By Al Giordano

(Headlines from today's daily El Tiempo: "Police Repression in Choloma" and "Another Brutal Attack against TIEMPO.")

It’s hard to be a pro-coup newspaper when the regime you’re trying to prop up keeps attacking your own reporters.

Such is the evolving reality for the daily El Tiempo in San Pedro Sula, owned by one of the top families, the Rosenthals, some say the wealthiest in Honduras’ oligarchic pantheon. The Rosenthals also own TV Channel 11, Cablecolor TV network, and dozens of companies that sell insurance, construction, cement, coffee, sugar, bananas, cattle, cacao, food processing, real estate and alligator skin products.

The family’s prodigal son, Yani Rosenthal, had been a top staffer in the Zelaya administration but resigned in 2007 to pursue his own presidential campaign. When that didn’t gather steam, he backed the 2008 candidacy of Roberto Micheletti, now the “president” of the Honduras coup, in his failed bid to become the Liberal Party nominee. And for most of the first 49 days since the June 28 coup d’etat, the family newspaper – the dominant daily in its region - has been a more or less reliable ally of the coup mongers.

In the past week or so, though, a series of violent attacks by coup police and military against peaceful demonstrators - and the press that covers them - in the second-largest city of San Pedro Sula (The Field first pointed this out this dynamic on August 4) have apparently pricked the conscience of El Tiempo and its coverage has taken a 180-degree turn. This can be seen as a barometer of how the coup is losing support even among the highest echelons of the oligarchy.

It’s like the onion: As we discussed back on August 8, the support and/or silent acquiescence that keeps the Honduras coup regime in power is not monolithic and has rings that the civil resistance is designed to peel away. Through the anti-coup movement’s adherence to nonviolent struggle, it has now won a key battle for hearts and minds in the country’s second city region. The National Police and Armed Forces overplayed their violent hand and as a result of extending their brutality to members of the press that documented their abuses, the daily El Tiempo has lost patience with the regime.

Here are some photos from today’s El Tiempo and the captions underneath them, translated:

“The police pulled the photographer’s hair while they pushed him and yelled obscenities.”

And...

“Journalist Gustavo Cardoza of Radio Progreso was also arrested and beaten.”

El Tiempo now reports:

The National Police aggression against the reporters of the daily El Tiempo was not limited, this time, to insults and nightstick beatings, but they also destroyed photographic material in clear abuse and violation of free speech and human rights…

The Security Secretary said that “in no moment did the National Police try to impede the work of the media…”

And yet a YouTube video posted by El Tiempo tells a truer story:

The headline of today’s El Tiempo is Police Repression in Choloma, and the story reports that the National Police riot yesterday against peaceful demonstrators along a key transit route from San Pedro Sula to the port of Cortez – a region that his home to many multinational sweatshops – came because the coup enforcers broke their word to the demonstrators:

 

“The demonstrators have an hour and a half to remove the stones from the highway and continue their peaceful march. The police are committed to provide security for the march during its entire route,” said (police spokesman) Espinoza Caballer to the media reporters present at 10:55 a.m.

However, the agreed-upon deadline was not honored and riot police backed by military soldiers send by the commander of the 105 Infantry Brigade , Colonel Edgardo Isaula, attacked the marchers at 11:25 a.m.

At 12:30 p.m. the police also expelled, by force, a group of demonstrators that had met in Choluma’s Central Park, in front of the police station, who were trying to obtain information about their wounded and arrested compañeros…

Here’s another photo and caption:

“The tear gas not only affected the protesters but also the dozens of families that reside alongside the boulevard. Many, with small children in their arms, had to run from their own homes.”

And another:

“Inside the Choluma police station, the wounded continued being beaten by the uniformed police.”

And:

"The police action caused at least 35 arrests and six wounded who required emergency medical attention.”

El Tiempo’s coverage today also included editorials that now firmly place the newspaper against the coup d'etat, like this one:

The savage repression on Monday, August 3, in downtown San Pedro Sula turned out to be totally ineffective: beating and mistreating men and women who had demonstrated peacefully, as police have done since the day of the coup d’etat, didn’t convince anybody of the legitimacy of said coup nor did it deter the protests. To the contrary, many people who were undecided were convinced that the use of violence and force against the people is what comes from dictatorships born of violence…

Any attempt, however small, to reduce the economic benefits of the few families that dominate Honduras in order to distribute them to the majority, is considered taboo. Raising the salary of workers, lowering fuel taxes, offering free education, establishing bonuses for farmers, caring for the forests, eliminating private contracts with the state, those were the detonators of the coup d’etat. And when an attempt was made to reform our obsolete Constitution to democratize political relations and permit the people to participate in decision-making that effects the lives of all, they overstepped their boundaries.

A second editorial recognized that international sanctions against the coup regime are working as they hit economic interests where it hurts:

The presence of Honduras at the negotiating table for a Central American trade deal with Europe now depends on reestablishing Constitutional order in our country. Until that is done, the negotiations will continue but without Honduras’ participation.

That’s because all the countries of the European Union decided, individually and together, not to recognize the de facto regime that surged from the military coup on June 28, and pulled their ambassadors from Tegucigalpa.

At the same time, all bilateral and multilateral support from Europe for Honduras has been suspended while the breaking of the Constitutional order persists…

Honduras, isolated by the international community because of the de facto regime, has rapidly lost opportunities for continued international support which is indispensable…

The same occurs in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and with other international financial institutions, thanks to the suspension by the United States of bilateral support…

The signing of an agreement with the IMF is right now fundamental for our country to be able to survive the economic crisis that was already present before the military coup but which has become unmanageable because of the breaking of the Constitutional order and the consequent recrimination by the global community toward a spurious regime and usurper government.

As such, the political crisis, defined by a sharpening of state and media terrorism and repression, the constant violation of human rights and the dictatorial escalations against a growing national resistance to the de facto regime has also brought economic suffocation that is worsening inexorably.

What can be read into the texts and photographs of today’s El Tiempo?

First, as we discussed on August 8, support or acquiescence to the coup regime from the very oligarch interests that the coup needs to survive has cracked wide open. Second, such interests are far more guided by the pressures on their wallets than by political considerations. Third, the civil resistance’s adherence to nonviolent struggle and the coup regime’s brutality against it is turning hearts and minds against the coup.

The particular oligarch interest that owns El Tiempo is said by some to be the most powerful family in Honduras. It is a family that has, in recent years, allied first with President Manuel Zelaya and later with Roberto Micheletti, who now leads the coup d’etat. That it is now lining up against Micheletti and his Simian Council of golpistas brings a heraldic message to Honduras and the world:

The nonviolent civil resistance is working.

The layers of support and acquiescence for the coup are being successfully peeled away.

And its plotters are more isolated and alone every day that the resistance continues.

Update: In the comments section below, Observer makes a pretty strong case that El Tiempo was not previously a pro-coup newspaper, and documents it with links to previous editions.

Update II: Commenter Alexis Aguilar responds to Observer that El Tiempo could be more accurately described as shifting back and forth from day to day regarding the coup regime but that more recent coverage has taken a decidedly critical turn against the coup.

By Al Giordano

Authentic journalist Bill Conroy and I have filed a new report about how an important US agency that keeps funding the Honduras coup regime isn't obeying what the US State Department says it should do to put aid to the coup on pause:

US State Department and Millennium Challenge Corp. Contradict Each Other Over Honduras Coup Aid:

Maybe somebody should get the US Secretary of State to sit down with the chairman of Millennium Challenge Corporation and get the two US agencies on the same page. Let’s see, the Secretary is Hillary Clinton… and the MCC chairman is… Hillary Clinton! Gee, could somebody please get those two in the same room to get this matter straightened out?...

Hey, let’s get Secretary Hillary Clinton to sit at the same table with Chairman Hillary Clinton and see whether a little “diplomacy” might get the two of them to agree with each other to make US policy’s deeds match its words. Or maybe they could call each other at 3 a.m. on the red phone. But, really, how seriously is Latin America supposed to take the US government if Clinton can’t even come to agreement with herself?

And wait 'til you see, in our report tomorrow, where those US taxpayer funds are going...

Update: While we're posting the latest update to the saga of the State Department and its Millennium Challenge Corporation's continued funding of the Honduras coup regime, here's a revealing video of Tuesday's anti-coup demonstration in Tegucigalpa:

It's revealing because it directly contradicts the dishonest media reports of "hoards" attacking fast food restaurants. You can see in the video that the crowd vastly outnumbers the military and police that are flanking it, and right there behind the stage is a McDonald's franchise.

The people aren't attacking it. They're singing the National Anthem, which remembers the struggle for independence from colonial rule:

"You also, oh my country!, arose
From your servile deep sleep;
You also showed the world
The infamous shackle destroyed.
And in your blessed soil, behind the tall
Hair of the wild jungle,
Like a bird of black feathers,
The fleeting colony was lost..."

Then, the speaker on the stage asks the crowd "is this a peaceful demonstration?" and the people cheer and raise their fists in agreement.

That nearby McDonald's wasn't among the multinational franchises attacked on Tuesday. Those incidents happened away from the vast majority of marchers, at places where the anti-coup movement's leadership didn't have any presence. The video offers a much more authentic sense of the pacific nature of the anti-coup civil resistance than unfortunately is offered by so much of the commercial media.

Update II: And here's the latest from Conroy and I, documenting that the Millennium Challenge Corporation's funds are going to a high profile coup plotter and presidential candidate in Honduras:

Pro-Coup Honduras Presidential Candidate Elvin Santos Is a Key Beneficiary of Continued US Government Funding

The Liberal Party Nominee's Construction Company Enjoys a Multi-Million Dollar Contract, Government Records Show

Coming up next: Narco News correspondent Belén Fernández sat in this morning on a meeting between members of a human rights delegation and US Ambassador Hugo Llorens in Tegucigalpa, took twenty pages of notes, and will have a report for us shortly...

By Al Giordano

Back in 1986, paper mill workers in the US state of Maine went on strike. A great multitude gathered one night in one of the mill towns to hear then-US presidential candidate Jesse Jackson speak in solidarity with the workers.

In the middle of Jackson’s oration, a commotion could be heard from the bleachers of the school gymnasium where the talk had been held. A chant of “Scab! Scab! Scab!” arose and I saw workers shaking fists and pointing fingers at one scrawny longhaired guy who had apparently crossed the picket line but still wanted to hear Jackson speak. The scab made a beeline through the crowd toward the exit sign, passing right in front of your correspondent. I’ll always remember the look of fear on his face. This was a burly crowd capable of tearing him limb from limb.

“Brothers and sisters,” thundered Jackson from the podium. “Let not one lost sheep lead the whole flock astray!” He may have saved the guy’s life, or at least a limb or two. The strike meeting continued without incident. And the newspapers had no chaotic acts to sensationalize the next morning

(Maybe I’m remembering this story today because the fellow community organizer that had invited me to that gymnasium, Renny Cushing, now a state representative in New Hampshire, is coming to visit somewhere in a country called América, and sends a hello to all the clams and our other friends in New England.)

The lesson of the lost sheep applies today in Honduras, where the pro-coup media is abuzz with gloating obsession over two acts of property destruction yesterday that happened near an otherwise peaceful protest march in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

Here’s how the golpista media is portraying it:

Hoard of Zelaya Supporters Unleash Chaos in Tegucigalpa

Peaceful demonstrations that were hoped for yesterday in the Honduras capital turned into vandalism by sympathizers of deposed president Manuel Zelaya, who yesterday morning marched to the presidential palace to demand the return of the ex-president. But upon their arrival in Tegucigalpa, they unleashed chaos, according to information from the daily El Heraldo.

A urban bus and fast food restaurants were set on fire by groups of Zelaya supporters who put up barricades and shouted for the restitution of the deposed governor.

Elements of the Army arrived to break up the protesters who planted terror in their path.

Now, as anyone can see from the photograph above, the attack on a fast food restaurant (only one experienced fire) was demonstrably not the act of a “hoard.” It was few young men, three in this photo, who visibly are not near any multitude of demonstrators.

And yet the dishonest elements of the media are eager to portray the incidents as if tens of thousands of marchers suddenly mounted torches and pitchforks to stampede upon Popeye's New Orleans Cajun Fried Chicken and Biscuits! (Use your head: a hungry crowd after a 200 kilometer six-day march wouldn't torch any food source without dining on it first.)

The French Press Agency (AFP) – no byline is on the story so one wonders where its professional simulator Francisco Jara was yesterday – similarly claims:

A demonstration in support of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya turned violent when a group of protesters set fire to a fast-food restaurant, an AFP reporter witnessed.

The protesters were returning from a mass march near the presidential palace when some began hurling rocks at a Popeyes fried chicken restaurant, and then set fire to the establishment, the reporter said.

Now, that’s a novel journalistic trick: an agency quoting its own reporter as its unnamed source. What could be the pretext for not naming its own reporter? Fear of retribution from his employer? (The news agencies have rule books instructing under what circumstances a source can go unnamed, and this is not one of them.) How lame is that? Note that even AFP admits that the incident occurred after the march was already over.

The German Press Agency (DPA) echoed the fantasy version of what happened:

After a demonstration turned violent late Tuesday, militant groups attacked a series of restaurants owned by US companies, pelting them with stones and smashing in doors and windows. One restaurant was set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail.

Local press reports said there were no injuries. However, a bus was also set ablaze.

Those three “reports” and others each obscure and distort the real story: that the destructive acts of solitary grouposcules were not those of the much larger multitude of peaceful anti-coup protesters. (Note also the repetition with which simulating media refer to anti-coup backers as “Zelaya supporters,” when its been well documented that the majority of Hondurans against the coup includes a great many that never supported Zel aya, including many that don’t involve themselves in electoral politics at all.)

Radio Globo countered by describing those who set the two fires as “infiltrators and provocateurs.”

And yet it’s also possible that, far from being coup regime agents, the deeds were committed by hotheaded young males of the sort that have similarly plagued post-Seattle anti-globalization demonstrations and other movements, such as the 2006 popular assembly movement in Oaxaca, Mexico, by using the shadow of peaceful demonstrations as a non-consenting cover to engage in Molotov cocktail tosses at property or police.

What is clear – because the photographs don’t lie – is that the arsons were not the act of the vast majority of protesters and did not even happen in close proximity to the march.

The problem for the movement becomes – and this is why Radio Globo and others often reasonably infer that they are acts of the regime aimed to discredit a movement – that the dishonest elements of the media and other pro-coup voices are always gleeful when aberrations like those happen. It allows them to portray an entire movement as “violent” even when, as yesterday, 99.9 percent of the people in the streets adhered successfully to nonviolent practice.

One of the English-language promoters of such knowing falsehoods in Honduras is an anonymous blogger that claims to be a “gringa” (US citizen) woman living in the tourist Mecca of La Ceiba, Honduras. On her (or his, because nobody knows the identity of this deranged disinformation peddler) blog, titled “La Gringa Blogocito” or “the little blog of the gringa,” she or he portrayed the vandalism as the act of all “Zelayistas” (Zelaya supporters) who are all, according to his or her colonialist spin, “terrorists”:

Zelayistas provoke chaos in Tegucigalpa

How nice. The Zelayistas were led by former first lady Xiomara Castro and her daughter Hortensia. If they aren't speaking out as leaders strongly against this senseless violence and vandalism, we have to assume that they approve of it.

The first lady has stayed in the US Ambassador's house. Members of the violent Frente Nacional de Resistencia group met with the US Ambassador Hugo Llorens over the weekend, though reportedly the Ambassador will not meet with members of the government.

Are these criminals the ones that Honduras should bend to? Are these poor misunderstood delinquents the ones who the human rights people should be worried about or all of the poor people who just want to go about their life, earning a living, going to school, without worrying about being attacked or having their means of earning a living destroyed.

Open your eyes, world. Honduras is being held hostage by terrorists.

Ugly Americans – not to be confused with the decent ones, that also exist - are everywhere on the planet and in Latin America tend to congregate in ex-pat ghettos in tourist destinations. Many come merely for the lower cost of living: they couldn’t afford servants, gardeners and chauffeurs back home, but in the Third World they can live like viceroys. Many have been here for twenty years or more and still don’t speak good Spanish, so immersed in the ex-pat bubble as they are. They tend to view “the help” with contempt and the images through the TV set of thousands that look like their maids and nannies taking to the streets is inherently threatening to them. I’ve written here of the Oligarch Diaspora: well, here’s its evil twin: The Ugly American Diaspora.

You can see from that Ugly American’s anonymous blog the over-the-top and hysterical words like “terrorists” and "criminals" to describe marchers, 99 percent of whom are nonviolent and break no law at all.

I should disclose that on that blogger’s private email list last month, on July 17, “La Gringa” issued a communiqué – sent along by one of its recipients - against Narco News and me, by name, for having the temerity to report that pop-star Juanes had cancelled his July 26 “concert for peace” in Tegucigalpa. Juanes had cited “political manipulation” by coup supporters of what he had originally intended as a nonpartisan event.

She or he wrote:

I was just trying to point out that Narco News is very unreliable…

He (Giordano) or someone who was (sic) impersonated him was harassing me for awhile (sic) on my blog, too, trying to spread disinformation in the comments.

Fact: I’ve never left a comment on that blog, and that is easily verifiable because on Blogspot, where it is hosted, the log automatically registers any gmail user by name as the identity of the commenter. And after all, why would I want to comment on any blog with so much smaller a readership than we gather here already? Especially if its dominated by the Ugly American Diaspora that isn’t persuaded by anything but its own racial bigotries and class prejudices. (Cue up the predictable chorus of “but, but, but, I’m married to one, and some of my best friends are my servants!”)

I wrote to the blogger last month to request a correction, which was never made. So much for someone who talks about “disinformation” while singularly dedicated to spreading knowing falsehood and without the ethics or honesty to correct an error even when demonstrated to be wrong.

Since I post my name to everything I publish, one can agree or disagree with my conclusions but at least have the ability to research who I am and confirm that there are no undisclosed conflicts of interest behind my reporting.

Not the case when it comes to anonymous cowards like La Gringa Blogocito.

I’m tempted to offer, from my own pocket, a $100 cash reward for information leading to the accurate identification of that blogger’s name and sources of income. That’s various weeks’ pay in Honduras. It wouldn’t take much effort (or incentive) to crack the ex-pat channels of gossip, addiction, loose lips and innuendo in a tourist town like La Ceiba and find out all kinds of illuminating information about the disinfo peddler. Would inquiring minds like to know who this is that is so dedicated to disinformation in support of a coup d’etat in a land that is not her own but too cowardly to sign it with a first and last name? Anyway, feel free to drop a dime that might deepen the inquiry: narconews@gmail.com

Oh, and despite “La Gringa’s” protestations to the contrary, the July 26 Juanes concert never happened, as we had originally reported on July 16. So much for the credibility, huffing and puffing of “La Gringa.”

But back to the matter of other lost sheep: Whether or not yesterday’s isolated acts of vandalism (nobody was physically harmed, thankfully) were the result of infiltrators, provocateurs or macho youths that sought to place themselves at the vanguard of a crowd they did not organize, any social movement or civil resistance may consider it a necessity to similarly identify such actors, investigate, deduce where they’re coming from, and if need be sit them down and read them the riot act about how their actions become convenient excuses to tarnish an entire struggle.

(There is something particularly cowardly when such actions are done near a peaceful protest: Of all the hours to choose to engage in such provocations, to do so near a multitude that, to the contrary, has vowed to remain pacific, constitutes an anti-democratic imposition upon the movement, while also seeking to hide under its skirt. It also endangers the great majority of civil resisters who want no part of it.)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a clear example last week of how to deal with that particular species of lost sheep after an overzealous supporter threw a tear gas canister into the offices of a commercial TV station: His government arrested the individual and the President himself announced on national television that the perpetrator would have to “feel the full weight of the law” calling the act “counterrevolutionary” and one that only served to fuel enemy arguments against his cause.

Social movements that don’t pay attention to the imperative of isolating and self-managing their own “lost sheep” tend to end up becoming hijacked by them again and again (whether or not the offenders are infiltrators or provocateurs or not is not that relevant because the manner to deal with them, for a movement, is pretty much the same; identify, isolate and contain). The failure to do so proved a fatal flaw in the post-Seattle milieu of anti-globalization protests that helped cause them to peter out, as they began to become defined publicly by the acts of a small minority.

That doesn’t appear to be the case in the Honduras civil resistance, as Narco News correspondent Belén Fernández reports today from Tegucigalpa. Upon receiving news about the bus that was burned, movement organizers from Olancho took pains to inform our reporter that it had been done by “a small group.” It was not something they were associated with, or wanted to be. The vast majority of Honduran coup opponents remain committed, in word and deed, to their chosen path of nonviolent resistance. It is a flock that will not allow itself to be led to the slaughterhouse.

Update: From the national coalition that organized the marches:

“The National Front Against the Coup is not responsible for these incidents. On principle the Front supports peaceful marches, peaceful demands and peaceful mobilization. At no point do we use or call for violent acts. It appears that these incidents are the responsibility of groups interested in ruining the social mobilization and they have taken it upon themselves to provoke this situation for which we categorically deny any responsibility.”

In case anyone was confused, there it is.

By Al Giordano

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with coup plotter and National Party presidential candidate Pepe Lobo.

If you haven’t been keeping tabs on our front page, I’m not the only Narco News journalist working this story. This just in:

US Secretary of State Clinton’s Micro-Management of the Corporation that Funds the Honduras Coup Regime

Records Demonstrate that the Secretary Has Hands-On Control of the Fund that Gave $6.5 Million to the Regime After the June 28 Coup

By Bill Conroy and Al Giordano


also...

On the Road to Tegucigalpa with Father Andrés Tamayo

Honduras Anti-Coup Marchers Defy Media Conviction that They Do Not Exist

By Belén Fernández

and...

Millennium Challenge Corp. poured millions into Honduras in months leading up to putsch

U.S. Aid Agency, Established Under Bush, Seeks to Promote “Economic Freedom”

By Bill Conroy

and also...

The Wall Street Journal Walls Itself In and Ridiculously Defends the Dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti

Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Unwilling to Be a Real News Reporter, Cribs Her Stories Jayson Blair Style from Emails and Cable TV

By Juan Carlos Rivera

All very worthy reads.

And don't miss this, either:

¡Atención! ¡Atención! Calling all New York City Field Hands!

Don’t miss the world premier on Wednesday night of the short film Love In Times of Influenza by Narco News School of Authentic Journalism graduate (’04) and professor (’10) Gregory Berger:

WHEN Wednesday Aug 12
8pm

WHERE Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street)
East Harlem/El Barrio
Manjátan

website

map it

PRICE GRATIS!

Greg Berger, director-producer and star of the cult classic “Gringothon” (2003, Mexico) and “The Gringothon Diaries” (in production, Bolivia) premiers his latest work, in which at the height of the swine flu scare in Mexico City, disguised as an executive of a multinational pork products corporation, he took a real live piglet, “Dobbs,” on a leash through the streets of the capital looking for Dobb’s long lost mother, “Michelle.” In between the laugh out loud reactions of the populace through their hospital face masks, you may actually learn something about where the Swine Flu came from.

By Al Giordano

The President of the country whose seal is emblazoned on your correspondent’s passport took some heat from the right during his 2008 presidential campaign when his bride, Michelle Obama, said, “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

The statement was far from a spontaneous gaffe: It was very smart politics and from the moment it happened I marveled at the genius of David Axelrod, the Obama advisor who I suspected had orchestrated it. Michelle’s admission was a clarion call to tens of millions of US citizens who knew their government had betrayed its founding principles more often than not in recent decades and who had generally stayed away from the ballot box over the past 28 years. If there’s anything the United States of America has fostered in so many of its citizens, it is a healthy ambivalence about a “democracy” that hasn’t usually walked its talk.

The higher voter turnout that allowed Barack Obama to overwhelm the Clinton machine in the primaries and achieve a punishing victory last November was largely the result of citizens that do not regularly vote – young people, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, community organizers and others that know what I’m talkin’ about here –turning out and doing so because Obama presented the possibility that we might be able to be proud again.

Many of the causes of that long national ambivalence by a significant swathe of the US population could be found in Washington’s historic behavior in this hemisphere: from the 1955 US-backed coup d’etat in Guatemala to the 2002 US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela (turned back in three days by the Venezuelan people), the global power of the North - the first land to lead the hemisphere an a wave of insurrectionist rebellions against European colonialism - had become the hemisphere’s colonizing empire, and utilized shamefully brutal and violent methods to do so.

In that context, President Obama ought to think twice before bandying about the word “hypocrisy” again in the way he did last weekend while in Mexico. Asked about the widespread perception in Latin America that Washington hadn’t backed its words against the Honduran coup d’etat with deeds, the President said:

“The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can't have it both ways.”

“If these critics think that it's appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is that maybe there's some hypocrisy involved in their -- their approach to U.S.-Latin American relations that -- that certainly is not going to guide my administration's policies.”

As with all falsehood, there is a kernel of truth in what the President said: It would be hypocritical to repeat the dastardly deeds of the past. Counting only the actions since Barack Obama was born, the list is long and shameful enough: The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the 1965 US occupation of the Dominican Republic, the 1966 Green Beret intervention against rebels in Guatemala, the 1973 US-backed coup d’etat in Chile, the 1975 US launched Operation Condor to install and back military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the dirty wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s (which included well-documented official US cocaine-trafficking to pay for it), the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, the 1987 US military “drug war” intervention in Bolivia, the 1988 US-backed electoral fraud in Mexico, the 1989 US invasion of Panama, the multi-billion dollar US intervention of Plan Colombia launched in 2000 (which continues through the present), the 2002 US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela, the 2004 US-backed coup in Haiti, the 2006 US-backed electoral fraud in Mexico, and the 2008 US launch of Plan Mexico among them.

As you can see from the above (and partial) list, this is not a matter of ancient history. Some of this crap continues through to the present day.

When in April of this year the US President went to the Summit of the Americas and promised a new beginning in US-Latin American relations, his counterparts to the South took him seriously and gave him much benefit of the doubt. That the US voted with the rest of the Organization of American States (OAS) to lift the ban on Cuba’s membership, while its Justice Department finally indicted ex-Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and Washington took its first baby steps to ease the embargo on the island, contributed to what could have been that new hemispheric order based on mutual respect that Obama waxed so poetically about.

US policy toward its closest neighbors had begun to turn the corner from dysfunctional to functional.

But suddenly, less than seven months into the Obama administration, all that promise of progress is now at risk, because of its ham-handed response to the June 28 military coup in Honduras.

I worry not for Latin America. As Narco News has documented for nine years, most of them while the US suffered under a tinhorn tyrant named Bush, the people of this hemisphere have been untying the colonial knot just fine even as Washington opposed them. And as I documented last week from distinct regions of Honduras, the civil resistance there will triumph sooner or later and topple the coup d’etat and its illegitimate regime with or without support or opposition from the United States.

What the US will get from its betrayal of its initial good statements against the Honduras coup will be a civil revolution that erases the institutions – executive, legislative and judicial – that existed until June 28 in Honduras and that replaces them with a more Latin American kind of democracy. I really don’t worry about Latin America. I’ve listened and learned too much to think that it needs Washington’s hand to do for itself what its majorities desire.

No, I worry for the United States of America.

Right now, the cadre of foreign policy bureaucrats to whom President Obama unwisely delegated hemispheric relations while he pursues lofty priorities like national health care have wrought their own special kind of coup d’etat in Washington. In the end, he can’t escape ultimate responsibility because he put them there. The buck stops at his desk. There’s no ultimate way for my fellow community organizer to wiggle around it. He’s the one that will stand for reelection in 2012 and perhaps be left wondering why folks like Michelle Obama who want to feel proud of their country may end up sitting on our hands and go back to our non-voting ways.

At the center of that coup in the United States is the Clinton machine that in some kind of macabre power sharing agreement has taken US policy in this hemisphere hostage and off the track of what the President promised when running against Secretary Clinton for president in 2008.

Not only have we now got Clinton attorney Lanny Davis lobbying on behalf of the Honduran dictatorship before an administration whose central promise was that it would end the undue influence of lobbyists, but as journalist Bill Conroy documented this past weekend for Narco News, the US-funded Millenium Challenge Corp. – whose board of directors includes Secretary Clinton – poured $17 million into Honduras oligarch interests between April and July of this year.

While DC apparatchiks told us they had cut almost $20 million (about ten percent) of US aid to Honduras and put the rest on pause, Clinton’s Millenium Challenge Corp. (MCC) has been quietly replenishing those funds through the back door.

A Narco News review of deposits to the Honduran Central Bank reveals that since the June 28 coup d’etat – in a little over a month – MCC has subsidized the coup forces in Honduras with $6.5 million dollars.

Those payments arrived on these dates and in these amounts:

July 9: $0.9 million

July 16: $0.3 million

July 23: $3.7 million

July 30: $1.6 million

While it’s possible that the US President doesn’t know about this sabotage of his stated policy – a small Central American nation with a population smaller than that of New York City might not exactly be front and center of his attention – his Secretary of State is on the frickin’ board of directors of the entity that, we now know, has been quietly funding the coup even after it was consummated.

So while I wholeheartedly agree with part of what the President said in Guadalajara this weekend – that it would be “hypocrisy” for the US to respond to the Honduras coup with military invasion, assassination, traditional covert black ops, electoral fraud, and the rest of the bag of tricks that have defined US-Latin American relations for all of Obama’s 48 years – the real hypocrisy at work comes, rather, when Washington tells us it has put funding for the coup regime “on pause” when it is now demonstrably true that it has not.

Last week, Obama told reporters that he couldn’t “push a button” and make the coup regime go away. That was also too cute by half, because there are buttons left unused through which it could do what it falsely claims it has already done: stop the flow of US dollars to the Honduran oligarchy and its coup regime.

At very least, his Secretary of State could make a motion on the board upon which she sits to stop that meddlesome anti-democracy funding.

The fact remains that giving that money to the regime or the private sector interests behind it are themselves the kind of US intervention that Latin American peoples have long struggled against.

Shutting down that money flow to the criminal enterprise that is the coup regime and its private-sector sponsors is not the kind of “Yankee intervention” that the region opposes: it is the continuance of that dollar spigot that constitutes the dirty intervention.

And that’s why the President’s statements – on hypocrisy and previously on the lack of a button to push – are too cute by half.

Again, I don’t worry or weep for Latin America or Honduras. The people united will never be defeated, and our authentic journalists, myself included, will be there alongside them reporting their every step in community organizing and civil resistance to win back what basic democratic principles establish is rightfully theirs. It really doesn't matter how much money or oxygen Washington gives to the Honduras coup regime: that baby is going down, and will go down hard, at the hands of an organized people.

But I’m looking at the faded gold ink on my 2001-issued US Passport and flipping through the pages right now: Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, the United States, multiple indentations and earmarks for most of them… I recently had to go to a US embassy to get additional pages woven into its book because the Brazilian consulate had demanded two blank pages to graffiti and the original ones had overflowed with entry and exit stamps. And I’m feeling sorry not for Honduras but for us, the pro-democracy citizens of conscience of the United States who, like Michelle Obama, want to be able to be “proud of our country for the first time in our adult lives,” but who see that dream slipping away once more.

By Al Giordano

The Honduras civil resistance, August 8, in front of the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

(Photos by Tiros, Chiapas Indymedia.)

When members of the Honduran civil resistance solicited the counsel of Serbian resistance veteran Ivan Marovich from July 31 to August 2, a repeat question from various participants was:

Q. How do we avoid infiltration?

Marovich replied:

One thing I can't teach you is that. We spent half our time looking for infiltrators. When years later we opened the files, we discovered how wrong we were!

Another thing we learned was how bad the regime’s intelligence was. The main source of its information was gossip, people talking about each other, and most of it was not true.

I loved that answer, because it exactly describes my own discoveries in my pre-journalism years as a community organizer arrested 27 times in social movements in the United States. And it also matches every counsel on the topic of infiltration offered to me by my mentor of eight years during the 1980s, the US dissident Abbie Hoffman.

Before his death in 1989, Abbie's lawyers had unearthed more than 57,000 pages of FBI files that had documented both the espionage against him and the rumor campaigns fueled by government infiltrators aimed at discrediting his leadership in the anti-war and other movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It is possible that Abbie was the most spied upon North American dissident in history.

When, as a lad of 21, I first asked Abbie what he thought of the probability that his phones were tapped, his response was, “Good! That way, they at least know two things: What I am not doing – because they tend to fantasize all kinds of crazy things – and the poor agents assigned to me have to deal with the fact that I’m having more fun than they are.”

This, from an organizer that had just come aboveground from seven years as a fugitive who faced 15-years-to-life in prison: his distinct lack of paranoia was refreshing in an era when I had encountered many other movement leaders whose fear of infiltration, espionage and disinformation campaigns had crippled both their demeanors and their capacities to think and strategize clearly.

It was Abbie’s experience, and as echoed by Marovich from his own, that the great majority of the “information” government agents had gathered on their movements was so wrong that it only served to throw them more off the trail than on it.

Another factor I’ve observed over three decades and more of dealing with the matter is that men (sorry, guys) tend to be more overly obsessed and paranoid about infiltration and espionage than women in social movements, and for too many it has retarded their capacity for leadership.

Likewise, men, more than women (and of course there are notable exceptions in each gender) tend to be more vulnerable to the provocations of infiltrators, especially those that seek to involve movement participants in violent or felonious activities that quickly justify greater repression against all in the movement.

Abbie always taught best by doing, more so than by talking, so I’ll tell you a story that I found revealing and formative to my own practices ever since.

On Christmas Day 1982, Abbie and I arrived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, called in by a local environmental movement that had lost its many expensive court cases against a project to divert water from the Delaware River to the Limerick nuclear power plant 40 miles away on the Schuykill River. Construction was to begin on January 7, two weeks later.

Opposition to the pump brought a wide local coalition together from liberal environmentalists to wealthy Republicans concerned about their property values to what might stereotypically but affectionately be called “rednecks” driving pick-up trucks with gun racks on the back. And one of the first things we heard when interviewing the various sectors was lots of macho talk along the lines of “we’re going to blow up the pump,” or, “I’ll shoot those motherfuckers if they come here with their bulldozers.” Many spoke as if they meant it.

From our own perspective as organizers, any major violent act like that would have set back the movement and limited its mobility in organizing, as well as narrowing its public support. There were so many of these guys talking violent action against the pump that we feared that all it would take was some infiltrator-provocateur to spark some of them into shooting or blowing stuff up.

But Abbie said, and it struck me strange at first impression, that we shouldn’t worry ourselves about infiltrators, but, rather, about our own troops and inoculating them against being manipulated by them. “What does society do with men who were beaten as boys and thus have a greater tendency toward violence?” he asked me in his frequently Socratic teaching method. He then answered his own question: “They give them badges and make them cops!”

Abbie asked the movement’s leaders to gather every single individual that they had heard speaking of violent action, plus any of the “silent macho types” that might have that proclivity, and called a meeting in the attic of the local tavern where many of them drank at night.

There, Abbie began the meeting: “We need your help, men. You see, there are other people out there – not you, of course – who might be government infiltrators or with violent tendencies, and we need a way to keep them in line. Many of you guys have been in the Armed Forces. Some of you fought in Viet Nam. You know the importance of discipline. You’ve been trained in it. And what we need from you, should you be willing to accept this mission, is that you be the marshals of the movement and organize at all our actions and events to keep things from getting out of hand.”

The guys – who five minutes prior had been the leading advocates for violent action – fucking loved it! “Can we have our own tee shirts, just for marshalls?” asked one, to applause from the group. And from there grew a long discussion about different scenarios in which a provocateur or other participant might turn violent during our planned blockades at the construction site, just days away. Once they considered it their job to keep the peace, the violence talk within the movement simply rolled to a stop. The marshals met regularly, held training sessions, printed their tee shirts, set up a CB radio communications network in which we all had our own handles (Abbie’s was “River Rat,” and mine was “Captain America”) and the local tavern owner put the song “I Love a Man in Uniform” on the jukebox to which they would stand up and salute each time it was played.

“What if a cop or a provocateur spits at me, can I whoop his ass then?” asked one.

“No, you can’t."

“What if he spits a second time?”

“Nope, you gotta keep the peace.”

“Okay, but what if he spits a third time?”

“If he spits a third time,” answered Abbie, divining that such a scenario was very unlikely to happen to a disciplined movement, “go ahead and kick his ass.” Everybody laughed.

When the marshals printed their tee shirts they had the Latin words for “Three Spits and You’re Out” emblazoned on them.

The lesson of this tale – and, yes, that movement which had successfully blockaded the pump construction site for three weeks and eventually defeated it at referendum remained disciplined in its nonviolent practice – is that when a civil resistance organizes to make itself immune to outside or internal provocations, the matter of infiltrators will still exist but becomes a much smaller problem. The power is in that case, as in most, in the hands of the movement itself, whereas worrying too much about infiltrators or provocateurs leaves the power in the hands of the regime: a power to guide the movement’s own actions by making it reactive instead of proactive, not to mention the internal division such paranoia breeds.

Translation of sign at August 8 anti-coup protest: "Requirement #1 to be my husband: To the Army, You Must Not Belong."

There are other benefits to any civil resistance that come from adherence to nonviolent discipline, too.

A “state of siege mentality” serves those who, in the context of movements, seek power and control over others. Movements attract power-seekers like flies to dung. The greater the perceived urgency of secrecy and hiding, the more authoritarian in daily praxis the movement tends to become. A movement that is overly reactive to repression tends to promote leaders that thrive in such a state of siege, and they’re not usually your best strategic thinkers or organizers.

And there is another debilitating effect: Paranoia causes individuals and groups to wall themselves in and to shrink from the duty to organize to expand the movement and seek the counsel of a wider swath of participants from the grassroots level. And the more that a movement becomes its own echo chamber, reverberating only the information and opinions available to a few, typically shut off from the people by their own paranoia, the less strategically and tactically effective its actions turn out to be. A paranoid movement always loses its most powerful weapon: it’s connection to, and support from, the people.

I’ve frankly grown distrustful from experience of too much clandestinity among some political and social movements and actors. It too often walks hand in hand with personalities more concerned about their own turf or power over others than with what should properly be the only and most real goal: winning the battle at hand, and then the war or the revolution.

The wonderful solution provided for part of this problem by adherence to nonviolent strategies and tactics – and I say this as one who is not philosophically a pacifist (I don’t see nonviolence as a moral imperative, but, rather, as a strategic one) – is that nonviolent struggles have so much less to hide than violent ones, and therefore are less crippled by paranoia.

We must always keep in mind that a big part of the motive for infiltration, espionage and disinformation against any social movement or its participants is aimed at creating that “state of siege mentality,” which immediately limits the options and maneuvering room for any social actor.

Also, a shift from worrying about whether an individual is a regime agent or not to, instead, judging a person by his or her actions cleans up the process a lot. If a participant’s behavior is counter-productive to a cause, expelling or putting that person to the side of the movement’s organization is just so much cleaner and easier when not burdened with accusations of “infiltrator” or “regime agent.” Because, as was the experience of Marovich and Hoffman both, who had the luck to live long enough to read the regime’s espionage files against them, we learn that we are so often wrong in our presumptions about who is an infiltrator and who is not.

The great nonviolent practitioners – people always mention Gandhi, King, César Chávez, and, really, there have been hundreds of the same tendency that also won their battles, but who are lesser known – took great pains, in fact, to openly and publicly inform the enemy of exactly what they were doing. After a while, when it becomes clear that a movement walks its talk, and does precisely what it says it is going to do, regimes are disarmed of the power of their own tactics of infiltration, espionage and disinformation, or at very least, those counter-insurgency tactics become far less effective.

Marovich explained to Honduran organizers on the night of July 31 that when his movement in Serbia moved toward tactics that included informing the police agencies in advance of its plans for each action or demonstration, they succeeded in removing the uncertainty and fear among individual cops sent to contain those protests.

“The officer might still receive an order to attack you,” Marovich explained. “But if he’s not personally afraid or nervous – something that happens more when he doesn’t know in advance what the multitude marching toward him is going to do or not - he can think more clearly about how to comply with that order.” Uncertainty, paranoia and fear almost always generate a much more brutal and violent response from individual police or soldiers: Even with those ordered to attack protesters, there are degrees in how savagely that can happen.

What many consider the most compelling case for nonviolent discipline in a movement is that it more effectively peels away the layers of support for a regime – as outlined in Part II of this series in which we describe the coup regime as an onion – because it dramatizes the fundamental violence of the regime itself and the compelling moral authority of the resistance. I haven’t mentioned that much here because people either “get” it or they don’t.

There are simply many people in this world not aware of the concept of public relations, in part because advertising and media carefully cultivate such ignorance so that their own manipulative tricks on the crowd – whether to sell products or manufacture socio-political consent - will work better. And for those that don’t grasp that dynamic, the case is more effectively made as a pragmatic one: Discipline – one doesn’t have to overtly call it "nonviolent" to obtain it from collaborators - as an organizational principle that works so much better than the lack of it.

One need not be ideologically a pacifist to understand the power of group discipline, and truth is that most people are not pacifists by nature. But we are pragmatic, and that’s all it usually takes.