Central America : Honduran President Faces Battle With His Own Military

When he campaigned for the presidency of Honduras, Carlos Roberto Reina vowed to reform the powerful army, end the draft and remove the police from military control. He even hinted that he would trim the sacrosanct military budget.

But within days of his landslide victory last month, Reina heard from the army that has dominated Honduras for decades. “No way,” said the army’s commander, Gen. Luis Discua, when asked about possible cuts in the estimated $40 million allotted the military annually.

Confronting Discua and the armed forces will be a major challenge for Reina, who scored a surprising and decisive victory over the ruling party’s candidate in Honduran presidential elections held Nov. 28.

An urbane, 67-year-old lawyer with a background in human rights, Reina assumes in January the presidency of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, a nation still reeling from a controversial legacy of the Cold War.

In the 1980s, the United States gave Honduras $1.4 billion in aid, much of it military assistance, in exchange for providing a home for U.S.-backed Contra rebels fighting the left-wing Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. The money, critics say, gave the Honduran army carte blanche to largely ignore civilian law.

The result, say human rights groups, was a series of politically motivated killings and disappearances of leftist union leaders and students, allegedly committed by the security forces.

“Reina has to redefine the relations between civilian power and the military,” said Ramon Costodio, president of the independent Honduran Committee for Human Rights.

Besides his pledge to curb the armed forces’ powers, Reina, of the center-left Liberal Party, promised to clean up his country’s notoriously corrupt political institutions and implement a “moral revolution” in public service. He claimed that he would attack chronic government corruption and reform partisan state institutions, such as the judiciary and the national electoral tribunal, which organizes elections.

The National Party administration of President Rafael L. Callejas, a U.S.-educated agricultural economist whose term ends Jan. 27, has fostered “an explosion of corruption,” a diplomat said.

But Reina’s chances of implementing reforms will depend on how quickly and effectively he can create his own team and marginalize the traditional party barons who are looking for the customary fruits of electoral victory, a political analyst said.

Reina defeated his chief rival, Oswaldo Ramos, the right-wing National Party candidate, 52% to 41%--the largest margin since civilian government was restored to Honduras in 1981, after 18 years of almost uninterrupted military rule. Reina’s Liberal Party also overturned a National Party majority in Congress and the municipalities.

Despite his large mandate, Reina must govern a country of 5.4 million with dwindling foreign aid and some of the worst social indicators in the Americas; seven of 10 Hondurans live in poverty, according to Honduran economists.

Growth in non-traditional exports, including shrimp and melon, has only slightly eased Honduran dependence on the volatile prices of bananas and coffee, which account for almost two-thirds of exports. Floods and tropical storms in October and November severely damaged many banana plantations.

The new government will also have to confront the worst AIDS crisis in Central America. Officials estimate 60,000 people are HIV-positive.

Reina has said he will respect Honduras’ obligations on its $3.6-billion foreign debt and a structural adjustment program with international financial institutions.

The austerity plan was implemented in 1990 by Callejas, who renegotiated the foreign debt, paid about $600 million in arrears, privatized some state institutions and liberalized the economy.

The defeat of the National Party has been seen as an indictment of these economic policies, favored by the Washington-based lending institutions.