Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
The entry titled "Oliver North, Central America and drug runners."
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Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2007 > February > 15 > Entry
Oliver North, Central America and drug runners
Flying to the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras is sort of like going back in time. It’s the last remaining U.S. base in Central America, a throwback to the days when revolution seemed to rage throughout the area. It was here that Oliver North hatched his ill-fated plan to sell arms to Iran to finance the Contra war in neighboring Nicaragua.
Today the base concentrates mostly on counter-narcotics work in the region. Col. Christopher Hughes says the latest tactic of drug runners is to crash-land airplanes in the jungles of Guatemala and load the drugs into trucks before the authorities arrive. The U.S. military also has trained hundreds of Salvadoran troops at Soto Cano before their deployments to Iraq.
I visited the base last week for a story on its role in the rescue of a group of missionaries from the Atlanta area, whose open-bed truck toppled in Honduras’ remote central mountains. Here is a picture of the base I took from a Blackhawk helicopter, an unforgettable experience, along with a shot of hilly Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital.
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By jeremy
February 15, 2007 10:03 PM | Link to this
is it me or are there several US bases in honduras? i know this is not the last US base in central america