Far-left President of Honduras Xiomara Castro on Wednesday threatened to shut down America’s military base in the country if President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration carries out mass deportations of Hondurans.
Castro issued her threats during her New Year speech, aired as a mandatory broadcast on Wednesday on national radio and television. The Honduran president warned that, should mass deportations of Hondurans occur, she would change her administration’s “collaboration” policy with the United States and, as a result, the American military base on Honduran territory would “lose its reason for existence.”
“Faced with a hostile attitude of massive expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the U.S.,” Castro said, “especially in the military field in which, without paying a penny for decades, they [Americans] maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras.”
The United States has a military presence in Honduras through the Soto Cano Air Base, built in 1982 in the city of Comayagua. The base, which houses more than 500 U.S. military personnel and 500 Honduran and U.S. civilians, also serves as headquarters for Joint Task Force Bravo (JTF-Bravo).
Castro said she hopes President-elect Trump’s incoming administration will be open to “constructive and friendly” dialogue and not engaged in “unnecessary reprisals” against Honduran migrants.
“I want to say that we hope that the new U.S. administration of the democratically elected president, Donald Trump, will be open to dialogue, constructive and friendly,” Castro said. “That he does not take unnecessary reprisals against our migrants, who as a rule are a great contribution to the U.S. economy.”
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According to information from Honduran authorities cited by the Spanish news agency EFE, more than 1 million Hondurans, including both legal and illegal, currently live in the United States. An estimated 280,000 are on deportation lists.
Former Honduran Vice President Salvador Nasralla criticized Castro’s threats against the United States and warned the expulsion of the American military presence in the country could lead to a rupture of relations with the United States, Honduras’ “main strategic partner.”
Nasralla, who is reportedly the presidential pre-candidate for the centrist Liberal Party in Honduras’ 2025 general elections, accused Castro of planning to hand over the military base to China, something he considered a “threat to the country.”
“A conflict of this magnitude would open the door to devastating tariffs for our exports, hitting our already fragile economy hard and leaving thousands of Hondurans without a livelihood,” Nasralla said.
The former vice president stressed that Honduras needs “allies, not absurd confrontations,” and highlighted U.S. cooperation as fundamental for employment, trade, and development in the country.
Several Spanish-language outlets reported on Wednesday that remittances sent by Honduran migrants represent around 25 percent of Honduras’ entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Between January and November 2024, Honduras reportedly received $8.85 billion in remittances — 90 percent of which originated from the United States.
Castro also announced that, as president pro-tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional bloc, she will convene a meeting of foreign ministers together with Mexico’s far-left President Claudia Sheinbaum on migration.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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