Training Friends and Scaring Foes

By George J. Church.

The menacing action began last Wednesday, on barren, rock-strewn ground marking a rare flat stretch of the rugged border between Marxist Nicaragua and U.S. ally Honduras. The oppressive quiet of early afternoon was broken by a buzz, quickly swelling into a roar. Out of a cloud of dust lumbered heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers, following an obvious invasion route north toward the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, some 80 miles away.

The U.S. had long imagined that a showdown in Central America might begin that way, and Washington was assembling a fleet of 39 warships for counteraction on the other side of the isthmus. On D day next Tuesday, 2,000 Marines will storm ashore from amphibious assault craft onto an isolated strip of sand near Puerto Castilla, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They will secure a beachhead for troops of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, who will be flown in by helicopter the following day. By the end of next week, about 10,000 American troops will have gone into action throughout Honduras, a nation the size of Tennessee. In one operation, U.S. and Honduran soldiers will push off side by side from base camps, practicing ways to search the jungles of northern Honduras for leftist guerrillas who might rise in response to a call from Managua to support an invasion.

And what will the Nicaraguans be doing? Just watching and, if all goes according to Washington's script, perhaps shuddering a bit at the display of U.S. force near their border. Those tanks, for instance, were manned by soldiers of the Texas National Guard, playing the role of invading Sandinistas for the benefit of Honduran pilots, who carried out mock bombing and strafing runs against them (see box). Officially, the maneuvers are not even war games, just joint "training exercises." Pentagon officials go so far as to insist, with resolutely straight faces, that last week's "tank battle" and next week's amphibious landing are not directly linked.

Though the maneuvers are scarcely unprecedented, they are clearly extraordinary. Honduras, which borders on war-torn El Salvador as well as Nicaragua, makes an ideal base for U.S. operations in Central America. About 1,500 American troops are stationed there, and the U.S. has built a network of permanent facilities: airfields, antitank ditches, a full-size military hospital. It is no secret that some of these facilities have been used to support American allies outside Honduras. Contra guerrillas battling the Sandinistas in Nicaragua train at American-built camps in Honduras; U.S. pilotless, or drone, planes are said to fly from Honduras over El Salvador, spying out concentrations of leftist guerrillas to be attacked by the U.S.-aided government.

The current U.S.-Honduran war games, dubbed Big Pine III, extend a series that began in 1983 and has become nearly continuous. In between the big maneuvers, U.S. and Honduran soldiers nearly always have some small-scale training exercise in progress. Never before, however, have so many U.S. soldiers participated in the games or used such heavy equipment so close to Nicaragua (some of the tanks maneuvered within three miles of the border). Next week's amphibious landing, named Universal Trek '85, together with Big Pine III, represents the most intricate military exercise the U.S. has conducted in this hemisphere.

Training is a genuine goal of the exercises, but it is not the only one. Some of the maneuvers look like a rehearsal for an American invasion of Nicaragua. But even the Sandinistas, who have raised alarums about a U.S. attack when past exercises were held in Honduras, have stopped talking about one. Intimidation is another matter. "It's a show-the-flag operation," says House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Dante Fascell, a Florida Democrat. The main purpose, he says bluntly, and approvingly, is "to scare the Nicaraguans."

Somewhat surprisingly, that idea has stirred little protest in Washington. Tennessee Senator Jim Sasser calls the maneuvers "scary," and his fellow Democrat, Maryland Congressman Michael Barnes, terms them "inconsistent" with President Reagan's efforts to promote peace negotiations between the Sandinistas and the contras. For the most part, however, even persistent critics of Reagan's Central American policy are undisturbed. Says Larry Birns, the avowedly liberal director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs: "This is gunboat diplomacy upgraded, but a bit of pressure doesn't hurt."

One reason for this view is that the Sandinistas have not hesitated to intimidate their neighbors. Washington sometimes inflates the menace posed by Nicaragua's Soviet-aided military buildup; Reagan was simply wrong when he declared in 1983 that Managua's armed forces exceed those of all other Central American countries combined. But, counting full-time soldiers and militia on active duty, the Nicaraguan army of 62,000 is by far the largest of any single country in the area. Nicaragua has 150 tanks; Guatemala has ten and the other Central American nations none at all. Though the Sandinistas are deficient in combat aircraft, they boast 36 helicopters, including at least ten Soviet-made Hind gunships. Hopes that this military machine eventually may be cut back rose a bit last week. Representatives of Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica, meeting in Panama, agreed to set up a commission to monitor the arms-reduction provisions of a regional treaty that they are trying to negotiate. But until an enforceable pact is in effect--if ever

Another purpose of the maneuvers may be to slip some indirect aid to the contras. In the past, the anti-Sandinista guerrillas have picked up weapons | and equipment left behind by American troops after military exercises in Honduras ended. The contras could use some help. Though the U.S. Congress does not seem to be terribly disturbed by the American military maneuvers, it cut off direct funding of the anti-Sandinista rebels last June. A vote likely in the next month on the Reagan Administration's request to renew aid with a $14 million appropriation is expected to be breathtakingly close. Bereft, at least temporarily, of Washington financing, the guerrillas have been making little progress lately against the Sandinistas.

In El Salvador, the war also seems at a stalemate. The Salvadoran army has been more aggressive in conducting sweeps of guerrilla country, and claims to have the Marxist rebels on the defensive. But the guerrillas have proved adept at disappearing into the bush, then materializing again for attacks like the one last week on the village of Santa Cruz Loma (see WORLD).

Honduras, meanwhile, is far from comfortable with its role as an anti- Sandinista base. The country is the poorest in the region and complains loudly that Washington's military embrace has failed to bring the kind of economic aid that has been given to El Salvador, Honduras' traditional enemy. Hondurans worry about a collapse of the contra campaign that would cause all 12,000 or so rebels to flee Nicaragua and wander through their country in bands, toting American arms. Already, the country is feeling the strain of serving as a haven for Nicaraguan youths who flee the Sandinista military draft and arrive penniless in Honduras. Fundamentally, though, Honduras has cast its lot with the U.S. One of its most insistent demands is for a stronger U.S. guarantee of its security than that provided by a 1954 treaty. As long as American troops are on its soil, Honduras seems safe. Its fear is that the Americans will leave--and the next tanks clanking north from the border will be driven by real rather than fake Sandinistas.

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With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/Tegucigalpa and Bruce van Voorst/Washington