ABSTRACT
By the mid-1980s the Reagan administration's central American policy had taken on some of the most lamentable trademarks of the Honduran political culture: deception and self-deception, rampant factional conflict, incompetence, a penchant for Byzantine intrigue, and contempt for the law. The Reagan administration was, of course, far from monolithic. In January 1983 the foreign ministers of Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama had gathered on the small Panamanian island of Contadora to initiate a search for peaceful solutions to the region's mounting crises. The "crisis" being over, there remained the little matter of the fate of the United States ambassador. An Americas Watch report accused them of increasing human rights violations. The economy was in a shambles; human rights abuses continued to fester; there was growing labor and peasant unrest; thousands of contras remained camped on Honduran soil. The Hondurans were still torn between the desire to get rid of the rebels and the economic realities of their situation.
