HONDURAS-ENVIRONMENT: Islands Threatened by Military Garbage

By Thelma Mejía Reprint | | Print |

Thelma Mejia

TEGUCIGALPA, May 30 1997 (IPS) - The Swan Islands off Honduras, teeming with flora and fauna, are menaced by military refuse deposited by U.S. and Central American armed forces, according to environmemntals.

The islands in the Caribbean have become a depository for massive fuel tanks, powerful bombs and other military apparatus that flowed into Central America throughout the 1980s. US, Guatemalan, Honduran and Nicaraguan “contra” weapons are now concentrated on “La Mayor”, one of two Swan Islands, according to a report published here.

A study conducted by biology students at Honduras’ National Autonomous University (NAU) was published in the newspaper La Prensa which criticised the indifference expressed by the Honduran government as well as ecological groups.

The NAU students Nereyda Estrada and Franklin Castaneda worked on the study after visiting the Swan Islands with a group of North American tourists.

As soon as their plane landed they were struck by “the military trash that was strewn everywhere.” The island was a dumping ground for countless tins, tubes, boxes, collapsing hangars, rusty metal barrels, and mountains of explosives. Five large fuel tanks are on the verge of giving way to corrosion, the students said.

In their report, Estrada and Castaneda said that any Honduran who went to the island would “immediately see the disaster that’s happened, not to mention the present and future impact of pollution on marine species and terrestrial vegetation. A visitors will be particularly shocked because the Swan Islands are promoted as remote outposts of a pristine paradise.”

In 1995, Honduran president Carlos Roberto Reina made a well-publicized tour of the islands to “assert Honduran sovereignty” and to eliminate vestiges of the cold war symbolized by the deserted artifacts of war.

Reina’s visit was also designed to erase memories of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which established itself on the island with a weather station and a huge radar installation.

The Swan Islands – among the least densely populated of any Caribbean islands – are situated along the southern brink of a deep sea canyon called the “Cayman Trench”, which is home to a large number of endangered marine species.

Even if the United States took responsibility for removing all its military garbage, significant ecological damage has already been done, environmentalists said.

U.S. biologist Becky Menton, who is based at NAU, feared that Hondurans will endure this devastation without even learning the critical importance “cleaning up after oneself.”

The NAU report also pointed to indiscriminate grazing that’s being conducted by private business interests on the islands. It noted that this activity represented a serious ecological threat to the Swan Islands’ unique biological patrimony.

Despite the threat posed by the military refuse, the NAU students reported discovering two formerly unknown species on the island. One is a snake of the “zumador” group, and the other is a species of Piranga, a migratory bird.

The ecological wealth of the Swan Islands was first reported in the 1930s when an American researcher reported 22 species of land snails, nine of which are unique to the islands.