The role of the Honduran military

A short note here about the role of Honduras' military in the removal from office and exile to Costa Rica of President Mel Zelaya. I am dismayed at the reaction of the White House and Foggy Bottom - that they would be so quick to condemn the defense of democracy in Honduras by its military and so slow to attack the destruction of democracy in Iran by its paramilitary can only be indicative of a shallowness of understanding of foreign affairs by the administration.

I lived in Honduras for six months in 1989, assigned to Joint Task Force Bravo, stationed at a Honduran air force base Soto Cano in the Comayagua Valley. No, I did not live in the nearby town so I didn't rub elbows with everyday Hondurans most of the time. The Honduran civilians working for JTF-B were well educated, from the higher economic levels of society. As director of public affairs, I had a Honduran secretary, a recent college graduate with outstanding command of English.

But I did get around the country a lot, pretty much from one end to the other, north, south, east and west. My second commander there was completely fluent in Spanish and had served at the US embassy in El Salvador. Since one of the primary missions of JTF-B was civil affairs and assistance, this colonel spent a lot of time on the road visiting Honduran battalion commanders. (Unlike the US Army, the basic unit of the Honduran army was the battalion, who were posted on individual bases around the country.) My colonel always took a handful of principal staff with him, of which I was one.

Why was it necessary to spend so much time coordinating (and when necessary, schmoozing) Honduran battalion commanders? Because unlike much of the rest of Latin America's armies, the officer corps in Honduras has always been of the people, not the upper, ruling classes. This is in marked contrast to El Salvador's military, for example, as my boss explained, where the officers came from the uppers and defended the uppers' privileges and power jealously.

But in Honduras, going all the way back to the 1840s, battalion commanders had not only a military-command responsibility, but a civilian law-enforcement responsibility. They were closely equivalent to American sheriffs in many regards. Because of their ordinary roots, battalion commanders, officers and their soldiers were much less "classed" than elsewhere in Latin America. There never formed a significant rift between the people and the military.

Though attenuated nowadays from days of old, the Honduran army has long had a traditional role as keeper, and sometimes guardian, of civil order and has been viewed by the people as such. I remember one battalion commander we visited who almost every day went for walks for an hour or two somewhere in his district, sometimes with a staffer accompanying him, sometimes not. He was highly respected and warmly regarded by the people.

Another battalion commander, whom I call Rodrigo, spent about half his time supervising his battalion's construction of civil-building projects in the district, especially schools and water management works. This officer was sharply critical of JTF-B's management of civil-engineering projects for villages and small towns because, he said, we did too much for the people. We needed to involve them more so that they "owned" half the project. We stayed the night at his base, arising early the next morning only to find that Lt. Col. Rodrigo had canceled the morning's activities with us. In fact, he wasn't even there any more.

Most, maybe all, the Honduran lieutenant colonels I met were graduates of the US Army's Command and General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth, Kansas, or of the School of the Americas, then located at Fort Benning, Ga. Many were graduates of both. These schools served to strengthen and deepen Honduras' democratic traditions. Here's a plain illustration.

Just after returning from Rodrigo's base in late summer 1989, the other principal staff officers and I were summoned to the task force's SCIF, the Secret Compartmented Information Facility, a super-secure room in the J2's office area. It was the only place on our compound where were could be positive that the our conversations could not be overheard.

There we learned the reason for Lt. Col. Rodrigo's mysterious disappearance overnight. He and the other battalion commanders had converged on Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa, to confront the army's chief of staff. It seemed that this general had decided to mount a coup of some kind - perhaps not the full-scale coup Latin America was known so well for, but a significant seizure of power nonetheless. When the battalion commanders got wind of it, they went the capital, entered together into the chief's office and forced him to resign on the spot. Not a shot fired and the country's civilian government remained intact.

What the Honduran army did last week in shoving Zelaya, a would-be puppet of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, out of office was not a coup by even the wildest imagination. It was Zelaya who was trying to mount a coup, by using an unconstitutional referendum (with ballots printed in Venezuela!) to justify remaining in office as long as he wanted. No one in government, including his own party, supported Zelaya.

In fact, the Honduran Supreme Court actually ordered the army to remove him, a perfectly sensible development because of the historical role of Honduras' military in civil order.

If the Obama administration had stopped to consider Honduran history and culture (or had the State Dept. paused even to consult its own experts, it would not (one supposes) have been so quick on the trigger. But instead, it practiced "ready-fire-aim," though without the aim, even too late.