Our Challenge AirlinesJet was laboring over the Carribean in mid-February, 1986, packed to the racks with Hondurans returning from Miami, reveling Gringo vacationers, and mounds o f excess baggage. I was beginning to get suspicious about why we 'd been plyed with seemingly limitless booze o f the highest quality. Forced to change planes because o f a “stuck guage ," this replacement craft seemed no improvement. Now we were racing to make Tegucigalpa, Honduras's capital, before dusk, because a t night the entire Honduran airspace is militarized. Tegucigalpa’s Toncontin International Airport offers great challenges. Toncon- tin’s abbreviated runway was barely adequate for an earlier era’s prop planes. The week before, my flight companions recounted, a small plane had sliced off the head of a young girl standing in the back of a pickup on an adjacent road. Our own plane urgently grabbed the first available piece of tarmac and the pilots immediately threw both engines in full C l'nton~si~Q reverse, all the while braking feverishly. At runway’s end, a thin barrier masks a several hundred foot dropoff into a residential area below. Flying into Honduras is serious business, in more ways than one. Only ten days earlier my plans had been Portland-bound, but when I heard that the Oregon National Guard was sending some 180 infantrymen to Honduras for their annual two-week training, some part of me was shaken. I grew up in the small Oregon town of Lakeview and first got excited about the mundo latino (Latin American world) in Mrs. Smith’s enthusiastic 6th grade class. During college I studied in Peru, and in the late ‘60s, I worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala. Since my last trip to the area was in 1978, I had followed the turmoil in Central America from a distance, safe in the great Northwest. Then suddenly my two worlds collided—Oregon troops in Central America—I was compelled to see things first hand. I wanted to know what people there thought about all this. Stepping out of the casual Honduran customs into a balmy night, I was assaulted by a horde of “ helpers,” pulling at my clothes, reaching for a bag to carry, and offering me taxis, hotels and every kind of personal service. When I finally settled inside my own choice of a taxi, the driver introduced himself as Elvis Torres. “iNo me digal” (Don’t kid me!), I blurted, “You’re named for the King?” He told me that his parents had been big Elvis fans, and had worn out their one treasured record years ago (which from his description I later determined was Let's Be Friends, Pickwick, circa 1968). So by the time I reached my hotel, on a hill above downtown Tegucigalpa (that’s Tay-goos-ee- gall-pah), I’d made a friend and found myself back home in this foreign city. I'd last visited Tegucigalpa in 1977, returning from a long trip around South America. My memory was of a small, poor, backwater city which governed a country no richer. Yet now, suddenly, U.S. money was pouring into Honduras, a nation of barely 4 million population—$237 million slated for fiscal year 1986-87, $88 million of that in military aid—the second largest sum being sent to any Latin American country. In 1980, total U.S. aid to Honduras had been only $4 million. The U.S. Embassy had been upgraded to Class 2 status, the equivalent of embassies in Lima and Buenos Aires, immensely larger cities. As I walked through the streets of Tegucigalpa, it seemed there were far more cars, almost all U.S. and Japanese, and heavily armed soldiers everywhere, especially in front of banks and public buildings. But conversations with shopkeepers led me to understand that whatever image of prosperity this suggested, it wasn’t slipping through to them. The downtown is o ld and cob- blestoned, with hundreds of family- owned businesses lining the narrow streets. The lengua franca is Spanish, but the music in the air, the fashions, even the ubiquitous pizzarias seem to shout: Made in the U.S.A. The United States—Central American connection is palpable the entire time-one is in the region. First and foremost, ours is an export relationship. True, we import a variety of goods, mostly tropical agricultural products (coffee, bananas, hardwoods, etc.), from Central America. Yet U.S
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