Scoop

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

It rains here at five o'clock: sometimes It

little later, sometimes a little earlier, but by and large at tea-time every day. It rains very hard, which means you have to take precautions going back and forth from the American Embassy to the Maya Hotel.

It's not essential to get back to the Maya Hotel; you could conceivably go down to the cathedral and hang around there for a while, but you don't — you go to the Maya.

Once back on campus, as the hotel is often called, you meet everyone you saw at the embassy: Colonel Strachan, the icy press officer, whose job is to stop jour- nalists getting the wrong idea about the cur- rent military exercises, and who succeeds only in creating doubts where there were none before; and Professor Moskopolis, the military sociologist, who is studying women on manoeuvres, and has come to the alarming conclusion that if you sleep soldiers of different sexes side by side in a field tent, their subsequent performance is greatly impaired.

And then there are the journalists themselves, distinguished by their thread- bare look and the relentless wit of their con- versation. Since more of them have been killed in Central America than during the whole Vietnam war, and since many of the survivors have been on dangerous missions together, including getting shot at while on patrol with the Salvadoran guerrillas, they have an esprit de corps and a strong sense of fellowship — one that must compete with their equally strong sense of rivalry.

I was sitting with them up on campus one evening, treated with mild suspicion because I had twice been taken out to din- ner by presumed agents of the CIA, when I was called to the telephone. This was sur- prising since I was not a resident of the hotel and my only friends in Tegucigalpa, the chaps from the 'Company', had already returned to Washington. It turned out to be Jamie Framson, an Englishman who writes for papers on the other side of the political divide, and whom I had met on campus the day before. Did I have a driving licence? he asked. Yes, I had a licence. Would I be ready at 7.30 the next morning? Yes, but might I know what for? No, exclusive story: He'd tell me on the way. On the way to where? The border. Which border? Couldn't tell me.

The next morning it was all explained, to me. Framson and two reporters from a world-wide news agency, Carol the photo- grapher and Carol the writer, were going to rent a truck, paid for courtesy of the agen- cy, and go snooping around the Nicaraguan frontier. But they had blotted their copy book with the rental firm by smashing up the last car they had taken out and were rather hoping they could do it all in my name. All right, I said, but what about road mines? Make sure you drive round them! Ah; and what were we looking for? Secret American bases.

The American military build-up is the central issue in Honduras. The theory is that President Reagan is surreptitiously set- ting up a military infrastructure in the coun- try which he could use, when the time was ripe, to launch an invasion of Nicaragua and put an end to the rebels in El Salvador. According to Senator Sasser, a liberal Democrat who came down to Honduras in February, the Reagan Administration is us- ing the current joint manoeuvres with the Honduran army as a smokescreen for building airstrips, radar stations, fuel depots and ammunition dumps, and is doing so illicitly with funds authorised by Congress only for the day-to-day costs of troop exercises.

He has a point. For example, a dirt- packed airstrip, long enough to take C-130 transport planes, has been built out at Jamastran near the Nicaraguan border. Embassy officials claim it was built exclu- sively for the manoeuvres but since all they did at the strip was to drop a few hundred parachutists into a very prickly cotton field and then take them home again in lorries, nobody is very convinced by the explan- ation. Moreover, the army says the strip will disintegrate within weeks under the heavy rains of Central America, but the soldiers who built it find that a very offen- sive suggestion and insist that the runway has a good few years in it, so long as it is rolled every now and then.

The trouble is that one dirt-packed airstrip hardly spells out an imminent inva- sion of Nicaragua, so the press corps is busy trying to find out where all the secret bases are.

There is a man who knows all about such

it's a listed building.'

things: a bizarre Canadian who was once a mercenary in Africa and now owns the brothel in Comayagua. Actually it's not the only brothel, but it's the only one that doesn't go in for debt bondage of 13-year- old girls, and is therefore considered a decent and upright establishment. At any rate it is the preferred resort of officers and men alike and is the main link between the visiting American forces and the native Honduran society. And it is a goldmine for journalists.

The Canadian told the two Carols from the agency that there was indeed a secret base, along with an airfield, out at the border town of El Paraiso. Might he be confusing it with the strip we all knew about at Jamastran? No, he was positive this was something quite different.

So that was our mission: to find the base at El Paraiso and reveal to an indignant world that Ronald Reagan was about to launch a bloody attack against the San- dinistas.

Snag: our rented truck was out of petrol and you can't buy petrol in Honduras on a Sunday. It's not that the petrol stations are exactly closed, it's just that there is invari- ably a policeman sitting on the other side of the road waiting to get his teeth into a bribe. Even so, there are ways of outwitting the Honduran police and one of them is to go out to a rubbish tip in the slums of Tegucigalpa where they will fill up your tank, pint by pint, if you can pay the price.

Once out at El Paraiso the two Carols insisted that we masquerade as Peace Corps volunteers out on a Sunday drive. They then directed that we should 'fan out' over the town, if such you could call it, and try to pick up leads on the secret base.

Framson and I were not very good at this. We strolled up the main street and then down it again. We pottered around the park, sat on a bench, and then drank a Fanta. Above all we tried not to look con- spicuous. Finally we went to a bar, where we lured a talkative man away from his friends and asked him, discreetly, if he had seen any gringos around there. He said there were some missionaries in the area. Any soldiers, helicopters, planes? Ah, you mean Jamastran. No, we didn't mean Jamastran, we meant El Paraiso. Not a bloody thing in El Paraiso, he said; try Jamastran.

By this time the two Carols had the whole story sewn up. Yes, there was a strip out at Las Lomas — planes, helicopters and grin- gos everywhere. It was to the north. So off we sped northward. After about 15 miles we pulled up next to an old campesino on horseback, who seemed delighted to see us. Could he tell us how to get to Las Lomas? Yes, over yonder, but we would have to go by foot. By foot? Wasn't there a big airstrip and battalions of gringos? He chewed for a while and then, turning to us with a radiant smile, said, 'Las Lomas de Jamastran; muchos gringos at Jamastran.'

This was a blow; but the two Carols were not going to give up yet. Their man at the brothel knew what he was talking about so we would just have to go back to El Paraiso and find this airstrip once and for all. We asked around. The woman at the car- penter's said she knew exactly what we were looking for and gave us the first precise directions we had had all day. We went off down a dirt track, across a football pitch, and through the woods until we finally came out at a little group of huts, where an old woman was sitting with a child.

She looked at us bemused. I turned the engine off. We all got out and gazed about. It was most picturesque. Lovely country, we said to the old lady. Yes, she replied, very lovely. But it's quiet now. There used to be airstrip here but then they paved the road right out to El Paraiso. Now they don't use the strip any more — just use it to play football every night. Oh yes, they love to play football.

So that was the secret base of El Paraiso: a triumph of investigative reporting under the hazardous conditions of 'war-torn' Central America. Well, honestly, what an incredible bunch of amateurs.

But we did learn one thing: if the Penta- gon is really planning a full-scale invasion of Nicaragua it has done a first-rate job of covering its tracks.