U.S. Reportedly Pushed Honduras to Complain : Ally Wanted to Ignore Incursion but Found It ‘Hard to Disagree,’ Officials, Envoys There Say

The government of Honduras, on whose territory armies from elsewhere battled this week, reluctantly complained of recent Nicaraguan incursions partly as a bow to U.S. pressure, diplomatic and Honduran officials said Friday.

Honduras had known for weeks that troops of Nicaragua’s Sandinista army have been crossing its frontier to fight U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels camped inside this country, but the government preferred to remain silent. Indications that the Sandinistas were massing for bigger battles failed to alarm the Hondurans visibly.

Only U.S. prodding, inspired in part by political needs in Washington, helped pry loose Honduran calls for help and an official condemnation of Nicaragua.

The reason Honduras held back: The government here is unwilling to officially admit it hosts the contras, as the rebels are called, nor to openly join the Reagan Administration in support of them.

Little Reaction

It prefers, instead, to let the United States, Nicaragua and the contras fight it out with as little Honduran public involvement as possible. Even a fairly long and bloody battle 10 miles inside its border last weekend could barely provoke a Honduran reaction.

“The Hondurans are hung up on their specific attitude toward the contras,” said one diplomat. “They didn’t want to protest (the incursion). They didn’t want to deal with it.”

“We do not want to be more involved,” affirmed Roberto Suazo Tome, the Honduran ambassador in charge of Mexican and Central American affairs. “But honestly, we depend so much on the United States, it’s hard to disagree with them.”

The Sandinistas reportedly attacked a contras training camp inside Honduras last weekend. After heavy fighting, the Nicaraguan troops retreated without having overrun the camp, sources with access to intelligence reports assert.

Stragglers Remain

Friday, these sources said that only stragglers from the Sandinista force remain inside Honduras. The rest have reached safety inside Nicaragua.

The sources gave no information on damage to the contras base or casualties among the rebels. Generally, information available in Tegucigalpa about the battle is selective and has tended to emphasize contras success and Sandinista problems.

The Honduran government has openly commented on nothing having to do with the fighting. Instead, officials suggested that the Sandinistas came across the border to spearhead some sort of subversive campaign.

“The (Nicaraguan) operation has, as its principal end, the protection of the infiltration of subversive groups,” a communique said this week.

The communique is an example of the lengths to which the Hondurans go to avoid mentioning the contras.

No Request for Assistance

As the reported Sandinista incursion developed last week, Honduras’ refusal to denounce it or to ask for help to repel the invaders led to intense diplomatic maneuvering. Last weekend, U.S. officials initiated talks with Honduran military officers to ask what kind of aid the Hondurans might need--even though Honduras had made no request for assistance.

On Monday, White House officials leaked reports of the Sandinista incursion. Honduran authorities, upset that the White House announced something that they had kept under wraps, kept quiet.

“We cannot stop U.S. functionaries from saying what they want, even if it injures us,” lamented Tome.

Government spokesmen in Tegucigalpa denied that there was a border problem at all.

Pressed for Complaint

Later on Monday, U.S. officials here met with President Jose Azcona Hoyo to press for a public Honduran complaint against Nicaragua.

The officials suggested that if Honduras did not ask for aid, future help might somehow be jeopardized, according to local sources.

Finally, Gen. Humberto Regalado, the armed forces chief, called the U.S. Embassy to ask for assistance in transporting troops to the border by helicopter. On Tuesday, Azcona sent a letter to President Reagan backing the request.

In the letter, Azcona identified the problem zone as Olancho province. In fact, the bulk of the reported Sandinista campaign occurred in El Paraiso province to the west.

“The area invaded by the Sandinista forces is very inaccessible, making it virtually impossible for the Honduran armed forces to deploy to the region quickly,” Azcona wrote.

Urgent Request

He urgently requested “assistance from the United States of America, to include first of all, air transport of Honduran troops as necessary and other material assistance that may be needed to repel the Sandinista forces and to prevent these attacks from recurring in the future.”

Azcona began an Easter holiday at the beach Wednesday, leaving the emergency behind. No Honduran official has yet mentioned the contras fighting.

U.S. officials reached a $20-million figure for emergency aid from a list of needs compiled by Hondurans and Americans here last weekend. On Tuesday, President Reagan notified Congress that he was providing Honduras with $20 million in emergency military assistance.

The fracas between Washington and Tegucigalpa over the Sandinista incursion is explained here as a conflict between “public relations imperatives.”

The Reagan Administration, in a congressional battle over aid for the rebels, wanted to portray the Sandinistas as aggressors and the contras as an effective fighting force. In addition, sources say, there was a move to get Honduras to openly support the contras operations to ease the problems of getting supplies to them and protecting the force along the border.

6,000 Contras in Honduras

Several times during past years, Honduras has prevented equipment from flowing to the contras, restricted the rebels to their bases and forced them to move their camps up and down the border. At presently there are an estimated 6,000 contras based in Honduras.

Honduras, meanwhile, is regularly the object of criticism in Latin America that it is a “pawn” of the United States. The government here also fears that if the contras fail either to overthrow the Sandinistas or to somehow establish a place for themselves in Nicaragua, this country will be faced with a double problem: thousands of armed refugees on its hands and an unhappy neighbor to the south with a long memory of U.S.-Honduran complicity.

At the same time, Honduras depends heavily on U.S. financial aid; and its armed forces, a major political as well as security force in the country, contains strong anti-Sandinista elements.

The contending attitudes, diplomats say, are resolved by applying an old Honduran custom: denying that there is any problem.

But events sometimes tear away the cover, as one U.S. official put it this week.

“The fig leaf of deniability is getting more and more transparent,” he said.