714.1515/565: Telegram
The Honduran Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs (Coello) to the Secretary of State
[Received February 28, 1928—9:15 a.m.]
The Government and people of Honduras have always appreciated with an intense feeling of gratitude the good will and the friendly spirit in which for some years past the Government of the United States has interceded to bring about a satisfactory and pacific settlement of the boundary dispute with Guatemala. Honduras has endeavored to respond to those very lofty and generous purposes with its most deferent attitude. Since 1917 when mediation began my Government never cast off any means whatsoever of achieving a final settlement of the matter and accepted from the very beginning of the mediation arbitration by His Excellency the President of the United States but, unfortunately, without getting at that time a concrete answer from Guatemala about its accepting the arbitration. Guatemala later accepted that arrangement in the course of the Central American Conferences at Washington in 1923, according to the official declaration of Secretary of State Hughes which is recorded in the journal of the Second Plenary Session of 1923 which I deposited in your Department.92 Notwithstanding that agreement and the various steps taken by Honduras to secure the signing of the convention of arbitration, Guatemala constantly refused on some pretext or other to redeem the word it had pledged and finally went so far as to deny its promise. In the meanwhile Guatemala on more than one occasion took advantage of the anomalous situation of our country to take gradual possession of our territory and invaded its integrity now by clandestine works in the zone of the status quo that had been agreed to and then by granting concessions like that which was given to the United Fruit Company on November 7, 1924, to foreign companies in territory that is clearly Honduran, in violation of our sovereignty. The arbitrary instructions of Guatemala over Honduran territory culminated [Page 718] in the recent attack on the Chachahualia guard house which I had occasion to bring to Your Excellency’s knowledge in my previous radiogram of the 14th instant. The Chachahualia guard house stands on territory that is plainly Honduran outside of the status quo of which the American Government had official knowledge through the note of November 15, 1917 from this Department to the Legation of the United States at this capital.93 Notwithstanding the gravity of the offence perpetrated on the territorial sovereignty of Honduras by that last outrage my Government has, in its desire to avoid a conflict fraught with disastrous consequences to the peace of Central America, carried its prudence to an extreme and in that spirit has again suggested to Guatemala the imperative necessity of arriving at the earliest possible final conclusion of the boundary dispute to which end it proposed that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Guatemala to that Republic and a representative of the American government conduct a personal inspection to the end of stipulating a new provisional line which will set up a clearer more definite status quo intended to ward off further difficulties, and immediately take up subsequent negotiations for the final settlement of the matter either by direct agreement on a boundary line under the mediation of Your Excellency’s enlightened government or by bringing into play the arbitration that had been agreed on and previously accepted by Guatemala. Guatemala appears on new pretexts again indefinitely to defer the question so that the difficulties would stand and at the risk of giving birth to some other conflict with worse consequences. On those antecedents and with an appeal to the good friendship of the Government of the United States I take the liberty of again beseeching Your Excellency’s potent mediation to the end that you kindly interpose your good offices and influence so that the dispute may this time be brought to a final end. Expressing in advance my due thanks to Your Excellency for the great benefit bestowed on my country by your timely mediation, it affords me pleasure to renew to you the sentiment of my best and most distinguished esteem.
- See Conference on Central American Affairs, Washington, December 4, 1922–February 7, 1923 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1923), p. 56.↩
- Foreign Relations, 1917, p. 782.↩