ThE BORDER WAS CRUCIAL to just about everything being described in these pages.  The imaginary line between the nation-states of Honduras and Nicaragua warped political & jurisdictional spaces in all kinds of important & interesting ways, creating diverse sets of constraints & opportunities for everyone residing on either side of it.  Smugglers, outlaws & rebels generally found the border very useful.  Migrants, traders & ordinary people usually ignored it.  National armies & national governments often found it a major nuisance, because their authority to impose the rule of law ended at the border.  The border also created a borderlands — not unlike other borderlands zones around the world, such as the US-Mexico borderlands — a unique cultural & political space created by the very existence of a fixed line on the Earth separating two sovereign nation-states.  (Photo: Marines on patrol approaching Parades near the Honduran border, late 1928, George C. Stockes papers, Marine Corps Research Center)

     This is the homepage for evidence & documents relating to Honduras and the Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands in the 19th & 20th centuries, focusing on the 15 or so years from the Honduran Civil War of 1919 to the firm consolidation of the dictatorial regimes of Anastasio Somoza García in Nicaragua and Tiburcio Carías Andino in Honduras in the mid-1930s. 

     Right now there are four links:

1.   A big page containing 120 documents from a variety of sources titled  The Segovian Borderlands, 1919-1926:  Military Mobilization, Political Struggle, and Social Conditions.

2.  A draft paper titled  The Vexatious Frontier Question:  Capital, Coercion, and Sovereignty in the Western Nicaragua-Honduras Borderlands, 1919-1936.   (MS-Word file).  Presented at the January 2008 annual CLAH meeting in Washington and in 2009 at the MACLAS conference at William & Mary College.  The paper sketches the dynamics of Segovian borderlands history, society & culture during this period & represents a kind of rough draft for a journal article. 

3.   An Excel file that accompanies the paper that maps out (by month) episodes of borderlands military mobilization and political unrest from 1919 to 1936, along with periods of US intervention in both countries and who & what political party controlled which state apparatus in Nicaragua & Honduras.

4.    For ease of reference, the authoritative if conventional  Tim Merrill, ed., Honduras: A Country Study, Honduras (1995).

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