Honduran President Warns: U.S. Could Lose Its Military Base if Mass Deportations Are Carried Out

Jan. 4—In a Jan. 1st message to the nation posted on social media, Honduran President Xiomara Castro delivered a sharp message to the United States: if President-elect Donald Trump carries out his threat to deport Hondurans (among others) en masse from the United States, Honduras will consider it a hostile act which eliminates the grounds for Honduras to continue to allow the United States to keep its military bases inside Honduras. She suggested a much smarter deal for the United States: invest instead in helping Honduras build its planned cross-isthmus railroad. We quote:

“We hope that the new U.S. administration of the democratically-elected President, Donald Trump, will be open to constructive and friendly dialogue; that it will not take unnecessary reprisals against our migrants, who as a rule make a great contribution to the U.S. economy.

“Faced with a hostile attitude of the massive expulsion of our brothers, we would consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military domain, under which—without paying a penny for decades—they maintain military bases in our territory. In that case, [the bases] would forfeit any reason to be in Honduras.”

Yet later, she added: “We invite the President-elect of the United States Donald Trump to invest in the Interoceanic rail project [across Honduras], between the deepest port on the Caribbean at Castilla, and the deepest port on the Pacific, at Amapala in the Gulf of Fonseca.” That railway has been on the books for years, and would transform Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and its labor force. Xiomara Castro’s government is committed to get it built, whether with help from China or the United States—or optimally, from both.

The United States’s largest military base in Ibero-America, the Soto Cano Air Base, from which the U.S. Southern Command’s regional “Joint Task Force-Bravo” operates, is located on Honduran territory. The U.S. has operated out of the base since the 1982-1983 Contra operation (the base was a center of Ollie North’s guns-for-drugs operation) and was built up as a regional center when the U.S. military had to withdraw from its bases in Panama in 1999, as agreed under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties (despite George Bush, Sr.’s attempt to retake full control of Panama with his bloody 1989 Christmas invasion of that country).