Honduras served as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for US proxy wars

Evidence

During Central America’s bloody civil wars of the 1980s, the U.S. presence in Honduras was so great that the country was nicknamed the “USS Honduras”: it was like a stationary, unsinkable aircraft carrier, strategically anchored at the center of the war-torn region. From the Soto Cano Air Base, the Pentagon and CIA orchestrated support for regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, which were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and for the murderous Nicaraguan Contra insurgency, which became part of the biggest American political scandal since Watergate. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 282

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘USS Honduras’ framing is a strong hook for an essay on how a single air base enabled region-wide proxy warfare and hundreds of thousands of deaths.