How Many Clandestine Airstrips?

The new math has come to the Armed Forces of Honduras!  If you follow the statements by the Honduran Armed Forces, you are forced to conclude that 24+26= 70

There are 70 clandestine drug airstrips known to the military in Honduras.  Think about it;  they know about 70 clandestine drug airfields, and haven't done anything about them.  When they first made this admission a few months ago it puzzled me.

If the enemy is using a resource, deny that resource to the enemy.  That seems obvious, right? Among the constitutionally assigned duties of the Honduran military is fighting drug trafficking.  So destroying those landing strips seems like an obvious tactic.

Why weren't they doing anything to destroy these airfields until now?

Now they're doing something.  As a recent New York Times article informs us, in association with the stationing of US military forces at four US built forward bases at Guanaja, Puerto Castilla, Aguacate, and Morocon, joint operations are now targeting the destruction of some of these airfields.

Three Honduran departments hold the majority of these airfields: 25 in Olancho, 15 in Colon, and 10 in El Paraiso.  In case you're counting, that adds up to 50 airfields, or roughly 71% of the total 70.

Notice that the Department of Gracias a Dios, bordering on Nicaragua, is not mentioned.  More about that later.

The Honduran military are working with a DEA FAST (Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team) team to now blow up airstrips, some of which have been known to the Honduran military for years.

Since the military love naming their projects, this one is called Operation Armadillo 2.  The second phase of Operation Armadillo 2 ended in April with the destruction of 17 clandestine airstrips.  How are they destroying the airstrips?  Helicopters fly teams from these forward bases to the airstrip, where US trainers guide Honduran Special Forces in the placement of 5 to 7 explosive charges to create craters in the runway.

The 17 destroyed airstrips were apparently in the department of Gracias a Dios.

Reading between the lines, it seems likely that the Honduran military lacked the explosives and expertise in using them, and that may, in part, account for their lack of action until now.

Honduran Joint Chiefs Chairman General Rene Osorio Canales told the Honduran press that the third phase of Operation Armadillo 2 was about to kick off, but he couldn't mention details.  He assured us that all of the known airfields will be destroyed by the end of 2012.

But the official spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, colonel Jeremías Arévalo Guifarro, has some different numbers.  He says that there are only 50 clandestine airfields known to the military, and that they have already destroyed 24 of them.  The other 26, according to Colonel Arévalo Guifarro, are scheduled for destruction.

So which is it?  50 total airfields, as Arévalo Guifarro claims, or the 70 that the Armed Forces previously announced?  17 airfields destroyed as reported by General Osorio Canales, or 24 as reported by Colonel Arévalo Guifarro?

While Osorio Canales assures us that all of the known clandestine airfields will be destroyed by the end of 2012, Arévalo Guifarro says 50 of them will be destroyed.

It seems pertinent to point out that Colonel Arévalo Guifarro is the same spokesman who seemed out of touch in reporting on the "forced" landing of a drug plane in Yoro a few days ago.

Still, I find myself left with a question. These are grass-covered dirt landing strips build in remote areas by labor organized by the drug traffickers long before airplanes could land there.  Why can't they just fill in the holes in the same way that they created the airfield? or level the terrain adjacent to the existing landing strip in the same way they created it in the first place?  Isn't this just a game of Whack A Mole?

The drug traffickers almost certainly can restore these airfields, so without a program of continued surveillance of these locations this is just an inconvenience for them.

The only clear enduring product of this campaign is Armed Forces PR. And they can't even get their math straight.

New US Bases in Honduras

The United States military continues to build bases in Honduras, with the public mission of supporting US drug interdiction missions and oversight of the Caribbean, especially the area from Honduras to the Dominican Republic.

The first of these bases, at Catarasca, in the Mosquitia, opened in April 2010. The US built this base from scratch, providing all the materials, logistics, and construction forces through DOD contracts. One of the DOD contracts that only partially built the base was for $1.9 million:

"Caratasca FOL [Forward Operating Location] Facilities", $1.9 million contract W91278-07-D0098 0001, with Eterna S.A., initially to be completed in May 2009, extended to August 2009.

Now comes word that the visit of the HSV 2 Swift earlier this year brought the materials to build a base on Guanaja, an international tourist destination previously known as a diving mecca for its pristine waters, and a celebrity vacation spot.

Honduras has never had a navy base in the Bay Islands. The Guanaja base, at a cost of $2 million, again built from scratch, contains buildings and a pier built by US Navy personnel, and technology supplied by and installed by the US forces. It will eventually house a Honduran patrol boat, the L. P. Honduras, that was recently retrofitted by the Honduran Navy at a cost of $790,000 after being abandoned for the last 22 years!

The base will also reportedly house both US and Honduran aircraft used for drug interdiction missions. Quotha listed part of the public contract for the base on Guanaja as follows:

"Design Build CN [Counternarcotics] Facility", contract signed June 2010 for $1.2 million, funded by SouthCom, for completion by Empresa de Construcción y Transporte Eterna, by September 2011.

So the running total for these two bases is upwards of $3.1 million.

But wait, there's still more.

The USS Oak Hill (LSD-51) is currently docked at Puerto Castillo, nominally so its Marines can hold joint exercises with the Honduran forces. Among the exercises: refurbishing the existing facilities here.

La Tribuna quotes a US Embassy release as saying:

The marines will disembark to work jointly with the Navy of Honduras in infrastructure projects to improve their living quarters, training, and security on the base.

They will also share information on maintaining weapons and military procedures, according to news reports.

This military aid, the Embassy explains, is coordinated by the US Southern Command. This project is partially built on the following contract:

Listed as "Puerto Castillas", "Team Room and Range," $350,000 funded by Special Operations Command South, scheduled for July-September 2011.

This contract allows a US presence at the only deep water port in Central America, one the Seabees improved in the 1980s to support the US bases in the Trujillo area (CREM, for example).

La Prensa said that the US Navy had not yet identified a place along the Pacific coast to build a base to support US anti-drug efforts, but this La Tribuna story says that the Swift carried out a similar "training" mission in the Honduran part of the gulf of Fonseca last March. As it happens, there is an abandoned base in the southern Honduran department of Choluteca, the only department in Honduras with coastline on the Pacific, previously upgraded by the US in the 1980s. But it is not clear whether La Tribuna is talking about this former base, or something else.

The 2010-2011 contracts include pier and barrack upgrades at Corinto, Nicaragua, along the Pacific coast, which may be better equipped to support the US Navy.

Add to the bases listed above a multi-million dollar contract to build permanent base housing at Soto Cano airfield in Comayagua, and you have an increasingly permanent US military presence in Honduras, now extending across all of the territory.

Mayanization in action: erasing Pech history

A story that caught my eye today, from the Bulgarian site FOCUS Information Agency (billing itself as "the first Bulgarian private information agency" and "the most preferred Bulgarian electronic media both in Bulgaria and abroad"), simultaneously illustrates the complexity of Honduran cultural history, and the narrowing effects of what historian Dario Euraque has dubbed mayanization: the collapse of all the diversity of Honduras' pluralistic indigenous heritage into one category, as generalized "Maya".

The story reports on an initiative by the "Friendship Society Bulgaria – Honduras" who will be traveling to La Ceiba, a city on the north coast of Honduras, east of San Pedro Sula. There, they say, is found the only river in the world named after their native country, the Rio Bulgaria:

Inquiries have shown that a Bulgarian community has been living in the Central American country for 100 years. At the beginning of 20 century they discovered an unknown river and named it Bulgaria in honor of their native country.

That brought me only a moment's pause. While I had no previous knowledge of a Bulgarian immigrant population, the North Coast is incredibly diverse, and waves of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century were drawn there by the business opportunities created by internationalization of the banana industry.

The expedition will bring Honduran photographers Nimer Alvarado and Mervin Corales to trace the course of this river from its headwaters near Tegucigalpita (a small town, not the capital city), as it runs from Pico Bonito, one of Honduras' astonishing national parks, to La Ceiba.

So far, so good. The article notes that the photographic trek is

carried out in cooperation with the culture center in La Ceiba.

This is one of the local "Casas de Cultura", an initiative pushed forward under former Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle beginning in his first term in that position between 1994 and 1996. Casas de Cultura are intended to encourage public participation in the exploration of specifically local histories. It would seem like nothing could be more localized than a coherent Bulgarian community with sufficient sense of national origin to lead them to name a local landmark in memory of that country.

But wait:

The photographs taken will be displayed in an exhibition called Rio Bulgaria – the Bulgarian Presence in the Land of Maya [emphasis added]

So in what sense were Bulgarians living near La Ceiba "in the land of the Maya"? None, really.

We do know quite a lot about the prehispanic people of the north coast of Honduras. They lived in towns, the largest of which probably had populations of a few thousand people, whose remains are recognizable as mounds today, mapped by archaeologists visiting the area since the first half of the 20th century. At least one large archaeological site is directly adjacent to La Ceiba itself, although not developed for visitation. Based on ceramics, it probably dated to the Classic period-- more or less 500-1000 AD. And, also based on these ceramics, the people living near La Ceiba were not the same as the people of Copan, who we refer to today as Maya.

Who were the people living near La Ceiba? To answer that question, we enter into speculative territory, and need to take into account how archaeologists know who lived anywhere. The common approach is to take the people who Europeans described in the 16th century as most likely descendants of those who had lived in the same place earlier. Notice that this means we assume that people stayed in place, unless there is some strong evidence that they moved; this conservative assumption can sometimes be misleading.

But if we take this common approach, then the likely people of the area around La Ceiba would be the ancestors of the indigenous group today known as Pech, previously called Paya. Pech are recognized as the indigenous people who occupied the island of Roatan in the sixteenth century. The northeast coast opposite the Bay Islands was the earliest focus of Spanish occupation, including massive slave raiding of the indigenous population. This began a long history of depletion of Pech population, including forced resettlement and voluntary movement away from exploitation.

The surviving Pech are among the indigenous groups officially recognized by the State of Honduras, under ILO 160, the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries of 1989, which was ratified in 1995. According to Minority Rights Group International (MRG), an NGO tracking global diversity, today there are about 2000 Pech who

have resisted total assimilation and, under the national bilingual programme, have developed Pech-language courses and Pech teachers.

In fact, you can find a YouTube video of Pech children singing the Honduran national anthem in translation.

Does it matter that a promotional notice of a pretty bizarre "cultural" exchange between Bulgaria, of all places, and Honduras, erases the historical connection of Pech to the land they once occupied, and replaces it with a generalized "Maya" identity?

Well, yes, it does. Cultural diversity has been a focus of struggle in Honduras for decades. In these struggles, the erasure of other pasts and their replacement with a single Maya past breaks connections between contemporary people and the territory they once occupied. It can lead to investment in understanding one valued indigenous culture to the exclusion of understanding the others that Honduras recognizes. And it undermines attempts fostered by some Honduran intellectuals to forge a national identity that recognizes historical complexity for a nation today working to accommodate various forms of difference.

As MRG puts it

For most of its post-independence history the culture of national unity forged by the state has been on the basis of a mestizo ideal... As a consequence traditional indigenous and minority populations have historically been marginalized, ignored or discriminated against....

This despite the fact that

Unlike other countries of the region, in the 1980s Honduras officially recognized the multicultural composition of its society and the need to protect the economic, cultural and human rights of its ethnic peoples. This helped to create an official space for indigenous and minority populations to work towards having their rights recognized and their needs addressed.

So yes, it matters when a photographic exhibition planned to be shown nationally and internationally erases local identity. And it is especially ironic when this takes place in the context of re-discovering the complexity of European heritages of modern Honduras.

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A historical footnote: the erasure of Pech identity and its replacement by Maya identity has a long literary history.

When Christopher Columbus made his only landfall on the mainland of the Americas in 1502, it was on the north coast of Honduras, across from the Bay Islands-- that is, in the region of La Ceiba. He had first captured a canoe off the island of Guanaja, which, like Roatan, was likely inhabited by Pech speaking people. Most reports today identify the canoe as "Maya traders", ignoring the original accounts, written closest to the time of the incident. These clearly identify the canoe as coming from one of the islands, and its passengers as local people.

Most pernicious, modern accounts base the identification of this canoe on a sixteenth-century general historian, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, who wrote that

this vast region [the mainland of northern Honduras] is divided into two parts, one called Taïa and the other called Maïa

Or, that is what he is said to have written. In fact, the manuscript of his book clearly has "Païa", not "Taïa", the name previously used for the people who call themselves Pech.