Max Blumenthal drops by the largest US military base in Latin America

Max Blumenthal rolled up on the Soto Cano / Palmerola air base in Honduras, the US military’s largest in Latin America. It plays a key role in Washington’s military strategy for Central America, and was a major factor behind the 2009 coup.

Video by Ben Norton

The Grayzone visited Soto Cano or Palmerola air base. This is the largest US military base in Latin America. It is the center of US influence not just in Honduras, but across the entire region.

And it’s really why the US is fighting so hard to preserve the corrupt and deeply unpopular government of Juan Orlando Hernández, because this country, Honduras, is strategically located. And so it’s a place where the US projects its power toward Venezuela, toward Nicaragua, toward Cuba.

In fact, during the 1980s, this base was a staging point for counterinsurgency operations by the US-backed Contras, overseen by John D. Negroponte, in hunter-killer operations that killed as many as 30,000 people in a covert war inside Nicaragua against the socialist Sandinista movement.

It’s basically a city where some 500 to 600 US troops live. Now they claim that it’s a Honduran air base, but people in Honduras consider that an absolute joke.

People in this country are outraged that this base is here, because it’s there’s no war going on in this country. And this base is actually the source of the repression that so many people feel.

It’s where Honduran military train with the US, especially the Honduran military police, who are used as a private praetorian guard for JOH, Juan Orlando Hernández, the repressive and corrupt, US-backed regime which has stolen two elections.