The Honduras threat to reconsider military ties marks a significant moment in Latin American ties with the US, say experts.
Honduras has threatened to expel United States troops, retaliating against incoming President Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations of refugees and asylum seekers entering the US from Central America.
Trump’s plan could affect hundreds of thousands of people from Honduras, a country which hosts a significant US military base.
Here’s what’s at the heart of the dispute between the world’s biggest superpower and its smaller neighbour, why it matters and what this means for ties between the countries.
What has Honduras said about US troops?
In her New Year’s message, Honduras’s President Xiomara Castro threatened to reconsider the country’s military cooperation with the US if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Castro stated that US military facilities in Honduras, particularly Soto Cano Airbase, would “lose all reason to exist” if these deportations occurred. But she also used the opportunity to criticize the longstanding US military presence on Honduras soil more broadly.
“In the face of a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our cooperation policies with the United States, especially in the military field, where for decades, without paying a cent, they maintain military bases on our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras,” she said in a Spanish statement broadcast on national television.
How important are US military bases in Honduras?
The US military presence in Honduras, while focused on Soto Cano Airbase, is part of broader operations in Central America that include smaller bases in El Salvador.
Soto Cano, which became operational in the 1980s to combat perceived communist threats in the region, hosts more than 1,000 US military and civilian personnel. It is also one of the few locations capable of landing large planes between the US and Colombia, apart from Guantanamo.
The base serves as a key launching point for the rapid deployment of US forces in the region, including for providing disaster relief and administering aid, and for counter-narcotics operations.
Its location provides proximity to drug trafficking corridors in Central and South America, also making it an essential staging ground for surveillance and interdiction.
However, some experts have criticized the US justification for its military presence at Soto Cano after Washington supported the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was eventually extradited to the US in 2022 for drug crimes and money laundering.
Hernandez was twice president of Honduras and is serving a 45-year jail term in New York since June 2024.
“The hypocrisy to say that they’re using it [Soto Cano] to fight drug trafficking when the US was shoring up, legitimating and pouring millions of dollars into the president of Honduras and his corrupt police and military,” Dana Frank, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Al Jazeera.
At the same time, while the US does not pay Honduras for the base, Soto Cano does serve benefits to the Central American nation, too.
“The US military presence in Honduras is generally popular, makes an economic contribution, and provides specific benefits to Honduras in terms of infrastructure development, intelligence, and emergency assistance in times of extreme weather which often impacts Honduras,” said Eric Olson, global fellow at the Wilson Center.
How significant is the threat – and why is Honduras making it?
Experts say the threat from Honduras marks a significant moment in Central American geopolitics.
“I think this is a really fascinating and powerful turning point in the role of the US which takes for granted that it is going to dominate the Western Hemisphere, that it’s particularly going to dominate Central America,” said Frank.
Frank said the US military may be particularly inclined to keep Soto Cano amid competition with China, which does not have a military presence in Central America.
Honduras, too, wouldn’t want a rupture in ties with the US, say analysts. The country relies on remittances from its overseas citizens: 27 percent of its gross domestic product came from remittances in 2022. And its biggest diaspora is in the US, where about 5 percent of the Honduras population – more than 500,000 people – live, per Pew Research Center estimates.
Hondurans play a key role in the US economy, particularly in labour-intensive sectors. In the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore in March 2024, one of the six construction workers killed was a Honduran national, while others were immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
That very same dynamic, however, makes it hard for Honduras to stay silent in the face of threats of mass deportations. The country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tony Garcia has said about 250,000 Hondurans could be expelled from the US in 2025, a number the Central American nation is not equipped to suddenly host.
Without the remittances from its citizens in the US, the economy of Honduras could also take a major hit.
How likely is Honduras to follow through?
Some analysts view the threat as a negotiating tactic rather than an immediate policy shift, and say that Honduras lacks leverage to influence US policies meaningfully.
“In the end, I sense that Honduras is making threats with a very weak hand,” Olson told Al Jazeera.
Frank described the move as a “preemptive strike” against Trump and a significant assertion of Honduran and Central American sovereignty.
Trump has pledged swift deportations of undocumented immigrants, but his team has provided no concrete plans, leaving Latin American governments uncertain as they try to prepare.
He has also pledged to slap a 25-percent tariff on Mexico and Canada if they did not stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl to the US.
How might the US respond – and what does this mean for bilateral ties?
Olson told Al Jazeera that the threat may have broader implications for US-Honduras relations, particularly under a Republican-led administration. The Honduran government, he said, was “playing with fire”.
“I cannot imagine that President Trump will take kindly to threats to the US military by a government that Republicans already seem eager to categorize with Nicaragua and Venezuela,” he said, predicting that bilateral relations may be “about to take a turn for the worse” regardless of the outcome surrounding Soto Cano.
Olson said that for the US, a potential rupture in military relations with Honduras would likely be seen as disappointing but not critical to its military operations.
To be sure, Soto Cano played a key role in the 1980s in the US-backed Contra War against Nicaragua and supported operations in El Salvador.
“It has a long and nasty history,” Frank noted, including its use during the 2009 military coup in Honduras, when removed President Manuel Zelaya’s plane refueled there.
But Olson suggested that Soto Cano Airbase no longer holds the strategic importance it did during the 1980s and 1990s.
“The US military has been considering its withdrawal from Soto Cano for some time,” Olson said, adding that missions such as counter-narcotics and emergency response could be conducted from other locations.
Frank also warned that Republicans, including Marco Rubio, are likely to frame President Castro’s government as aligned with anti-US governments such as those of Venezuela and Nicaragua.
“This will likely be spun into a broader anti-communist Cold War framework,” she said.
Source: Al Jazeera
