His death, following surgery in a military hospital, was confirmed by Carlos Roberto Flores, a former president of Honduras and a former chief of staff to Suazo Córdova.
Suazo Córdova was the first civilian president of Honduras after nearly a decade of military rule in a Central American country that had been dominated by the military through most of its history.
But his authority was limited. The commander of the armed forces, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, remained the most powerful figure in Honduras, inviting the United States to train and arm anti-Nicaraguan government forces — known as the Contras — on Honduran soil and serving as the point man for U.S. officials as they poured tens of millions of dollars into defeating the communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Still, Suazo Córdova came to symbolize an overeager embrace of U.S. political ambitions in a country where Washington and U.S. companies had often called the shots.
“He completely and willingly did everything the Americans wanted,” said Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, a historian, former minister of culture and a presidential candidate in Honduras in the early 1990s.
Suazo Córdova’s main accomplishment, some Americans and Hondurans said, may have been to hold together a nominally civilian government and turn over the presidency to another civilian. In its 161 years of independence before Suazo Córdova took office, Honduras had endured 385 armed rebellions, 126 governments and 16 constitutions.
“There was always a lot of apprehension, mistrust between the military and the politicians,” said Flores, who was president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002 and is now an owner of a company that runs the newspapers La Tribuna and El País and a television station. “It was a hard transition.”
It was late in the Cold War when Suazo Córdova became president, in 1982. Washington saw allies of the Soviet Union advancing in Latin America. Suazo Córdova and Álvarez worried that communism could spread to Honduras, a country the size of Tennessee with a population of about 4 million. The Americans and Hondurans wanted to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and help the government in El Salvador defeat leftist guerrillas.
Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the fighting before the United States abandoned its campaign against the Sandinistas and the warring sides in El Salvador agreed to a truce. Scores of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed as political enemies. Human rights groups accused Álvarez of directing death squads.
When the U.S. Congress cut funding to the Contras, the Reagan administration raised money by illegally selling weapons to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.
Suazo Córdova loudly proclaimed his animosity toward communism and several times met with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush in Washington. Reagan stopped briefly on a Central America trip to talk with Suazo Córdova in Honduras, and Bush once went to see him at his home in the small farm town of La Paz, northwest of the capital.
The military is still perhaps the most powerful institution in Honduras; it stepped in to depose President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Six civilian presidents had followed Suazo Córdova into office. Since the coup, two more civilians have been elected, one for a second term.
Suazo Córdova did not aspire to lofty social goals, former U.S. and Honduran officials said. Nor did he leave much of a mark on the many social problems that had become deeply woven into the life of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, now struggling with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
As a politician, Suazo Córdova played up his rural origins, often wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He had a playful, rough-edged and disarming way of talking, said Cresencio S. Arcos Jr., a U.S. diplomat who worked closely with him in the early 1980s and was ambassador to Honduras from 1989 to 1993.
But, Arcos said, Suazo Córdova had a steely core. In early 1984 he sided with dissident military officers who had put a gun to Álvarez’s head and shipped him out of the country. Suazo Córdova was the godfather of a child of the coup leader, Col. Walter Lopez Reyes of the air force.
Later, friends of Álvarez tried to assassinate Suazo Córdova. The FBI discovered the plot in Miami. Ultimately, Álvarez’s former chief of staff, an arms dealer he had befriended, and several others were sent to prison. The plot, investigators said, was going to be financed from the sale of cocaine smuggled into Florida. Álvarez returned to Honduras and was killed in 1989 in an ambush near his home in the capital.
In December 1982, a daughter of Suazo Córdova’s, Dr. Judith Xiomara Suazo Estrada, then 33, was kidnapped by guerrillas in Guatemala, held for 10 days and released after Guatemala and more than a dozen Latin American newspapers agreed to publish a statement by the guerrillas describing Honduras as the “imperialist headquarters for the invasion of Nicaragua.” The guerrillas referred to Suazo Córdova as “the buffoon of the imperialist plans.”
Suazo Cordova suffered a heart attack in the summer of 1983, when he was 55. He was treated at a U.S. field hospital in Honduras and then flown by the United States to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, according to John Negroponte, who worked closely with Suazo Cordova as the U.S. ambassador in Honduras from 1981, just before Suazo Cordova was elected, until 1985. (Critics of U.S. policy in Honduras often focused on Negroponte. They sometimes referred to him derogatorily as the proconsul and as the third member of a ruling triumvirate.)
Suazo Cordova had once been a hard drinker. “When I first met him,” Negroponte said, “He would tell you he hadn’t had a drink for years and he would tell you the day he stopped and how long it had been since then.”
Roberto Suazo Córdova was born in La Paz on March 17, 1927, the youngest of five children of Julian Suazo and Matilde Cordova. His father owned a small farm and was governor of the province of La Paz in the 1930s.
Suazo Córdova had six children with four women, said Jorge Canahuati, chief executive of a company that publishes the newspapers Diario La Prensa and Diario El Heraldo. Besides his daughter Dr. Suazo Estrada, his survivors include three other children, Joseph Julian Suazo Cervantes, Socorro Maria Suazo Cervantes and Carmen Chavarria.
Suazo Córdova graduated in 1949 from a combined undergraduate and medical program at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala. He worked in a hospital in Guatemala City for four years, then went home to practice medicine for 25 years in La Paz and begin his career as a politician.
Suazo Córdova served several terms in Congress and three times helped rewrite the constitution. Under pressure from Washington and some Honduran business leaders, the military agreed to permit elections in 1981. Suazo Córdova had become the protégé of the leader of the Liberal Party, Modesto Rodas Alvarado.
After Rodas died in 1979, Suazo Córdova became the party’s leader and, later, its presidential candidate. Suazo Córdova won the election in 1981 with 53 percent of the vote.
Toward the end of his presidency 32 years ago, Suazo Córdova maneuvered to get another two years in office. The idea was rejected, and he eventually lost the leadership of the Liberal Party.
He went home to La Paz to tend his small dairy farm. At one point he persuaded the government to renovate a building in La Paz as a cultural center. But he never again ventured into national politics.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.