Home  Peace Fund Honduras and Nicaragua |
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In the ensuing months, the Secretary General´s Special Representative held four rounds of talks with Honduran Foreign Minister Roberto Flores Bermúdez and his Nicaraguan counterpart, Eduardo Montealegre Rivas. Working with the OAS envoy, Honduras and Nicaragua signed a series of agreements to ensure peaceful relations while the substance of their boundary dispute was sent to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In March 2000, the two Foreign Ministers signed a memorandum of understanding detailing specific measures that covered such matters as maintaining communications between the two countries’ armed forces, restricting military activities along the border and conducting combined patrols in the Caribbean Sea. In late February 2001 tensions resurfaced around claims and counter-claims of violations of the confidence-building measures. In order to address the mounting tension, a meeting was held at OAS headquarters on March 16, 2001, between the Assistant Secretary General of the OAS and the Vice-Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Honduras and Nicaragua. A Technical Verification Agreement, developed during those talks, more clearly defined existing confidence-building measures and established additional measures to reduce tensions between the two countries. Through the Agreement, Honduras and Nicaragua invited third countries to provide technical experts, who, acting under the auspices of the Organization, and with the support of the General Secretariat, would verify Honduran and Nicaraguan compliance with the agreements reached. In this connection, the Parties, through a joint letter addressed to the Secretary General, requested that the General Secretariat verify compliance of eight specific confidence-building measures. On the basis of the Technical Verification Agreement, the General Secretariat, working with the parties, devised a concrete plan to verify two of the points contained in the letter from the vice ministers. These two points centered around verifying the location and composition of the military and police posts along the land frontier, and in the Caribbean Sea (the number and composition of the military and police posts along the land border and in the Caribbean Sea had been frozen at their September 1, 1999 levels by the San Salvador and Washington Agreements of 1999, and 2000, respectively). An Agreement for an OAS International Verification Mission was signed by the parties and the General Secretariat on June 7, 2001, which provided the OAS Mission with two objectives: the first was to “verify the number and location of military and police posts along the land border, and the number of personnel assigned to each post”, and the second was to “verify that the military and police posts in the Caribbean Sea were being kept at the same level as on September 1, 1999.”
At a ceremony at OAS Headquarters on December 19, 2001, the Secretary General and Assistant Secretary General presented the Report of the OAS Mission to Foreign Ministers Roberto Flores Bermúdez and Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, of Honduras and Nicaragua, respectively. The report stated that at all of the posts visited along the land border, the personnel, armaments, and communications equipment, were in keeping with the functions and responsibilities of surveillance and patrol which are part of the work of all police or military border posts. The report further concluded that the military and police posts on both sides of the border did not represent a threat to peace or an indication of increased military presence in the border area. In addition to receiving the report from the General Secretariat, the two Foreign Ministers also signed an Agreement for a Bi-national Border Development Plan, and an Agreement on Police Cooperation and Military Movement Notification. These two agreements, along with the results of the Verification Mission, were key elements in the Organization’s efforts to improve relations between Honduras and Nicaragua. On October 8, 2007, the International Court of Justice made a ruling in this case, which was accepted by both countries, putting an end to this long-time dispute. |
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