5: BEFRIENDING DICTATORS

  1. Associated Press, “U.S. Military Expands Its Drug War in Latin America,” February 3, 2013; John Lindsay-Poland, “Pentagon Continues Contracting U.S. Companies in Latin America,” Fellowship of Reconciliation blog, January 31, 2013, http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/pentagon-continues-contracting-us-companies-latin-america/11782.

  2. Parts of this chapter stem from my “When a Country Becomes a Military Base: Blowback and Insecurity in Honduras, the World’s Most Dangerous Place,” in Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability, edited by Lesley Sharp and Nancy Chen (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2014), 25–44.

  3. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 121.

  4. Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 16–17; Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas, 209.

  5. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 3, 20.

  6. Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880–1930 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 38–39; John Farley, Bilharzi: A History of Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991), 155.

  7. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W. W. Norton), 1983, 42, 42–46; Langley and Schoonover, Banana Men, 40–41.

  8. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 44–45; Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 19.

  9. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 42; Langley and Schoonover, Banana Men, 38–39; Farley, Bilharzi, 155.

10. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 45.

11. Ibid., 43.

12. Ibid., 9, 184; Tim Merrill, ed., Honduras: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1995).

13. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 9.

14. Ibid., 44–45.

15. William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 116–18.

16. Ibid., 117–18.

17. Todd Greentree, Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), 117; LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 150, 297.

18. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 150, 297.

19. Greentree, Crossroads, 121, 162.

20. Ibid., 121–22, 162.

21. William R. Meara, Contra Cross: Insurgency and Tyranny in Central America, 1979–1989 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 28–29.

22. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 150; Phillip E. Wheaton, Inside Honduras: Regional Counterinsurgency Base (Washington, DC: EPICA Task Force, 1982), 40.

23. Glenn Garvin, Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1992), 40–41; LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 395.

24. Government of Honduras, “Annex to the Bilateral Military Assistance Agreement between the Government of Honduras and the Government of the United States of America Dated May 20, 1954,” Tegucigalpa, Washington, DC, May 7, 1982, sect. 1.

25. For more detail, see my “When a Country Becomes a Military Base.” See also Problemas Internacionales, “Honduras: Enclave contra Nicaragua,” report, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos para América Latina y Africa, 1982; Dieter Eich and Carlos Rincón, The Contras: Interviews with Anti-Sandinistas (San Francisco: Synthesis Publishers, 1984); Garvin, Own Gringo, 111; Wheaton, Inside Honduras; Eric L. Haney, “Inside Delta Force,” in American Soldier: Stories of Special Forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, edited by Clint Willis (New York: Adrenaline, 2002), 27–36; LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 311, 115, 117, 436, 478, 391, 384–85, 491; Meara, Contra Cross, 89–91; Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dalton, 2009), 231–33.

26. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 587.

27. Ibid., 317; see also Greentree, Crossroads, 37.

28. National Security Archive, Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (New York: Warner Books, 1987), 52–53.

29. Haney, “Inside Delta Force,” 28; Greentree, Crossroads, 116.

30. See e.g. Tom Hayden, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (New York: New Press, 2004), 57; LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 699nn119–20.

31. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 299.

32. Trial transcript. Reyes et al. v. Grijalba, United States District Court Southern District of Florida, March 6, 2006.

33. Greentree, Crossroads, 7.

34. General Accounting Office, “Honduras: Continuing US Military Presence at Soto Cano Base Is Not Critical,” GAO/NSIAD-95–39, Washington, DC, February 8, 1995, 1.

35. Ibid., 4, 1.

36. Ibid., 8.

37. Scott M. Hines, “Joint Task Force–Bravo: The U.S. Military Presence in Honduras; U.S. Policy for an Evolving Region,” master’s thesis, University of Maryland and National Defense University, 1994.

38. Meara, Contra Cross, 32, 155.

39. Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging Wars and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 199.

40. Ibid., 200–3.

41. Ibid., 203, 205, 199.

42. Ibid., 206, 77.

43. Associated Press, “Honduran Govt Cooperating with US Human Rights Probe, Foreign Aid Maintained,” Washington Post, August 13, 2012.

44. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide 2013: Trends, Contexts, Data,” report, Vienna, March 2014, 24, 126.

45. Vívelo Hoy, “Niños Hondureños Parten Hacia EEUU para Evitar el Reclutamiento de las Pandillas,” October 9, 2014, http://www.vivelohoy.com/noticias/8419803/ninos-hondurenos-parten-hacia-eeuu-para-evitar-el-reclutamiento-de-las-pandillas.

46. Alberto Arce, “Honduras Police Accused of Death Squad Killings,” Associated Press, March 17, 2013.

47. Adrienne Pine, “Where Will the Children Play? Neoliberal Militarization in Pre-Election Honduras,” Upside Down World, blog, November 5, 2013, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4542:where-will-the-children-play-neoliberal-militarization-in-pre-election-honduras&catid=23:honduras&Itemid=46.

48. Pine, “Where Will the Children Play?”

49. Michael A. Allen, Military Basing Abroad: Bargaining, Expectations, and Deployment, Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York, Binghamton, 2011, 35.

50. See e.g. Cooley, Base Politics, 208–9.

51. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2014 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2014), 526–30.

52. Ibid., 532–38.

53. Adam Taylor and Anup Kaphle, “Thailand’s Army Just Announced a Coup. Here Are 11 Other Thai Coups since 1932,” Washington Post, March 22, 2014.

54. Kent E. Calder, Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 76, 115–16.

55. Cooley, Base Politics, 105–13.

56. Ibid., 250.

57. Ibid., 249–51.

58. Thanks and credit to Joe Masco for suggesting this line of analysis.

59. C. Johnson, Blowback, xi.

60. Adrienne Pine, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 35–38; T. W. Ward, Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

61. Paglen, Blank Spots, 237, 211.

62. Thom Shanker, “Lessons of Iraq Help U.S. Fight a Drug War in Honduras,” New York Times, May 5, 2012, 1.

63. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.