UCLA

The scandal termed "Iran-Contra" has already been analyzed—as a Presidential crisis, as a media event, as a new stage in planning and operating covert wars independent from even President Ronald Reagan. But this literature draws heavily on documents from the U.S. government: this dissertation examines years’ worth of collected news articles from Honduras, and shows the ways in which the planners of the covert war against Nicaragua faced a constant series of potential exposures. The Reagan Administration had made sure that the Honduran military and state had the media power to help deny the Contra War for a decade—letting Tegucigalpa outright blackmail Washington. The planners of the counterrevolution had limited success using Red-baiting against witnesses or journalists. However, they were able to deploy doctors against doc-tors, or to outright substitute Catholic clergy with Evangelical fundamentalists: only Honduran doctors or theologians were able to manipulate the standards of evidence and undermine the professionals who "warranted" stories about the war. CIA Director Bill Casey had arranged for the Nicaraguan counterguerrillas to be operated and funded separately from any formal CIA structure, trading Iranian missiles and South American cocaine to fund explicit counterrevolutionary terrorism. The Reagan Administration acquired new levels of media power and secret warfare—but the citizens of Honduras or the United States were not helpless in the face of a lawless conspiracy at the peak of state power. Like many "partner states" in previous covert wars, Honduras was crucial to the covert narco-paramilitary operation against its neighbors El Salvador and Nicaragua, but not itself in any state of combat. I argue that using Honduran sources exposes the numerous different times that the war was vulnerable to civilians—from illiterate Honduran campesinos to Iowan church volunteers or investigative journalists. Tracing each story from its origins in Honduras reveals where U.S. state power was most vulnerable to exposure and disruption.