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At the start of the next hurricane season, the Corps plans to dispatch about 200 Marines to Central America in the form of a new special purpose Marine air-ground task force. The Marines will engage in partnership training with key military allies in the region, and will be equipped to provide humanitarian relief in the event of a natural disaster.
The Marine Corps plans to stand up the new unit for U.S. Southern Command in 2015, said Brig. Gen. David Coffman, commander of Marine Corps Forces South. Like most SOUTHCOM missions, the Marines will largely focus on building partnership in a part of the world laden with violence and uncertainty, which has left some of the most vulnerable members of the local populations — including children — fleeing for the U.S. border.
“It’s going to be overwhelmingly focused on engagement in Central America and the Caribbean, building partner capacity for our partners to take care of themselves — both in the narcotics trafficking fight and in a broader sense on how they use their military capability,” Coffman said.
The unit will include ground, air and logistics capabilities. The air element will be equipped with CH-53E heavy lift helicopters, said Capt. Armando Daviu, a spokesman for MARFORSOUTH, which could be used for humanitarian missions.
The unit will likely deploy during the height of hurricane season starting in May or June, Daviu said. The Marines will stay for about six months, and a replacement unit won’t deploy again until the following spring, he said.
The Corps is still in the process of working with host countries to determine where the unit will be based, Coffman said, but it’s likely the Marines will train with militaries from four countries in Central America and one in the Caribbean: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and the Dominican Republic.
“It really models how the Marine Corps operates,” Coffman said. “They will have a crisis response, ‘be-prepared-to’ component. General [John] Kelly asked the commandant for was not a crisis response-oriented force, but an engagement-oriented force.”
Putting a company of Marines on the ground in Central America will allow MARFORSOUTH to boost the theater security cooperation they’ve been carrying out there over the past couple years. Marine Corps Times spent a week on the ground in June with teams of Marines training local forces in Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. The small teams of Marines currently have a year-round mission there, training local militaries that are fighting on the front lines of the drug wars in some of the most dangerous countries in the world.
The time to boost those partnerships is now, Coffman said, based on requests from militaries there. Basing a SPMAGTF in the region for a six months at a time will allow them to boost the size and scope of those training missions, he said.
“I think we have that command signal from our partners to step it up a notch and that’s what we’re looking to do with adding a little extra heft to our force in Central America,” he said.
That training is vital to the partner militaries in Central America. Guatemala’s marine corps was just officially organized about 13 months ago, so training regularly with Marines helps them set military doctrine, Col. Medardo Monterroso Suarez, commandant of the Guatemalan marine corps, told Marine Corps Times in June.
“We’re a newborn force and we have our own doctrine, but it’s still very important for us to get the experience and expertise from the other forces that have learned it through operations,” Monterroso Suarez said.
Areas of the Caribbean and Central and South Americas are also prone to tropical storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Having 200 Marines in the region and ready to respond would help following disasters like the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010 or Hurricane Mitch, a deadly storm that hit Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua in 1998, pummeling the countries with record amounts of rainfall.
