service at Normandy, and most of these weapons would be more valuable in Hollywood." His company's mission, however, is no scriptwriter's flight of fancy: his men are serving as a first line of defense against the Sandinista forces from Nicaragua, 30 miles to the north. Two months ago, when the Sandinistas began pounding the border checkpoint of Penas Blancas, Montero had to charter a bus and haggle with local cabbies just to get his men out to the front. "I'm not asking for a tank," he sighs. "Just three pickup trucks."

Neither Honduras nor Costa Rica is currently at war. But both border on Nicaragua, whose imposing military buildup and revolutionary Marxist rhetoric have caused its neighbors alarm. Both are also bases for thousands of U.S.-backed contras, Nicaraguan rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government. Now, to varying degrees, Honduras and Costa Rica are growing apprehensive about the close relationship with the U.S. that their geopolitical predicament has forced upon them.

In Honduras last week, officials were considering whether to revise the 1954 Bilateral Assistance Military Agreement, under which the U.S. can bring a wide range of military equipment to Honduran soil, and in particular a secret 1982 appendix that made possible the creation of the Regional Military Training Center. The government of President Roberto Suazo Cordova has also been discreetly pressuring some 10,000 Honduran-based contras to move into Nicaragua. After playing host to as many as 5,000 U.S. servicemen and conducting joint military exercises with the U.S. almost continuously over the past 18 months, Honduras now houses fewer than 700 U.S. troops and has asked that the exercises be scaled down.

Costa Rica too has resisted U.S. attempts to turn it into a stronger military buffer against Nicaragua. Last week, in a show of independence from Washington, President Luis Alberto Monge announced that he had obtained $154 million in loans from Western European nations. The neutral Costa Rican government also ousted a contra spokesman by canceling his tourist visa.

Beyond their fears that the presence of U.S. troops could actually incite Sandinista attacks, both countries fear that a military buildup could drain money from civilian economies that are already in dire straits. Honduras has virtually ceased payment on its $2 billion debt to foreign Danks and international organizations, a move almost unnoticed during the Argentine debt crisis. Capital flight in the past two years alone has been estimated at $1 billion. Although Costa Rica is substantially better off (it receives more U.S. aid per capita than any other country except Israel), it can barely meet the interest payments on its $4 billion foreign debt.

When U.S. forces first arrived in Honduras last summer, an enthusiastic welcome awaited them. The American trainers quickly whipped the lackadaisical local forces into shape and upgraded the Honduran arsenal: in place of World War I-vintage French equipment, it now includes at least two dozen 105-mm howitzers. The Americans were further encouraged in their mission by the effective leader of the country, Army Commander in Chief Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, a zealous friend of the U.S. and sworn enemy of the Sandinista regime.

But the honeymoon proved short-lived, as the Hondurans have begun to suspect that the temporary U.S. presence might soon prove permanent. On the streets of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, U.S. servicemen now attract baleful stares. When two G.I.s in a pickup truck hit a local student last May, an angry mob pounced on the vehicle and set it ablaze. Most important, after ousting Alvarez in a barracks coup last April, General Walter Lopez Reyes lost no time in publicly repudiating his predecessor's policy as a "distortion in the use of power, which endangers Honduras' peace-loving and democratic policy." Negotiation with the Sandinistas, he implied, was preferable to confrontation, and the economy was more important than the military.

"If you have a guest in your house, the first week you have breakfast and the talk is friendly," explains Jorge Arturo Reina, leader of a dissident faction of Honduras' ruling Liberal Party. "After a month, your wife begins to ask when he is leaving. The second month, you ask him directly what his plans are." Nor is any foreign military presence likely to be popular in a country in which barely half the population is fully employed and per capita income is only $600 a year. Although in the present fiscal year the U.S. is committed to sending Honduras $168 million in economic aid, vs. only $78 million in military aid, the Suazo government would like to receive even more compensation for its support. "We have wonderful relations with the U.S.," says Government Spokesman Amilcar Santamaria, "but we believe the level of U.S. [financial] cooperation could be higher."

Honduras maintains, in addition, grave reservations about the uninvited friends its guest has brought along. The Tennessee-size nation of 4 million has during the past year been crowded with soldiers from three foreign countries. Apart from U.S. troops, Honduras has provided a home for thousands of contras, whose hit-and-run operations along its borders have served only to inflame the threat of Nicaraguan retaliation. At the U.S.-run training camp in Trujillo, meanwhile, the Americans have been graduating twice as many soldiers from neighboring El Salvador as they have Hondurans, in an effort to bolster that country's fight against the rebels. That rankles many Honduran officials, who recall the 1969 war between the two countries and still believe, as an opposition leader puts it, that "once El Salvador settles its internal problem, it will set its sights on us again." In the past three months, the Honduran government has insisted that there be as many Honduran trainees as Salvadoran and that it, rather than the U.S. advisers, determine how many Salvadorans enter the country.

To the State Department, such defiant gestures indicate a change of degree, not of direction, in Honduran policies toward the U.S. But the country's newfound assertiveness also suggests that its sense of pride may have been wounded. "Honduras has always been the stupid child of the region, and what has happened with the U.S. shows it even more," complains Gilberto Goldstein, president of the Honduran Sugar Producers Association. That feeling was exacerbated when Secretary of State George Shultz paid a surprise visit to Nicaraguan leaders in Managua two months ago. It seemed to many Hondurans that Washington might be angling to resolve its differences with Nicaragua privately, peaceably, and over their heads. "At the insistence of the U.S., Honduras has been taking a hard line," points out a Honduran political scientist. "And now we're being made to look like fools."

Costa Rica, by contrast, has sought to defend nothing more than its own implacable neutrality. Ever since a brief revolution in 1948, the country has had no army, no tanks and no troops. Indeed, its defense force might almost have been recruited from the chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. The air corps consists of seven planes; the 250-man company that is assigned to defend the capital of San Jose relies for transportation on a single Land Rover. More than half the 8,000 members of the Civil Guard are traffic policemen, who until recently wielded no instrument more deadly than a screwdriver (for prying license plates off illegally parked cars). Costa Rica's most powerful weapon is the 81-mm mortar, but there are only six of those in the whole country; and their ammunition, bought 30 years ago, no longer explodes.

Such insouciance perfectly suits the region's showcase democracy. Costa Rica's 2.5 million citizens, most of them middle class, thrive on a relaxed and tolerant ethos founded upon a spirit of gentle compromise. For three decades the government has concentrated on building roads, schools and hospitals instead of arsenals. The country now boasts the highest per capita income in Central America ($1,520) as well as the lowest illiteracy rate (under 10%). "The last thing this country needs is an army," maintains Jose ("Don Pepe") Figueres Ferrer, the first President of neutral Costa Rica.

That happy nonchalance may, however, be a luxury for which Costa Rica will have to pay a price. In the past two years the country has become a home for the 3,500 anti-Sandinista contras of the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ARDE) and, in the process, a target for Nicaraguan reprisals. Just three months ago, after ARDE Chief Eden Pastora Gomez used his Costa Rican base to launch a 36-hour attack on the Nicaraguan port town of San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua struck back by firing 60 rockets at the Costa Rican border settlement of Poco Sol. Not long before the Sandinistas began assaulting the border town of Penas Blancas, Costa Rican President Monge sent an urgent message to Washington asking that a shipment of $7.85 million in promised military aid be sent posthaste.

Hard-liners within the Reagan Administration seized upon that request with glee. One low-level State Department cable even proclaimed that it "could lead to a significant shift from [Costa Rica's] neutralist tightrope act and push it more explicitly and publicly into the anti-Sandinista camp." Although the message did not reflect official policy, once leaked it produced an understandable outcry in Costa Rica.

Actually, Costa Rica violated its military abstinence three years ago, when the Sandinistas began drawing closer to Cuba and the Soviet Union. At that point the government accepted $30,000 from the U.S. to send local guards to be trained in Panama, and allowed Washington to sup ply the nation with boots, tents, Jeeps, ra dios and even some low-key training. Last year the U.S. offered to rebuild a main road through the dense jungle in northern Costa Rica.

It seemed hardly coincidental to Costa Ricans that the road could serve to ferry troops and materiel northward in the event of an attack by Nicaragua. They were nonetheless willing to accept the offer until Under Secretary of Defense Fred Ikle injudiciously announced that hundreds of military personnel would be responsible for the project and that their presence "would be the first such joint exercises in Costa Rica." With a menacing Nicaragua urging it to remain on the side lines, Costa Rica began backing away from the road project, then canceled it. Two months ago, 30,000 Costa Ricans flocked into the streets to reaffirm their country's neutrality.

Costa Rica's dilemma is partly of its own making. Its pacific tradition has long made it a haven for exiles of all political stripes: it now houses some 16,000 refugees from El Salvador, 10,000 of them un registered. It is home to 3,500 exiles from the Sandinista regime, though just five years ago it allowed free rein to Sandinista rebels fighting to bring down Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

In the final analysis, neither Costa Rica nor Honduras will be satisfied with its military situation until it has made progress with its social and economic woes. And until Washington appreciates this, the U.S. is unlikely to be fully welcomed or trusted in either land.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Tegucigalpa, David DeVoss/San Jose