Honduran Town Feels Fallout From Living on the Edge of Contras War

Las Trojes is a town at the edge of the war.

Distant gunfire startles residents in the night. Hundreds of needy families, uprooted by the hostilities, have flooded into the rural community. Its once-thriving commerce is deeply depressed. And its only road to the outside world is a target of attacks from neighboring Nicaragua.

Like Honduras as a whole, Las Trojes has found that fighting next door means trouble at home. The jagged edge of the Nicaraguan war, having stolen the town’s vitality, is now gnawing away at its tranquility.

It is still a peaceful place of tile roofs and dusty streets. Traffic is a languid blend of motor vehicles, horses and mules.

But mingled with the small-town serenity is an air of anxiety. It comes out in the words of Andres Martinez, 42, chairman of the town council.

“Las Trojes is going to be left empty, like a desert,” Martinez predicted darkly. “That will happen. A time will come when we won’t be able to live here anymore.”

A robust man with thick black hair, Martinez had just come into town from his nearby cattle and coffee farm. He wore a faded blue shirt, jeans, and a revolver in a black leather holster.

“I don’t know what to do,” he confessed, parking his straw cowboy hat on some bags of chemical fertilizer. “I went to the Presidential Palace to ask for an audience with the president.”

‘Everyone for Himself’

He wasn’t allowed to see President Jose Azcona Hoyo. “It’s everyone for himself,” he quoted a presidential aide as saying to him. “He meant that we are supposed to leave if things get too bad.”

Las Trojes is 85 miles east of Tegucigalpa, the capital, and less than a mile from the Nicaraguan border.

The road into town runs along the border and serves as a major supply route for Nicaraguan guerrillas, known as contras, who are fighting the Marxist-led Sandinista government. The contras have their main camps in the Honduran mountains to the east.

Nicaraguan troops frequently cross into Honduras in pursuit of the U.S.-backed guerrillas. Fighting sometimes swirls through the border lands, which are heavily laced with land mines.

“No one knows who mines that terrain,” Martinez said. But he blamed the problem on the contra presence.

“It is a thing like a plague, practically,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, those contras should be removed from the border zone.”

For a week at the end of October, a battle between the contras and the Sandinistas raged on the Honduran side of the border southeast of Las Trojes. The fighting did not come within 10 miles of the town, but more than 1,000 Hondurans who were displaced by the hostilities from other villages took refuge here, Martinez said.

When the latest refugees arrived, he said, there were already about 3,000 displaced Hondurans in Las Trojes, whose normal population is about 4,500.

The refugees crowd into the homes of relatives and friends, take over empty shacks or find shelter in makeshift huts of boards and plastic sheeting. They receive some food from townspeople and relief organizations, but, according to Martinez, they don’t have enough to eat.

Townspeople strain under the burden. Reinaldo Hernandez, a farm worker who lives with his wife and son, is sharing their dirt-floored home with a family of seven refugees.

“They are friends, so we help them,” Hernandez said.

Ada Martinez, her husband and their five children took refuge in the Hernandez home after the Honduran army ordered civilians to evacuate her hometown of Arenales, she said. On Oct. 23--the day before the contra-Sandinista fighting started in the area--about 60 soldiers who were posted in Arenales moved out and warned residents to get out of the way too, she said.

“They said the contras had a right to fight with the Sandinistas because the Sandinistas were coming after them,” Martinez, 27, and pregnant, said.

Economy Withers

When the refugees were living and farming in the mountainous border lands east of Las Trojes, their shopping trips to the town helped its business boom. But as the war has emptied out much of the rural area and curtailed farming, the town’s economy has withered.

Would-be merchant Amado Flores, 23, opened his first business three months ago in a modest stall under a homemade awning of orange plastic. Flores offers belts, pants, children’s dresses, men’s caps.

In three months, he said, he has sold nothing, “not even a cap.”

Some Consider Leaving

Some residents have moved away to quieter places, Flores said, and he is thinking of going too.

“You can hardly live here anymore,” he lamented.

As Flores spoke, a green and white bus without a windshield passed by on the main street. The windshield was shattered by a Sandinista bullet on the road into Las Trojes last month, Flores said.

A few days earlier on the same road, another bus was hit by a Sandinista rocket-propelled grenade, which killed the driver’s helper and wounded two passengers. Those and other incidents have made many residents of Las Trojes nervous about using the winding, deeply rutted road.

“A lot of people have stopped traveling out of fear,” said Carlos Alberto Aleman.

“There is general nervousness,” he added. “We don’t sleep well.”

Aleman, 43, owns two transport trucks that ply the road between Las Trojes and Danli, the nearest city. He said truck drivers are especially nervous.

For a few miles along the road before it reaches Las Trojes, the Nicaraguan border is a stone’s throw away. And the Sandinistas know that the road is a major supply route for the contras.

On Thursday, a Sandinista rocket-propelled grenade hit the back of a truck that was heading toward Las Trojes with fuel for the rebel camps in the mountains beyond the town. The truck driver escaped safely before the truck’s cabin was engulfed in flames.

Honduran soldiers on the road said the contras’ top military commander, Enrique Bermudez, was coming along in another vehicle not far behind the truck.

Commander Escapes Attack

“He said he barely escaped death,” said a sergeant who talked with Bermudez afterward.

The sergeant and three other soldiers were manning one of several small army bivouacs that overlook the road along the stretch that skirts the Nicaraguan border. He said the soldiers sweep the road for Sandinista mines and protect it from attack.

This year, eight Honduran soldiers have been killed along the road by mines and Sandinista fire, according to the sergeant. When the Sandinistas aim at their sandbag bivouacs, he said, the Honduran soldiers return the fire.

The rifle and mortar exchanges disturb the night in Las Trojes, adding to the town’s sense of insecurity.

“We hear the shooting very clearly,” said Manuel Godoy, the town’s civil registrar. “We are all jumpy. We are afraid that something can happen at any moment.”