Honduras Shadow Fighting in Limbo

By Pico Iyer

In one sector of the red-tiled capital of Tegucigalpa, the walls are scarred with angry slogans. DEATH TO COMMUNISM, the bloodred graffiti say. OUT, SOVIET TRASH! On the other side of the city, not far from the main drag of pizza parlors and Dunkin' Donuts outlets, where Madonna's hit Papa Don't Preach squeals from every radio, the signs say, AMERICAN MURDERERS OUT and OUT, YANKEE TRASH! Somewhere in the middle, there are a few quieter and more plaintive messages: PEACE YES, WAR NO.

The graffiti war in Honduras is at once a parody and a paradigm of the larger phantom war that is haunting the country within its borders and without. Ever since 1982, when the U.S.-backed contra rebels set up bases in Honduras for their efforts to bring down the Nicaraguan government, the country has found itself in a curious kind of limbo: not at war, but hardly at peace, caught in the line of a fire that it is unwilling and largely powerless to join. Now, with Washington about to send $100 million in aid to the contras, the reluctant hosts find themselves closer to the war, and more divided, than ever.

As the third poorest nation in the hemisphere, Honduras is more than eager to receive the $100 million, as well as the $80 million that Washington is sending this year to strengthen the country's military, which is led by General Humberto Regalado Hernandez. Yet many Hondurans feel that the government of President Jose Azcona Hoyo is forfeiting its stability and independence to gain the Yanqui money.

The 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 Christian Democratic Party, "but Honduras has no independent foreign policy anymore. We have displaced people on our own territory, a permanent conflict with Nicaragua, and we are isolated internationally. I see an escalation of the war, and I do not know where it will stop."

The shadow of that escalation falls longest in the farming areas near the contras' southern training camps. Already, as many as 20,000 peasants have been driven from their homes by the increased cross-border shelling, and many of them are now committed to their own kind of limbo -- living in one-room shacks, unsettled by the fighting yet hardly supported by the government. All around are further casualties of war. In the sunbaked border town of Danli, the local coffee-growers' association estimates that its members have lost $15 million in four years. The farm owners have seen their land destroyed and their workers discouraged. "I am down from 30 workers to eight," complains Antonio Eraso, the group's president, "and now some of our children are starving. We are worse victims of the war than those in Nicaragua."

That air of embattlement has gradually spread across the country. After the contra aid package was passed by Congress this summer, President Azcona predicted a "backlash of subversive acts in Honduras." Two weeks later, seven men with machine guns and hand grenades set upon a prominent Nicaraguan exile, wounding two of his guards. Only a few days later, the car of a journalist who had criticized the contras' presence was blown up.

In the 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 the U.S. would send them to Alaska."

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 island of Grenada." For the moment, though, it seems that the tensions and motions of war will continue, with none of the ready solutions. "No one feels completely secure," says Victor Meza, a political analyst at the Honduran Documentation Center whose name recently appeared on a death list. "Somebody wants to create a climate in which we do not know where the violence is coming from." Whatever the source of that threat -- the contras, the Sandinistas or the newly active local paramilitary groups -- the once sleepy backwater is increasingly on edge.

With reporting by Laura Lopez/Tegucigalpa