Why is Honduras threatening to expel US troops?
Honduras has threatened to expel United States troops, retaliating against incoming President Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations of refugees and asylum seekers entering the US from Central America.
Trump’s plan could affect hundreds of thousands of people from Honduras, a country which hosts a significant US military base.
Here’s what’s at the heart of the dispute between the world’s biggest superpower and its smaller neighbour, why it matters and what this means for ties between the countries.
What has Honduras said about US troops?
In her New Year’s message, Honduras’s President Xiomara Castro threatened to reconsider the country’s military cooperation with the US if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Castro stated that US military facilities in Honduras, particularly Soto Cano Airbase, would “lose all reason to exist” if these deportations occurred. But she also used the opportunity to criticise the longstanding US military presence on Honduras soil more broadly.
“In the face of a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our cooperation policies with the United States, especially in the military field, where for decades, without paying a cent, they maintain military bases on our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras,” she said in a Spanish statement broadcast on national television.
How important are US military bases in Honduras?
The US military presence in Honduras, while focused on Soto Cano Airbase, is part of broader operations in Central America that include smaller bases in El Salvador.
Soto Cano, which became operational in the 1980s to combat perceived communist threats in the region, hosts more than 1,000 US military and civilian personnel. It is also one of the few locations capable of landing large planes between the US and Colombia, apart from Guantanamo.
The base serves as a key launching point for the rapid deployment of US forces in the region, including for providing disaster relief and administering aid, and for counter-narcotics operations.
Its location provides proximity to drug trafficking corridors in Central and South America, also making it an essential staging ground for surveillance and interdiction.
However, some experts have criticised the US justification for its military presence at Soto Cano after Washington supported the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was eventually extradited to the US in 2022 for drug crimes and money laundering.
Hernandez was twice president of Honduras and is serving a 45-year jail term in New York since June 2024.
“The hypocrisy to say that they’re using it [Soto Cano] to fight drug trafficking when the US was shoring up, legitimating and pouring millions of dollars into the president of Honduras and his corrupt police and military,” Dana Frank, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Al Jazeera.
At the same time, while the US does not pay Honduras for the base, Soto Cano does serve benefits to the Central American nation, too.
“The US military presence in Honduras is generally popular, makes an economic contribution, and provides specific benefits to Honduras in terms of infrastructure development, intelligence, and emergency assistance in times of extreme weather which often impacts Honduras,” said Eric Olson, global fellow at the Wilson Center.
How significant is the threat – and why is Honduras making it?
Experts say the threat from Honduras marks a significant moment in Central American geopolitics.
“I think this is a really fascinating and powerful turning point in the role of the US which takes for granted that it is going to dominate the Western Hemisphere, that it’s particularly going to dominate Central America,” said Frank.
Frank said the US military may be particularly inclined to keep Soto Cano amid competition with China, which does not have a military presence in Central America.
Honduras, too, wouldn’t want a rupture in ties with the US, say analysts. The country relies on remittances from its overseas citizens: 27 percent of its gross domestic product came from remittances in 2022. And its biggest diaspora is in the US, where about 5 percent of the Honduras population – more than 500,000 people – live, per Pew Research Center estimates.
Hondurans play a key role in the US economy, particularly in labour-intensive sectors. In the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore in March 2024, one of the six construction workers killed was a Honduran national, while others were immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
That very same dynamic, however, makes it hard for Honduras to stay silent in the face of threats of mass deportations. The country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tony Garcia has said about 250,000 Hondurans could be expelled from the US in 2025, a number the Central American nation is not equipped to suddenly host.
Without the remittances from its citizens in the US, the economy of Honduras could also take a major hit.
How likely is Honduras to follow through?
Some analysts view the threat as a negotiating tactic rather than an immediate policy shift, and say that Honduras lacks leverage to influence US policies meaningfully.
“In the end, I sense that Honduras is making threats with a very weak hand,” Olson told Al Jazeera.
Frank described the move as a “preemptive strike” against Trump and a significant assertion of Honduran and Central American sovereignty.
Trump has pledged swift deportations of undocumented immigrants, but his team has provided no concrete plans, leaving Latin American governments uncertain as they try to prepare.
He has also pledged to slap a 25-percent tariff on Mexico and Canada if they did not stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl to the US.
How might the US respond – and what does this mean for bilateral ties?
Olson told Al Jazeera that the threat may have broader implications for US-Honduras relations, particularly under a Republican-led administration. The Honduran government, he said, was “playing with fire”.
“I cannot imagine that President Trump will take kindly to threats to the US military by a government that Republicans already seem eager to categorise with Nicaragua and Venezuela,” he said, predicting that bilateral relations may be “about to take a turn for the worse” regardless of the outcome surrounding Soto Cano.
Olson said that for the US, a potential rupture in military relations with Honduras would likely be seen as disappointing but not critical to its military operations.
To be sure, Soto Cano played a key role in the 1980s in the US-backed Contra War against Nicaragua and supported operations in El Salvador.
“It has a long and nasty history,” Frank noted, including its use during the 2009 military coup in Honduras, when removed President Manuel Zelaya’s plane refuelled there.
But Olson suggested that Soto Cano Airbase no longer holds the strategic importance it did during the 1980s and 1990s.
“The US military has been considering its withdrawal from Soto Cano for some time,” Olson said, adding that missions such as counter-narcotics and emergency response could be conducted from other locations.
Frank also warned that Republicans, including Marco Rubio, are likely to frame President Castro’s government as aligned with anti-US governments such as those of Venezuela and Nicaragua.
“This will likely be spun into a broader anti-communist Cold War framework,” she said.
Source: Apps Support
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,046
The Russian media outlet Izvestia said a Ukrainian drone attack killed its freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov. Data previously provided by the Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 15 journalists killed since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Source: Al Jazeera
Palestinian Authority suppresses criticism of Jenin operation in West Bank
Beirut, Lebanon – The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) ban on Al Jazeera is part of a broader attempt to silence criticism of its security operation in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, according to activists and analysts.
The ban came almost a month after the PA launched a crackdown on a coalition of armed groups that call themselves the Jenin Brigades.
The groups are affiliated with Palestinian factions such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and even Fatah, the party that controls the PA.
Since early December, the PA has besieged the Jenin camp and cut off water and electricity to most of the inhabitants in an ostensible attempt to restore “law and order” across the West Bank.
However, its indiscriminate tactics in Jenin coincide with a wider attack on free speech, activists and human rights groups told Al Jazeera.
Repression and censorship
Activists and rights groups said dozens of people have been summoned and interrogated – some beaten – over social media posts opposing the PA’s operation in Jenin, although prominent Palestinian personalities have still been able to write critical posts about the security operation.
Most of those detained have been released, but some were forced to upload apology videos, according to rights groups.
Sanad, Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency, reviewed and verified three apology videos that were circulating online.
“There is tension over the PA’s operation and people don’t feel safe to speak about it or to share with us what happened to them when they were detained,” said Murad Jadallah, an activist with Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group in the West Bank.
The PA was born out of the Oslo Accords between Palestinian and Israeli leaders in 1993. It mandated that the PA recognise Israel and eliminate Palestinian armed groups in exchange for a Palestinian state alongside Israel by 1999.
Israel, however, has used the last 30 years to expand illegal settlements on large swaths of stolen Palestinian land, nearly tripling the number of settlers in the occupied West Bank.
As an occupying power, it still controls most aspects of Palestinian life and frequently carries out raids, killings and arrests in the West Bank, even in areas where the PA is supposed to be in full control.
Despite dimming hopes for statehood, the PA has stuck to its mandate under the Oslo Accords, leading to accusations from many Palestinians that the administration is effectively cooperating with Israel to maintain the occupation.
Over the years, the PA has also escalated repression against Palestinian opponents and dissidents. In 2021, the PA arrested critic and activist Nizar Banat, who died in custody.
According to Amnesty International, the PA has failed to adequately investigate his death.
More recently, on December 28, a sniper shot dead Shatha al-Sabbagh, a female journalist who had been speaking to residents in the camp about the security operation.
Her family blamed the PA forces, yet the PA denied responsibility and blamed “outlaws” for her death.
Four days later, the PA banned Al Jazeera – believed to be the most popular media network in the occupied West Bank.
“If this decision is enforced, it means Al Jazeera … won’t be able to monitor what it is monitoring and documenting today,” said Munir Nuseibah, a political analyst with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka.
“This will affect the Palestinian cause as a whole. Al Jazeera … reports Palestine to the world,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The way the Palestinian Authority is dealing with the situation right now is that there is just one truth and that truth is their narrative,” said Al-Haq’s Jadallah.
Disinformation
Some PA officials have claimed that armed groups in the Jenin camp are part of a broader Iranian-backed conspiracy or “extremist outlaws” aiming to undermine the Palestinian quest for statehood.
According to Ahmed Mohamed*, an activist monitoring digital freedoms in the Palestinian territory, the PA’s rhetoric aims to link the Jenin Brigades to a foreign plot to discredit them as a legitimate resistance against Israel’s occupation.
“This is a rehashing of Israeli propaganda … which claims that Palestinians are not acting out of their own will, but on direction from Iran and that Iran is the big boogeyman,” Mohamed said.
“There is merit that Iran supports resistance activities in Palestine and oppressive regimes elsewhere, but the PA is trying to claim they are the ones who have Palestinians in their mind and have a pro-Palestinian policy,” he added.
Iran has traditionally provided financial and military aid to Hamas and PIJ – two of the factions that loosely make up the Jenin Brigades – as part of its broader policy to challenge Israeli and US hegemony in the region.
However, Hamas and PIJ are not puppets and remain rooted in their quest to resist Israel’s occupation, according to a report by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a United Kingdom-based think tank.
Meanwhile, the PA’s main donors are the United States and Europe, whose stances often conflict with wider Palestinian aspirations and views.
Social media platforms seen as close to the PA have been sharing one video showing four men in white trousers, white tunics and ill-fitting white hoods over their heads. The men also appear to be wearing explosive packs on their torsos and claim they will blow themselves up if PA security forces enter the Jenin camp.
Some of these PA-affiliated pages claim the men belong to an “extremist” battalion called 313, which is also the name of a unit that fights with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Sanad said the video was never uploaded on any social media pages affiliated with the Jenin Brigades and “appears to have been created to mislead the public”.
“There is no battalion officially named Battalion 313 [in Jenin],” Sanad found.
Coercion and intimidation
The head of a leading human rights group in the West Bank, who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal, said the PA was also coercing civil servants to partake in demonstrations supporting the Jenin operation.
“[Civil servants] risk being punished if they are considered absent [at these pro-PA protests],” the source told Al Jazeera.
“They could receive administrative penalties or a call from the PA security forces.”
Al Jazeera obtained a copy of an official government letter that appears to verify the claim.
The letter was addressed to the mayor of Masafer Yatta in Hebron and requested that certain employees not be punished for not showing up to a demonstration on behalf of the PA on December 24.
As such, the letter indicates that employees would normally be penalised for missing a pro-PA demonstration.
Jadallah, from Al-Haq, added that PA security forces often confiscate the phones of people they interrogate and replace their critical social media with posts that lionise the PA and its operation in Jenin.
Palestinian security forces warned detainees not to delete the new posts once they were released, he said.
The human rights organisation head also argued that the PA is instrumentalising cybercrime laws – and laws to combat incitement – to justify muzzling free speech.
In 2017, the PA passed – by decree – a cybercrime law that made it possible for authorities to arrest people for “inciting hatred” on social media and for “disturbing public order”.
Critics of the cyberlaw argued the laws, which were broadly worded, could be abused by the PA to enhance cyber-surveillance and stifle dissent – a longstanding practice of the Israeli occupation.
“The laws are being applied to suppress any criticism of the Jenin operation and particularly harsh criticism,” the source said.
“If anyone shows open support for the Jenin brigades … then they risk being summoned.”
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