Toppling a Coup, Part I: Dilemmas for the Honduras Regime
By Al Giordano
Last Saturday, at a hastily called public meeting in Tegucigalpa, more than one hundred rank and file participants in the Honduran civil resistance and some of its known leaders came out to speak with Ivan Marovich, the Serbian resistance veteran who had been invited by local and national anti-coup organizations to share his experiences.
It was one of three such sessions, and the only public meeting of the three. Almost immediately upon the completion of the screening of the film Bringing Down a Dictator (you can watch it via YouTube in six parts beginning here) about the Serbian movement that toppled the government of Slobodan Misolevic, a wind storm outside brought down a light pole, and with it the electric wires that lit the auditorium.
The Q & A session was thus held in darkness, and yet nobody left. Every attendee stayed for more than an hour with questions and comments to share. The lack of light in the windowless auditorium provided the feel of an underground meeting of the resistance.
One of the questions was:
Q. How can we cause a headache for the dictatorship?
Marovich replied:
That is a very good question because now we’re getting down to the dynamics of popular resistance.
During our struggle, every morning when we would get together we would ask ourselves the same question: how can we give the regime a headache today?
What matters now is who is going to make the next move.
If the regime makes the next move, you have to react.
If you make the first move, then they have to react.
The whole game is to calculate the next steps, to put the adversary in a position where he can’t react well.
You can see how this develops over time. When we were still small, maybe ten people, and the existing opposition leaders had been run out of the country or arrested, we were a very small organization. If we could get this many people in one theater we would have been happy. What we wanted was a small but powerful provocation. And this is when we used street theater. What we wanted to have is something that is going to provoke a response and make the regime look stupid.
This is what we called a “Dilemma Action.”
Dilemma actions are actions that put the opponent in a dilemma.
Let me tell you a Serbian folk tale. The story is called The Dark Realm, and it goes like this:
There once was a king that went with his friends on a journey. And they entered a land which was totally dark. You couldn’t see anything. They came across some small stones. Someone heard a voice and it said, “anyone who takes some of those stones will regret it, and those that don’t take the stones, they will regret it also.” So they didn’t know what to do.
Some said, “I’m going to regret it so I better not touch it.” Others said, “I’m going to regret it anyway so I better take some stones.”
And when they left the dark land they looked at the stones and they realized that they were diamonds. And those that took none regretted it. And those who took them, they regretted that they didn’t take more.
So what we wanted to have is a dilemma action in which the opponent is going to regret whatever he does.
The fist thing that we did, when we were still ten people, is we took a big barrel and a baseball bat. We wrote on the barrel: “Money for Milosevic.” It said we’re collecting money for Milosevic’s retirement. If you have money, put in the barrel. If you don’t have money, beat on the barrel. And Milosevic’s photo was on the barrel. So we put it on the street and walked away.
People walking by read the sign and began banging the barrel. Because of that noise, four more people came. And when they read it everyone started banging the barrel. This made a very loud noise. Finally somebody called the police. The police came and asked, “Who’s barrel is this?” Nobody knew. The police didn’t know what to do.
If the police had left the barrel there, people would keep banging the barrel. If they took the barrel, well, that is not their job. Finally somebody ordered them to take the barrel. We took photos of them and gave them to the media which reported, “POLICE ARREST BARREL.” So whatever they would do, they were going to regret it. And they regretted it because the very next day every town in the country had a barrel in its town square.
This is an example of how you create headaches for the adversary. The system, the regime, they have procedures. They have the way they do things. They don’t rely on creativity. They don’t rely on taking initiative. They totally rely on their procedures and on following orders. They don’t know how to react in certain situations. And that’s when they start making mistakes.
As the saying goes, never interrupt your opponent when he’s making mistakes.
One thing the system likes is demonstrations. They know how to react to demonstrations. They know how to count many people are in the street, how many police are needed, how much tear gas, maybe a water cannon. They know all that. But if they see a barrel in the streets and they arrest it and then there are barrels all over the place, they don’t know what to do.
The importance of taking initiative to put the adversary – the coup regime – on the horns of a dilemma is a tactic that is increasingly being implemented by the Honduras civil resistance, often on a decentralized level.
After their highway blockades that had paralyzed the country on three successive Thursdays and Fridays in July began to have diminishing returns when the National Police and the Armed Forces attacked and dispersed them violently, the civil resistance moved to a new kind of protest that began on Wednesday and is taking place along twenty different routes throughout the most populated corridors of Honduras. All of these marches will converge early next week on the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, which are four hours apart from each other.
The agreement from all the local organizations along the tributaries of the march is that they will not block traffic this time, but, rather, walk along the side of the road, and that they will travel about 20 kilometers (12 miles) a day to reach their destinations. In each town along the way, they'll hold public events and call on the local folks to join them in the march. Already, tens of thousands are walking along the side of all the major roads in Honduras.
quot;MsoNormal">“We don’t even know how far we will get today, but we want to advance 20 kilometers and on the road people are already beginning to join us,” said walker Esly Banegas to the newsletter of Radio Progreso:
At 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, Father Andrés Tamayo of the Catholic Church began walking with others from his state of Olancho toward Tegucigalpa. “We don’t have any security forces,” he told the radio station, “our safety is peace.”
From the eastern end of the Atlantic coast, another march left from La Entrada, Copán. Another branch of the march left from Tela, in the state of Atlántida. Both were headed toward San Pedro Sula. A call has been issued to the members of the public to support the march along the way with food, water and medicine.
As you can see from the photos here of just one tributary of that march, sent to Narco News by lay Catholic missionary John Donaghy, along the route between Santa Rosa de Copán and San Pedro Sula, the marchers are keeping to the side of the road. They’re not blocking traffic.
The dilemma they provide for the coup regime is this: If it sends police and military to attack the peaceful march, the regime looks not just authoritarian but stupid. If it does not send repressive forces to attack the march, the sheer numbers of people who will converge in the two biggest cities next Tuesday will be earthshaking and again demonstrate, as on July 5, that many times more Hondurans, hundreds of thousands, are mobilized against the coup than have shown up for all pro-coup rallies combined.
Sometimes a dilemma action can turn the enemy’s initiative against it to put the regime on the defensive.
An example of how the tables of initiative are turned is the story this week about the regime’s order to shut down Radio Globo and its 15 stations throughout Honduras.
There, the regime took the initiative. It delivered a letter saying "you must stop broadcasting." Radio Globo chose to react in a way that turned the horns of the dilemma back against the regime. It ignored the order. You can listen live online – click where it says “Escuchanos Aquí” - and confirm for yourself that three days later, the “closed” radio station is still broadcasting, still taking live phone calls from the public, still breaking the information blockade as a national clearinghouse for information on the civil resistance from every corner of the country.
If the regime is going to shut it down it is going to have to do it by force, which will cause it a national and international scandal and further reveal that its claims to be protecting freedoms and democracy are objectively false. If the regime, likewise, does not invade the station by force, it reminds all that it is weak, that it can’t enforce its own orders, and that it is not really as in control as it pretends to be. And every day that a radio station operates under threat of closure, it has more and more listeners, because there is an added drama of listening to see when or if it gets shut down. The regime is thus on the horns of a dilemma.
Another example: Yesterday, the Air Traffic Controllers Meteorologists union in Honduras began a strike in all the country’s airports, expressly in protest of the coup d’etat. Its workers refused to sign the paperwork on each plane scheduled to fly in or out or within the country, in accordance with international aviation laws and treaties. This stopped all air traffic for at least four hours last night. (And now you might deduce one of the reasons why your correspondent, having duties to comply with this week in another country, slipped out of Honduras the day before.)
The air traffic meteorologist strikers have put the regime in another dilemma: It could leave the strike alone and have a country without access or escape by air, crippling important business interests and express mail services. Or it could send in coup regime troops to do a job they are not trained to do, which means that if mistakes are then made and god forbid public safety of passengers or people on the ground becomes threatened, it will be on the regime’s head.
The regime has sent in the uniformed scabs now to direct commercial air traffic, a job they are not trained to do, in violation of international aeronautics treaties and laws. Now the international airlines are placed in their own dilemma: to continue flying in and out of the country in more dangerous and illegal conditions, or to ground their flights.
The same has happened with the hospital workers’ strike that began last week. Most of the hospitals in Honduras are now filled with military soldiers, purportedly to do the job of doctors and nurses. Whether they can actually do that job remains to be seen. Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers in an army of only 9,000 are thus diverted from the usual tasks of repressing and attacking the peaceful opposition.
The regime’s bad choices in how to respond to the dilemmas posed by the air traffic controllers and hospital workers have led it to spread its limited forces of repression thin. This in turn gives other theaters of the civil resistance a little more elbow room to maneuver.
One thing that became crystal clear from my reporting from Comayaqua, Tegucigalpa, Catacamas, San Pedro Sula and points in between, through talks with members of the civil resistance, is that the best organizers among them are beginning to wake up each morning with that same question: How do we create a headache for the regime today?
These headaches, growing in number and from decentralized locations begin to deliver “the death of a thousand cuts” to the regime, whose only hope to remain in control is to keep the national and international community convinced that, whether legitimate or illegitimate, it at least is in control. But the fast growth of these “dilemma actions” are painting a more compelling picture of a coup regime that very much is not in control, that it is unable to govern.
That reality – and not arguments over whether the coup was “legal” or not – is the most devastating thing for any regime. Once it becomes clear that a regime is not in control, the perception that it can ride out the unrest diminishes considerably, and it begins to lose the first layer of its illusory support: the consent by silence of those sectors that simply want to back the eventual “winner” of the conflict.
The coup regime - support for it or grudging acceptance of it - is built on an illusion, one that claims it is “in control.”
The dilemma actions from the grassroots are demonstrating, with greater frequency and volume every day, that the coup regime is very much not in control, and is losing its grip daily.
Next we will discuss how the support (and apathy) that prop up a coup regime resemble the form of an onion, and how successful civil resistance movements - with examples of how this is working in Honduras - design their actions to effectively peel away the layers of that onion until the coup plotters are left divided, isolated, alone, abandoned, and very soon after that, expelled from power….
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Submitted on August 7th, 2009 by Frank Balzer (not verified)I teach sociology. One of the areas I cover is social change. This article is definitely something that my students are going to be exposed to.
One thing to remember, the Honduran oligarchy is mostly a creation of the 1980s. Before that time, Honduras' ruling elite were fragmented and, as a result, didn't come down on their social movements and unions like a ton of bricks.
It is also the reason that small and incremental reforms were legislated between the 1960s and 1970s.
During the late-19th century, the US-based banana companies entered and they losely functioned as a ruling oligarchy.
However, the actions of the US during the 1980s finally produced an unified oligarchy. This new group was ushered in with the 1982 constitution; it was constructed near the end of the last dictatorship. The Honduran people were not demoncratically consulted during its construction. Instead, the newly unified oligarchy, the newly powerful military and Negroponte created this document.
Zelaya's non-binding encuesta was promoted to place this document under democratic scrutiny; I suppose he was attempting to transform it from an instrument of the oligarchy to one that answered to the people.
However, the oligarchy -for some reason- didn't have the corrupt Supreme Court use legal procedures to carefully find the encuesta illegal; instead, the Court simply declared it illegal.
Of course, no articles of impeachment were declared. (Though I have read that the constitution does not have procedures to implement impeachment procedings; if so, it is another indication that the document was not carefully constructed.)
Anyway, the reality of the coup is that the oligarchy wanted place itself back in the driver's seat and they wanted to give Latin America's other subdued oligarchies a working model that they could build on, also.
Thankyou Senor Markovic
Submitted on August 7th, 2009 by Brian Curdy (not verified)My thanks to Mr. Markovic.
During the 1980s and the 1990s Mr. Milosevic (and other "mainstream" leaders) pretended to "represent the people," when he was/(they were) representative of a Mafia-type oligarchy that was socialist in name only.
Friends (of mine) in Croatia, Bosnia and the Kosovë came to believe (between 1982 and 1998) that all of the Serbian people were backing the Serbian oligarchs to make 2nd class citizens out of everyone else.
Mr. Markovic's stated objective of defying nationalist lies and unbridled capitalist piracy nearly makes me weep (when I remember what I witnessed).
In the end, men of courage-like Mr. Markovic-rose up in Serbia itself against the oligarchs and warlords.
Most of those old fascists, contemporaries of "Senor Micheletti" and his troop of sordid crowing imbeciles, are either dead or in hiding now--
--The success of the Honduran people is the hope for the 21st century and times to come.
We must not merely defeat tyranny-we must also defeat the tyrant's claimed authority to speak for us with a baseball bat over our heads like some sword of Damocles.
My question for Mr. Markovic is how must we overcome past hatred?
I think we must try in order to form a common front. We will soon be faced with a new task of building a future...
In the cases of men like Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, and Billy Joya this seems like an (almost) unsurmountable obstacle for me...
Inch'Allah....
The march in the West
Submitted on August 7th, 2009 by John Donaghy (not verified)Reading your article I recalled something I noticed - but didn't really note. The march was preceded on the highway by some police who directed the traffic around the march (since the march took one side of the highway). It just now struck me how ironic this is. The police were actualy faciltating the march!
I love your posts. Too bad
Submitted on August 7th, 2009 by Mina (not verified)I love your posts. Too bad that you stoped writing about Iran. We weren't lucky enough to continue having your supporting and informing posts about post-election situation in Iran.
My point of view regarding Honduras
Submitted on August 7th, 2009 by Mario Guerra (not verified)Fantastic article. My full respect and admiration to Honduran people. This peaceful resistance will grant them success.
One thing, though. Regarding the competing people (Zelaya and Micheletti), Hondurans are between a wall and a hard place. Granted, Micheletti is extremely stupid, but Zelaya is not much smarter.
OTOH, I think that this peaceful movement will have a strong influence in events to come.
Giardano Honduras article!
Submitted on August 7th, 2009 by jim bier (not verified)Great journalism! concise, complete, empowering.
I joined fieldhands and invited 48 of my closest 'activist' friends to join the Western Virginia group!
The irony of it
Submitted on August 8th, 2009 by David Sketchley (not verified)The US poured vast sums into destabilising Serbia, especially through the NED and the IRI. They trained the student movement, Otpor, to provoke and destabilise the Milosevic regime.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Otpor
They were also the 'inspiration' behind other 'color' revolutions, successful and unsuccessful such as the Venezuela students movement, and the recent ongoing Iranian disturbances. Check out the Iranian green movement's clenched fist salute, the same as Otpor's.
The same Robert Helvey, who lectured Otpor also lectured the Venezuelan students.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2380
Nice to see them beeing hoist by their own petard!
@ David Sketchley
Submitted on August 8th, 2009 by Al GiordanoDavid - Do you know what counter-insurgency is?
It includes when rumors are spread and facts are distorted to smear social fighters. This used to be mainly the work of government programs like COINTELPRO but now some on the left just do the job on each other.
The sugges tion that the US - which only supported OTPOR in Serbia during the last three months of its struggle, opposed its predecessor organizations for the first eight years (OTPOR was founded in 1998) and chose to do a NATO bombing campaign that OTPOR opposed during the interim time between the two - or its agencies like IRI "trained the student movement" are false in a way that make them counter-insurgency disinformation.
The student movement in Serbia trained itself over ten years, the first eight while the US backed Milosevic. They destabilized the regime all by themselves during that period!
There is something almost racist about the penchant of some sectors of the white academic left in the US to claim that people in other lands are so unable to do things for themselves that when revolts happen against US shunned regimes they are so quick to claim that the US is the hidden hand behind them. It is as if, to them, the proles in Serbia or Iran or wherever are unable to do anything for themselves, that they need Uncle Sam to do it.
This is a terribly counter-revolutionary concept and an example of how cultural imperialism permeates parts of the US left, too.
The other disgraceful thing about it is how these theories are so often backed by snippets of disconnected information in which the dots do not connect. The suggestion, using these snippets, that Ivan Marovich was ever trained by IRI or any US agency is false, defamatory, and provokes deserved contempt from me and others in the know. Your premise is that because he - like hundreds of thousands of Serbian youths - were part of OTPOR that they are somehow connected to the US, or to what any other former OTPOR member has done (OTPOR disbanded in 2001, it doesn't even exist anymore), or that General Helvey held a training session in Venezuela and because he did every former OTPOR member is somehow connected to that, is crazy conspiracy theory talk that is only doing the system's job of smearing people's movements for it.
Finally, the most whacky "connecting of dots" comes in the claims that because, one, OTPOR had a clenched fist logo and then, two, the Iranian resistance used a clenched fist logo that there is some kind of US backed conspiracy in both.
The clenched fist gained popularity in the 1800s as a symbol of the union movement. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has used it in their logo since 1891. The clenched fist was adapted by the feminist, black power and peace movements of the sixties and seventies, too. Does that make them all US plants, too?
You are inventing and spreading counter-insurgency rumors. For shame. Just stop it. (At times I feel like clenching my own fist and using it on US activists that smear legitimate foreign movements with such cultural imperialism, but I'll just keep using my pen instead.)
Giordano-Sketchley: Why I am behind Al and Mr Markovic
Submitted on August 8th, 2009 by Brian Curdy (not verified)Whether or not it was true, it has been said that the US (or "American interests") encouraged the Saddam Hussein regime to oppose and make war on the Iranian Revolution. I was a a young US Marine Corps Lieutenant in those days.
It has also been said that the the roots of Al Qaeda are not to be found in Islam, but in Cold-War efforts to destabilize Soviet borders....
During 1981-2003 it was not the Serbian "people" who hijacked Jugoslavia and drove it to chaos and destruction. It was a small clique of interested "nationalist" power-brokers who sought to instrumentalize the Serbs as a lever to reduce the civic, economic, and cultural balances that had been maintained during the Tito years.
During this period I found myself seeking progress and peace in Albania and the autonomous or semi-autonomous Albanian-speaking cultural areas of Montenegro, the Kosovë, Serbia, and Montenegro....
The struggle of leaders like Ibrahim Rugova (1944-2006) and others were not unlike the present struggle in Honduras, in the sense that Rugova (and others) attempted to resist the amputation of civic, economic, cultural, and even linguistic freedoms through non-violent action . Rugova, like Zelaya, became a symbol of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience.
Violent insurrection (circa 1998-1999) came as a last resort, and at a time when (Albanophone) Kosovars felt that the world had abandoned them to "ethnic cleansing" and mass deportation of the kind seen earlier in Croatia, Bosnia, and Novi-Pazaar.
I apologize to Mr. Markovic for my support of the NATO Intervention. I do so because I now feel that it was disproportionate and caused unneccessary harm to people who had enough cause for civil unrest on their own doorstep to be concerned with the Kosovë which was far away from (their) reality.
In 1995-2003 Milosevic was actually perceived (outside Serbia) as "more moderate" than such "oppositition leaders" as Seselj, Cosic, etc..." All Serbs (including parking lot sweepers willing to be drafted into private militias to hunt down Bosnians and Kosovars as if "we" were "game") were thought to be united in a blood-thirsty hunt of "non-Serbs."
By 2000, when the UCK armed resistance fighters found themselves brushed aside by NATO as "if they were central American bandits" rather than defenders of their own homes and family...I was just one among many who began to see things differently.
Since the dawn of empires, emperors have sought to divide and conquer. Mr. Giordano, we must take aim at a common objective-in the name of marching Honduran school-teachers and their camrades in the heat and in the rain. We must not allow dissention among ourselves-as we push together so that the Golpistas of Billy Joya, Micheletti, and Valasquez will begin squabbling among themselves. Sooner or later they will break-and they will run. So will their North American "supporters."
Oganize, organize, organize
Vox populi, vox Dei
Reply to Brian and David
Submitted on August 8th, 2009 by Ivan Marovich (not verified)Brian: "My question for Mr. Markovic is how must we overcome past hatred?"
We have to understand how this hatred came about. The oligarchs in former Yugoslavia esentially organized a transfer of wealth, accumulated during Tito's time, from the people to their hands. In order to do that they needed a civil war to keep people busy hating each other while they steal. That is why they were united to defeat last Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic and his plan to privatize socialist companies by giving shares to the workers. Once he was defeated, they started a series of wars (and here Milosevic is most to be blamed, since he was the strongest of them all). In the end, everybody is worse off then in 1990.
This is why it is important to understand that hatred is not some intrinsic attribute of the population in the Balkans, it was produced by the elite for a specific purpose. If we understand that, we can overcome it.
David Sketchley: "The US poured vast sums into destabilising Serbia, especially through the NED and the IRI."
This story came from NED and IRI, they wanted us to forget the role of the US in Serbian politics during the nineties, when they supported Milosevic, "a factor of stability in the Balkans", so the only thing they publicied was what they did in the very last stage of our struggle, after the NATO bombing. The bombing did not produce the wanted result and the West ran out of options, so they finally decided to support the opposition against Milosevic, including Vojislav Kostunica, an anti-american politician, who ran against Milosevic in 2000 election. But let us see if Serbia became an American puppet after the fal of Milosevic. Even today, Serbia does not intend to join NATO and is commited to returning to the Non-aligned Movement, from which we were kicked out when Milosevic was in power. We are also in a dispute with the US over Kosovo. So that story doesn't hold water, as we say in Serbia.
David: "The same Robert Helvey, who lectured Otpor also lectured the Venezuelan students."
Robert Helvey played no role in our struggle. The lecture in question was organized when the movement was at its peak, most leaders of the movement were not present, most of us weren't even aware of it, since there were hundreds of meetings with various organizations and individuals at the time. This was summer of 2000, we were strong, everybody wanted to talk to us. The role of Helvey is another example of the need that the US institutions have to show how they are the ones making things happen. The need that, strangely, they share with some people on the left.
Thankyou, Mr. Marovich
Submitted on August 8th, 2009 by Brian Curdy (not verified)I believe that we can work together, Sir.
Most of the details of issues where we might differ-are either historical-or geographically irrelevant to Honduras. What you have accomplished in Serbia must be accomplished elsewhere.
Wars are often campaigns of (private) wealth and priviledge against the poor and weak. Our only defense is unity of purpose....I think that I wholeheartedly agree with you there....
In 1992 I wrote a letter to Slobodan Milosevic asking him to resign from his functions in the interest of the peoples of Jugoslavia. Perhaps he read my letter-perhaps he didn't.
If he did he may have thought me an idiot.
If he was as intelligent a man as he is said to have been.....he may have given a few moments of thought to reflect on things...
Is it true that Albanian bakeries are some of the best ones in Belgrade? I have been told that but I have never been to Belgrade.
Organize, organize, organize-act......
Best regards,
Brian Curdy
line drawn, Serbia still paying the bill from the 90's
Submitted on November 5th, 2009 by radez onich (not verified)I am glad that I see some realistic views here, not distorted as usually when West writes about situation here in the Balkans...
I'd like to ask a couple of questions: I agree that in Serbia, Milosevic snatched power, and carried out his own agenda, but the effect, when you draw a line, is that Serbia has constantly been punished for his dirty deeds, and Serbian people as well still suffer because of that. Bombing, the pressure over war cirme tribunal fugitives, simply taking away one big chunk of Serbia's territory and declaring it a new country (Kosovo), etc.
Second, we can now witness that Serbia has build a good cooperation with DEA and other agencies in the world, 3 tons of cocaine have been captured in the Atlantic ocean recently with information from Serbian secret service, etc. At the same time, Kosovo, which is all but a serious country, still being run by a mix of mafia, people accused of war criminals and politicians, is Europe's drug trafficking territory no 1.
I'd like to learn how the West, and US in particular sees this reality? They've created this 'country', and the very politicians they support over there are safeharboring (don't know if this is the right word, sorry for not so good English) the biggest drug-smugglers in Europe.
Greetingz,
Radez