Honduras Resistance Warns of Provocateurs on the Internet

By Al Giordano

September 15 anti-coup protest - Day 80 - in Tegucigalpa, D.R. 2009 Rights Action.

A sure sign that the Honduran people’s resistance against the June 28 coup d’etat continues to enjoy massive public support comes from the continued disinformation campaigns against it. After all, if the coup regime really had, as its defenders claim, won the battle for Honduran hearts and minds, it wouldn’t need to persist in its overstated PR and disinfo campaigns against coup opponents.

Yet Honduran TV and radio airwaves are still daily bombarded by slick advertisements that seek to legitimize the coup regime and demonize its opponents. Pro-coup newspapers – owned by the same few families that control most of the country’s economic means of production – serve up similar daily fare.

And what drives the coup mongers battiest is that after 84 days of constant and massive dissent against the illegitimate coup regime – even after more than 3,500 arbitrary arrests of coup opponents, brutal beatings, torture and even some assassinations by the regime, its police and its military – the resistance remains nonviolent.

Coup defenders have thus tried to seize upon isolated images of youths tossing tear gas canisters back at police, or the early August incident in which three unidentified men, a few blocks away from a protest march, set fire to a Popeye’s Chicken restaurant with a Molotov, as somehow representative of the resistance. They’ve tossed in a few photos of graffiti on the walls of Honduran cities as further supposed evidence of the unruly nature of the resistance. But that dog hasn’t hunted and so now the deceit and trickery has sunk to a new low: the invention, out of thin cyberspace, of a supposed guerrilla army and its website which claims the armed organization (one that doesn’t exist) is sponsored by the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d’Etat, the umbrella organization for many organizations and individuals that oppose the coup.

The National Resistance Front is having none of it and this week fired off a statement that hits back against such disinfo peddlers and sets the record straight. I’ll translate it in its entirety:

A statement by the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d’Etat

The Communication Commission of the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d’Etat wishes to correct and reject some messages on the Internet authored by Mr. Georges Francoise Godoy, supposedly an Argentine-French citizen who frequents the information networks on the Internet of the resistance.

In a message distributed via Internet dated September 14, Mr. Godoy promotes a website named www.erph.org which makes it appear as if, under the banner of the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d’Etat, there is a so-called “Revolutionary Army of the Honduran People, Paramilitary Battallion Isis Obed Murillo,” whose commander is said to be President Zelaya. In said website there appears a “Communiqué #1” according to which this supposed organization has decided to attack members of the coup regime and their families militarily.

As authorized spokespersons of the Frente, this Communications Commission rejects as false the claims being circulated in respect to the existence of the mentioned armed front. We are going to repeat what we have said for eighty days: The National Resistance Front Against the Coup d’Etat is a public organization that uses only nonviolent methods. Since the beginning our organization agreed to fight agains the usurper regime with peaceful methods and without arms. As such: WE DO NOT HAVE ANY ARMED OR PARAMILITARY FRONT. And whoever tries to make it appear to the contrary exposes our leadership to military and police repression.

Consequently, we alert all compañeros and compañeras who use the Internet and other media to reject the messages of provocateurs who try to deceive about the essence of our struggle.

From the city of Tegucigalpa, MDC, on September 17, 2009

Communication Commission of the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d’Etat

Again, I’ll bypass the matter of whether the Internet source mentioned by the Resistance Front’s statement is some kind of regime agent or just another misguided foreigner who out of frustration – or the fetishization that comes from an inexperienced view of armed struggle as some kind of romantic notion that can erupt spontaneously without years of organization and public education preceding it – goes doing the regime’s job for it by treating a phony web site as real. All of that is secondary to the real battle over what is true and what is false.

But what is certain is that 84 days into the resistance, the opponents to the coup regime maintain themselves steady on a nonviolent path – even when provoked daily with the violence and disinformation of the regime – because they keep their eyes on the prize (a new Constitution) and hold on.