By Al Giordano

The pro-coup dailies in Honduras are abuzz with EXCELLENT NEWS FOR THE COUP REGIME!

Faced with the reality that millions of Hondurans have done the math and figured out that 14,000 National Police plus 9,000 members of the Armed Forces do not equal enough force to squash their unarmed movement to topple the coup d’etat, coup “president” Roberto Micheletti has called in the reserves.

The pro-coup daily La Tribuna gushes that the cavalry has come to save the coup regime from the forward march of the Honduran people:

More than 2,000 reservists, veterans of war and retired officials of the Armed Forces (FFAA, in its Spanish initials) reiterated their support for the President, Roberto Micheletti, at the celebration of the National Day of the Reservist.

At the celebration a group of war veterans attended from Honduras’ 1957 conflict with Nicaragua and with El Salvador in 1969…

“I don’t know if the war veterans want to consider me part of them because I – here is the proof, dated August 4, 1969, that shows that I participated in the defense of the sovereignty of our country, here it is, nobody can deny it, and we will do the same as long as we are alive,” said President Micheletti…

The pro-coup daily El Heraldo added to the celebration:

To some of the military veterans, their physical handicaps and the passage of years didn’t stop them from attending this celebration and declare themselves ready “for any mission” to support the institutionality.”

El Heraldo subtitled its story, “It is estimated that there are 50,000 reservists in Honduras.”

Journalist Arturo Cano of the Mexico City daily La Jornada also attended the celebration and offered a more detailed look at yesterday's spectacle:

White tee shirts were distributed from Army trucks. Senior citizens, mature men and some still young received them. The fronts of the tee shirts had the Honduras flag and two soldier figures: “Reservists in defense of democracy.” On the back was the same slogan of the pro-coup marches: “For Peace and Democracy.” In smaller letters the message was completed: “Every man should be a soldier when it is time to combat tyranny.”

“We are here to defend the country and we will not put put on our knees, although there are campaigns to discredit us,” said General Romeo Vásquez, perhaps less worried about the “campaigns” by the resistance to the coup d’etat than by the declarations by Liberal Party presidential candidate Elvin Santos and textile magnate Adolfo Facussé who now seek punishment for the military officials who took Zelaya out of the country…”

Cano estimated the crowd size at the reservists photo opportunity to be “one thousand” including current members of the military and Armed Forces employees that were dressed in the tee shirts to expand the size of the group in the photo. If there really are another 49,000 reservistas out there, they didn't attend the pro-coup media event yesterday.

The idea of calling out the veterans of the 1969 “soccer war” with El Salvador (a 16-year-old then would be 56 today) and the 1957 war with Nicaragua (today, 68 and over) – in a country where the average life expectancy for a male is 67 - is certainly novel and entertaining, but also an admission that the regime’s 23,000 police and soldiers combined aren’t enough to stem the tide of peaceful civil resistance that is driving the regime to distraction.

And since the cash-strapped coup regime does not have visible means of financial support to pay these retirees and reservists – who, after all, are of the great multitude of Honduras’ impoverished population - to suit up again, put a gun in their hands, and be sent after the seditionist highway walkers, hunger strikers, Radio Globo reporters and other threats to the banana republic of coups d’etat, a lyric from Woody Guthrie comes to mind: “I will point a gun for my country, but I won’t guarantee you which way.”

This event was much more about the photo opportunity and media stunt than an authentic show of force. But typical to the coup regime’s clown shoe antics in the last 43 days, it mainly serves to remind of what everyone knows is one of its fatal weaknesses: that when it comes to real police and soldiers, the regime’s last line of defense against its own people numbers a paltry 23,000, or one uniform to hold back every 326 Hondurans.

Update: AP has a one sentence breaking news story up that the Honduras coup regime has just banned the scheduled delegation from the Organization of American States from entering the country this week. That would have been made up of the foreign ministers of Canada, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico and Argentina. How is your "San José negotiations" scenario going now, Secretary Clinton?

Update II: As this video taken yesterday at the entrance from the capital city of Tegucigalpa toward the eastern highway toward Danlí demonstrates, the taxi drivers cooperatives and unions have now officially joined the civil resistance against the coup:

Note the creativity of this style of "blockade," in which the cars keep moving at a slow pace - like a vehicular picket line - thus not violating any law but still effectively shutting down a key transportation route. How the regime can deal with that is yet another "dilemma action" that the resistance has tossed its bureaucracy.

By Al Giordano

In three decades of organizing or reporting on social movements, one develops a very good memory of which of them won their battles, which were defeated, and what made the difference between those that won and those that lost.

If it could be boiled down to a single factor it would be this: In victorious struggles, a critical mass of the organizers arm themselves to think strategically and act tactically to isolate and defeat their opponent.

They learn from experience that the power structure that props up the enemy – be it a government, a particular corporation or an entire political-economic system – is shaped like an onion, and they set about methodically to identify, target and peel away the rings of protection around its core.

In this, Part II of a series on how the Honduran people are toppling a coup d’etat, I will identify the rings around the coup regime. The lines between each ring represent the cracks and potential divisions of the coup structure. And as with an onion, it is often easiest to begin with the outer rings and peel one’s way down to the core, a tiny stub that without those rings becomes vulnerable, unprotected, and quickly rots in the sunlight.

As preface, here is some sage advice, offered in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Friday evening, July 31, by Serbian resistance veteran Ivan Marovich, invited to speak to a closed door group of key sectors of the Honduran civil resistance held at the Beverage Workers union hall (SITBYS, in its Spanish initials).

Because this was a private meeting – a crew from Telesur and I were invited to attend on the condition that we did not record the meeting on audio or videotape – I won’t be quoting or identifying the participants, who represented labor, campesinos, students, artists, neighborhood, and other organizations throughout the country. But with Marovich’s permission, I will quote from my notes from his words there over the course of three-and-a-half hours.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also inform that organizers called upon me to translate for Marovich during the latter part of the meeting. The session went on for so long, with rapt attention by all participants, that the translators needed a relief pitcher. For those parts, I obviously do not have written notes, so will borrow from my notes of other presentations and interviews with Marovich conducted on Saturday and Sunday, August 1 and 2, as well my own interviews with him.

By way of introduction, Marovich summarized the story of the decade-long struggle in Serbia to bring down the regime of dictator Slobodan Milosevic in a country of seven million people, roughly the same size as Honduras. The ultimate goal of the Serbian civil resistance – a new constitution – was the same as that almost universally expressed by the many Honduras civil resistance participants interviewed last week by Narco News.

Marovich began:

We learned the hard way how to defeat our dictatorship.

In 1991, the first big demonstrations were held. We didn’t pay attention to discipline or strategic planning, and it was all over in six hours. The regime brought tanks into the streets and put thousands in jail. Leaders were beaten up and disappeared. It took us five years to recover from that. Meanwhile, the war in Bosnia was raging.

In 1996 we made our next attempt. We held demonstrations daily for 123 days, for four months. This time we were better at discipline.

We discovered that the regime was not monolithic. In the military there were many conscripts.

The police were highly militarized. They didn’t fight crime. Their only purpose was to protect the regime.

And there were the secret police, the death squads: small but scary.

In our case the military was not really a problem because it had normal people in it.

The police were called militia. Serbia had seven million people and 100,000 national policemen.

We knew that if there was somebody that could crack down and destroy us, it was the secret police.So we spent four months trying to avoid the police, trying to avoid any kind of confrontation with the police. We had gone from a demonstration of just six hours in 1991 to be able to sustain them for four months in 1996. But we still didn’t win.

Two years later was the third intent. This time we did it. We learned how to do it over a long period of time.

Our conflict was not resolved in a frontal clash and it wasn’t resolved in a standoff. In the end, there were three principles that carried us to victory.

One: We had to maintain our unity and expand our movement: We had a broad coalition from left to right, and often the divisions were among those that were closest to each other ideologically. On the right we had some monarchists that wanted a return of monarchy, but they came in two groups that fought over which dynasty they supported. On the left, the communists that had supported Tito and now were with us were divided in two main groups.

We wanted a new constitution and we avoided details about what it would say. That was important because lots of energy was lost debates before that over what the new constitution would say.

Two: Organization and discipline were key. Unions and political parties were using their organizational potential in civil disobedience: strikes, blockades, and boycotts. Each did the thing they were best at doing.

We, the students, were mainly involved in street activities: university blockades and strikes.

The transport workers were the best at organizing blockades because with a single bus they could close a route.

We worked with the structures of existing organizations and they were responsible for maintaining the nonviolent discipline of their members.

Three: We had a strategic action plan: We wanted to isolate Milosevic. We set about to peel away people who were crucial for his remaining in office. There were divisions in the regime, of personalities and from the greed of some of its supporters.

That third point, the goal to “peel away” the layers of support or silent consent for the Serbian regime, describes the onion concept.

Marovich elaborated:

As long as the regime felt it was being attacked from outside, they hung together. So we carefully picked objects for attack.

In the end, everybody except five people around Milosevic abandoned him. It took us a long time to get to that point.

We also looked at where the opponent was weak. We studied which institutions had the least loyalty to the regime, and also which could be the most dangerous to our efforts.

Milosevic kept elite troops. They had been through five years of the war in Bosnia. This was a force that killed 8,000 people in five days.

But in the end, in 2000, the police units fell one after another. The different police agencies and units didn't say, "We won't follow orders." They just said, "We'll wait."

On the final day, the death squads circled our demonstrations with their jeeps. Then they said, "We're with the people. Milosevic has to go.”

The Onion Skin: The Luster of Inevitability

One of the outer layers of the Serbian regime’s onion – very similar to the current situation in Honduras - was the worldwide perception that it had firm control over the country and its population. It’s the “inevitability factor,” and considerable sectors of global and national opinion, business interests, blow-in-the-wind politicians and parts of society that simply want to be left alone and favor a climate of the least conflict possible, will generally side with, or at least silently provide consent to, the party in the conflict that appears to be in control.

A great part of the spin and lobbying in the media on behalf of the coup is designed to reinforce the idea that the regime equals the status quo, that whatever discomfort one might have with its actions, it’s still fully in charge and therefore always will be.

An example of that kind of spin came last week from the always-shifty Michael Shifter of the Inter American Dialogue in Washington, one of these “Latin Americanist experts” whose job is to give sound bites to commercial media that seem objective but that always tend to reveal a pro-status-quo agenda. In this case, Shifter’s agenda is to prop up the Honduran coup regime by making it seem like it can’t be toppled. His words to the Wall Street Journal, when seen through the lens of the inevitability factor, are nakedly intended to influence that outer layer of the onion, the part that simply wants to “be with the winner.” He said:

"In Honduras, Washington's wavering will be seen as a sign that the government can wait it out until the elections and that the costs they are bearing for international isolation, while considerable, are preferable to the risks of allowing Zelaya to return, even for a limited time and with his authority curtailed.”

That echoes exactly what was the spin from many officialist quarters back in the 1990s regarding the Serbian regime; that it would be able to “hang on” despite international isolation. And now that play from the playbook is being repeated to spin and influence the outer reaches of the onion structure that supports or acquiesces to the Honduras coup.

During the public meeting on Saturday, August 1, Marovich shared with the Hondurans how his movement set about to successfully disarm that inevitability factor that had worked to prop up the dictator Milosevic:

The response we got from the world, including the US, for eight years was "we don't care. He's in charge."

Our task was to demonstrate that he was not in charge.

Instead of arguing about legitimacy, we aimed to show that it wasn't working.

We started with the weakest institutions, feeding divisions. We tried to improve our unity and divide theirs. Milosevic, for his part, tried to create division in our ranks.

The “dilemma actions” that we described in Part I of this series were the knife with which the Serbian civil resistance peeled away that outer skin's luster of perceived inevitability from the regime. The resistance actions, one after another, often daily, pounded away at a greater truth: that the regime really wasn’t in control, that it was bumbling, stupid, bureaucratically calcified, unable to react to provocations effectively or intelligently, and cumulative effect of many of those individual creative dilemma actions was to significantly erode the myth that the dictator was really in charge.

Specific to Honduras, the obsession in the corporate media and the First World academic left alike with the circus up above among politicians and nations – even though the two sectors see themselves on opposite sides of the Honduran struggle – has served only to reinforce the system’s spin of inevitability of the coup regime. For forty days and forty nights now, this tandem team of right-left messaging has sung in harmony, not authentic opposition, and has used up much of the oxygen and attention that the civil resistance from below in Honduras needs to demonstrate that the coup regime really isn’t in control.

Yet as anyone can observe from our own reports – focused on what is happening not up above, but on the ground, among the people – and those of a precious few other authentic media, the reality is that the coup regime has never established control over the population. It is in fact in a tailspin. This was objectively documented yesterday by the Bloomberg agency, which looked at the economic indicators in Honduras.

Honduras’s central bank cut its economic outlook today, predicting a contraction of as much as 2 percent as the global slump and a political crisis curtail trade and tourism.

The $14.1 billion economy will shrink 1 percent to 2 percent this year, compared with a previous estimate for growth of as much as 3 percent…

Consumer spending, exports and inflows of tourism dollars have all declined since the military removed President Manuel Zelaya from the country at gunpoint on June 28…

Economist Alcides Hernandez, director of the Tegucigalpa- based National Autonomous University’s economics program, estimates the crisis is costing the country $20 million daily in lost trade, aid, tourism and investment.

“I don’t know how long the Micheletti government can resist international pressure,” Hernandez said. “If they start blocking trade too, a country as poor as ours would quickly buckle.”

We’ve all met those fans of a particular sports team that yell from the bleachers or the Barcalounger that they want a home run or a touchdown pass, not content to see their baseball team instead methodically set up players on base with singles and double hits, or their football team's running game that slowly marches the ball down the field. Those that put all their attention in the basket of hoping sanctions from a single foreign government will be that “Hail Mary pass” in Honduras are no different than those armchair quarterbacks of sportsdom. On a fundamental level, they don’t study the game, they don’t listen, they don’t do community organizing themselves, and so they don’t understand how victories really are constructed with strategy and tactics on the field.

This series of essays is obviously for you: those that do study, that do listen, that do understand or want to know how history is really made to happen from below.

The Second Ring: The Honduran Economy

The Bloomberg estimate of $20 million dollars in losses per day as a result of the coup and its consequences on the Honduran economy, if continued for a year, adds up to $7.3 billion – fully half of Honduras’ $14.1 billion national economy without a single additional international sanction heaped upon it. Even if that $20 million per day figure is exaggerated, there's no doubt that the economic hit is sufficient enough to cause attitude adjustments among those whose pockets are emptying.

And that brings us to the next layer of the coup regime’s onion: its support from business interests, including among the oligarchy of a few families that has historically controlled so much of the ownership, wealth and political power in Honduras.

It’s no secret that the business community in Honduras backed the central push behind the coup and remains its foundation. Coup “president” Roberto Micheletti virtually admitted it on July 29 when he told reporters that although he could see his way to agree to the San Andrés proposal that Zelaya could return “with limited powers,” the business community, he said, would never tolerate it.

With that statement, Micheletti fell into a kind of trap. He admitted that he is not in control, that the real power is economic, that of the oligarchy.

Truth is, Micheletti has the ultimate power over whether he stays or resigns as coup “president.” Yet it is also true that he is subjugated in every way by the economic powers in his country (including the multinational corporations that have sweatshops, agribusiness and other interests there).

As we will demonstrate, Micheletti himself, along with the nation’s Supreme Court, make up the smallest inner stub of the coup onion. They will be the last to fall, and it will come because the civil resistance will peel the outer layers away from them, leaving them unprotected.

Already the important tourist industry, particularly along the northern coast of Honduras, are voicing discontent with how the coup has turned their hotels, restaurants and attractions into ghost towns, with only a very small cadre of year-round expats and other tourists to toss them a few lempiras or dollars. One of the stakes in the tourism industry’s heart came from the regime itself in the form of military enforced curfews over the past 40 days and nights, choking the bars, clubs, restaurants, entertainers and workers that were shut out of their paychecks by it. Resentment is building against the regime to the extreme that whatever these interests thought of President Manuel Zelaya, the objective truth is that they did better when he was in power than they have since the coup arrived.

A great many of these businesses are facing complete destruction and bankruptcy already. Flights into Honduras from other lands are, on average, more than half empty, whereas flights out of the country are, on average, full with those Hondurans who can afford to escape this disaster-in-process fleeing the scene of the crime. This economic problem will continue to compound and deepen every day that the civil resistance keeps up its fight, reminding the country and the world that Honduras has not returned to normalcy (further suppressing tourism and non-criminal investment), and the best, most objective indicators of that are economic.

The Third Ring: The Political Class

Claims of unanimous support on both sides of the coup conflict are becoming unraveled. Internationally, the unanimity in opposition to the coup has weakened from Ottawa to Washington to San Andrés to Panamá City to México City to Bogotá. These are the focal points of the authoritarian hyper-capitalist right in the hemisphere, and those with their gaze fixed at the circus up above are mainly watching that indicator.

But the same is happening inside the Honduran political system that, at first, unanimously endorsed the coup (including with a specious claim that the Honduran Congress had “unanimously” voted in a session that, it has since been revealed, locked out dozens of legislators that it knew would oppose the coup).

This fracture is probably fatal to the Liberal Party, which along with the National Party makes up the simulacrum of a “two party system” in Honduras. Both Micheletti and Zelaya were elected to Congress and to the Presidency, respectively, as Liberal Party candidates.

But the 2009 Liberal Party presidential candidate, Elvin Santos, who had been Zelaya’s vice president until last December when he stepped down to be his party’s nominee for president this year, is now claiming that he never supported the coup and that he backs the San Andrés agreement. His problem is that nobody, absolutely nobody, believes him in that claim. And yet it is a clear indication that the political system’s previous united support for the coup has become unglued.

On August 5, AP reported that Santos now sings a different tune:

"I will go to all corners of the country to explain that I was in no way a part of the events of June 28," Santos said on Channel 5's "Face to Face" show.

"The huge mistake was taking him (Zelaya) out of the country and leaving him defenseless," said Santos, whose Liberal Party includes both Zelaya and the man who replaced him, Roberto Micheletti.

Santos is what we call in Latin America “un pendejo con iniciativa” – a pendejo with initiative - which can be loosely translated as an idiot who can’t help but remind everyone of how weak and stupid he is with his loud protestations and bumbling actions to the contrary.

This was most clearly demonstrated on that same August 5, when he had the temerity to bring his campaign to the National Autonomous University.

Santos arrived at the university with a group of plainclothes bodyguards. When students began booing and cat-calling the presidential candidate - "Out! Out! Son of a Whore!" - they perceived as having supported the coup in its first month, you can see in this video that his security goons pulled out pistols and aimed them angrily at the students. The students didn’t back down and the armed gunmen and Santos can be seen running away on the video.

You didn’t read about Santos' provocation in any of the English language press accounts of the police riot at the university last Wednesday, but it was that incident – Santos’ bodyguards pulling guns out on unarmed students – that sparked the escalation: It was then that students took to the streets and blocked a main intersection. The National Police were already gathered nearby – indicating that they fully expected a conflict that day and likely were in on its provocation – and charged violently upon the students. When the rector of the university came out to try and calm the situation, the National Police charged against her and knocked her to the ground, an image that was seen on national TV in Honduras. The university is now suing the National Police.

In Honduras last week, your correspondent shared a taxi ride with Nelson Avila, economic minister to the Zelaya government and Liberal Party member. He told us that important leaders of the party who did not, as individuals, support the coup have been meeting regularly to plan opposition to the party leadership that sponsored the coup. The Liberal Party is thus in tatters, divided down the middle, and its once pro-coup candidate both declaring he’s not with the coup but while also escorted by gunmen that aim their pistols at coup opponents. In other words, stick fork in Santos. He’s toast.

While the conservative National Party and its 2009 presidential candidate, 2005 nominee Pepe Lobos, are united behind the coup, they are so tied to the business interests in Honduras that the collapse of consensus for the coup in that sector, driven by the big hole in their pockets and bank accounts it has caused, will shortly come into play as well.

The leading political parties also have pollsters. They understand full well that public support for the coup – a very low 23 percent favorability rating for coup “president” Micheletti in early July – has collapsed even further since then. With faux-elections coming up in November, both leading parties will have to contend with those hard numbers and readjust their public positions accordingly, especially because two anti-coup candidates, Carlos Reyes and Cesar Ham, will also be on the ballot, if the “election” happens at all.

The Fourth Ring: The Security Forces

We already saw, last month, on the day that President Zelaya said he would cross back over the border into Honduras but stepped back after doing a New York Times-style “toe touch” (that act of journalistic hocus pocus in which a byline dated in a particular country or city is filed days after the reporter has passed through there, giving the false impression that she or he is presently there on the scene… that actually happened in a story filed yesterday by Timesperson Ginger Thompson, datelined Tegucigalpa on August 7, but two days after the reporter flew out of San Pedro Sula through Atlanta) how the National Police called a brief strike for unpaid back pay, bonuses and higher wages.

Although the coup regime is increasingly strapped for cash, it had to give in immediately to the 14,000 National Police corps demands and pay them handsomely to remain on the job. The coup is so dependent right now on that security force to break up blockades and repress demonstrators that the National Police have it by the short ones. We can expect more and bigger demands for even more money for these cops – the last line of defense of the regime - as the civil resistance keeps up its fight.

We also saw on July 5, after military soldiers at the Toncontin International Airport fired upon protesters and assassinated 19-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, how the National Police commander on the scene withdrew his troops from the ring around the airport, not wanting to share in the infamy and blame that now stains the Armed Forces.

The other big security force at play is obviously the military itself. We reported last week the desperate attempt on national TV by General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez and his chiefs of staff to defend their actions of kidnapping and exiling the President on June 28 and their repressive behavior since then. (See also the insightful account by journalist Belén Fernández of that televised spectacle, Honduras Generals Break Silence in Hopes that the World Will Understand Them. Fernández is now reporting full time from Honduras for Narco News.)

Both the 9,000 member military and the 14,000 member National Police forces – already vastly outnumbered by hundreds of thousands of coup opponents in the streets - are growing increasingly nervous about becoming scapegoats for the coup when it all becomes unraveled. The Armed Forces in particular need to worry about this. You can read the signals in Elvin Santos’ statement above - "The huge mistake was taking him (Zelaya) out of the country and leaving him defenseless," he said, in a clear allusion to the institution that did it, the military – that it will be the sacrificial lamb on the coup altar when push comes to shove.

More chilling yet for the Generals were the words of Adolfo Facusse, from one of the key oligarch families and head of the Honduras National Association of Manufacturers, when he recently said on tape about the military:

"They exceeded themselves. They should have captured him and submitted him to justice.

"We have the Armed Forces on trial because they exceeded the order… They have to respond in court and defend themselves… We don’t tolerate the Armed Forces or anyone to play around with the Constitution…"

In the end, the oligarchs have visceral contempt for the military because it is partly led by non-oligarchs, members of the lower classes who rose up through the ranks. This puts the General and his men in a “pincer effect” where they have to defend their increasingly narrow space from two ends: On one side, they seek to maintain the coup (which is why it was a military complaint that led to the order to close Radio Globo this week) but on the other side they have to struggle to ensure that if the coup begins to collapse, they don’t get the blame and punishment for it.

And yet the Armed Forces has an ace up its sleeve: At the moment when it concludes that the oligarchs are going to scapegoat them for the excesses of the coup, in a single swoop they can move from being goats to heroes, by determining that the hour has come to turn against the coup regime and facilitate the safe return of the elected President. It really will be the only option that Vásquez and the other generals have when push comes to shove, to save their own hides.

So far, the coup mongers, Micheletti in particular, who invited the General to speak and stand next to him on stage during a July 3 pro-coup rally in Tegucigalpa, have tried to carefully keep this natural rift between military and oligarch from blowing up. But as the pressure mounts, and the need for scapegoats grows on a sinking ship, watch this dynamic at work.

The Onion’s Core: Micheletti and the Supreme Court

As with what happened in Serbia in 2000, when Milosevic and “five people around him” were the last specimens of the regimen left isolated as the other layers of their particular onion peeled off, in Honduras it will be Micheletti and the Court.

You’ve now read about the onion peel: how a civil resistance that whose no signs of fatigue or surrender is methodically chipping away at the “inevitability factor” that props up the illusions of control needed for the regime to survive. You’ve read how the second ring – the Honduran economy and the business community’s greater suffering under the coup than under Zelaya – is coming unstuck. You’ve read about the turmoil in the political class of Honduras – the third ring – through the fracture down the middle of the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party’s Super Glue attachment to the outer economic ring present the circumstances for that layer of the onion to strip away from the coup out of naked self interest. And you’ve read about the fourth ring of the onion’s worry – that of the Army and the National Police - that they will become scapegoats and find themselves alone with the final pathetic nub at the inner core of the coup.

And as when most onions get peeled, there’s a lot of crying going on in the coup kitchen right now.

In the final inner core of the coup onion are the make-believe “president” Roberto Micheletti and the members of the Honduras Supreme Court who provided the legaloid justification for the June 28 coup.

Neither of those players has an EXIT door through which to escape. They are backed into a corner of their own making.

In the case of Micheletti, a career politician of more than three decades in the national congress, he has already resigned his legislative position to become the coup “president.” Once the coup falls apart, and the music stops, he is left without a seat in this game of musical chairs.

Likewise, the Supreme Court members don’t have a parachute or lifeboat either. This is why neither they nor Micheletti will ever really go for the San José agreement for Zelaya to return but with limited powers. (And it is why the Clinton-Restrepo plan of putting all of Washington’s eggs in that basket will prove so utterly stupid and incompetent on both their parts: they abandoned the initial pro-democracy stance from DC at the precise moment that the coup began to unravel from below. How harshly will that be judged by history?)

Were the San José “solution” to be signed by both sides, it is the Supreme Court that will become national laughingstock, along with Micheletti. Its claims of moral authority as interpreters of the Constitution and the law will evaporate with the coup itself.

And that is precisely why an “institutional solution” is no longer possible in Honduras. There is no solution possible that keeps the Supreme Court’s current members in place, and they’re not going to willingly resign, and nor is there a convenient manner by which to remove them. They and Micheletti are the Milosevics – the Milosevilettis! – of the Honduran revolution underway against them.

The civil resistance will peel away the skin of inevitability and the myth of a coup “in control.” It is already doing so. The economic consequences will peel away the business community’s unity in backing the coup. Public opinion is already making hamburger out of the political class’ alliance with the coup. And the security forces are looking nervously over their shoulders with the knowledge that they can’t trust the economic and political classes not to throw them under the bus when the going gets tougher very shortly.

The civil resistance in Honduras has, over 40 days and nights, proved itself strong, united, increasingly disciplined and with an impressive capacity to shift tactics rapidly in response to immediate developments. The coup, on the other hand, as Marovich noted in Honduras, is slow to adapt to changing circumstances and realities, suffering growing divisions and cracks, has no end game, no idea how to resolve this thing so that it can terrorize in peace and continue in power.

But that the Supreme Court is part of the final inner stub of the onion leaves the civil resistance no alternative except to do what, once these layers of the onion are peeled away, is in its power to do: to chase the judges out of the court building, call the Constitutional Convention with or without an institutional imprimatur, and remake the nation and the government in accordance with a new Constitution.

That it will have to go outside of “institutional” structures to do so is not really a problem. Because since June 28, there have been no legitimate institutions in Honduras. The institutions forfeited their right to exist. And thus people power from below will take the initiative to rebuild their country anew from the ashes of the old.

The act of peeling away layers of support and apathy that provide consent for the coup is not the same – and this is what organizers understand better than academics or activists – as becoming allied with those forces, be they international, economic, political or security forces. Manipulating a sector through grassroots action in no way creates permanent alliances with those sectors. Successful civil resistances have always developed the strategies and tactics to peel them away nonetheless.

It’s all about the onion and how it gets peeled. The tears of the regime, its inner stub, and its foreign cheerleaders, be they outright golpistas or those in nostalgic love with “institutions” that no longer legitimately exist, are merely a natural effect of the peeling.

In the end there are two paths to take while the onion is being peeled: Cry, or organize.

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….

By Al Giordano

Just a quick note - as I prepare additional reports from my notes of seven days and nights on the road in Honduras - to say that we're back online from the Narco Newsroom, somewhere in a country called América. Shortly after I arrived back home last night we experienced a short circuit and lost power - and thus Internet access - and it took most of today to fix it. A reminder that nothing happens fast in this part of the world. If there's one thing these twelve years in Latin America have taught me, it is patience.

I expect to return to Honduras real soon. When you read my next couple of reports you'll understand why that's so necessary. The short version: the coup opponents are going to win, and they're going to topple the regime no matter what Washington with its increasingly erratic and ham-handed handling of the situation does or does not do.

The hour has come to re-school my fellow community organizer, the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as to what organizing on the ground can do, including by going around and against the Peter Principle poster children surrounding him (yes, I'm lookin' at you Secretary Clinton and White House advisor Dan Restrepo) where some not-ready-for-prime-time players are rapidly destroying all the goodwill Obama earned at the April Summit of the Americas.

The Peter Principle says that “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." That's the story from above.

But we're not going to whine or gnash teeth over it. We're not going to run around in circles and screech that the sky is falling. We're not going to get on our knees and pray to mere mortals that occupy those positions in power. Fuck 'em if they can't take the joke: We're going to do the only three things that have ever universally worked to correct any injustice: Organize, organize and organize. And that obviously includes the work of Authentic Journalism to make sure that organizing is seen and heard far and wide.

Coming up next, a recap - with some additional information we learned on the ground in Honduras - by way of setting up the explanation of exactly how the coup regime is going to be toppled from below. An international teach-in on Civil Resistance and how it is done is being offered by the Honduran people.

And that includes the ultimate goal we heard from every corner of the country: a new Honduran Constitution determined democratically not by its oligarchs and their tricks of faux-democracy, but by the people.

I'd also like to thank Paul Findley, known to Field Hands in California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and now Honduras, as Palo, who answered my call for a cameraperson last week and, on his nickel, flew to Tegucigalpa to document moments that you'll want to see once we get them produced for viral video dissemination.

And since Palo demonstrated that sometimes all one needs to do is ask aloud to find the necessary talent for a job that needs done, let me today put it out there that the workload has grown so large here that I could use a kind of executive assistant, reasonably bilingual in Spanish and English, to work with this project somewhere in América for a very small stipend.

The good news is that in an era where many news organizations go through "internship brokers" who "place" people who want more experience in a workplace of their chosen fields in exchange for extortionist payments from the intern or his or her parents, to get a gig as go-fors for no pay at all, we won't charge anything for the opportunity and we can probably pay something. Send inquiries directly to me at narconews@gmail.com

Let me also mention that during our travels I encountered various strong candidates - Hondurans and internationalists both - for the February 2010 School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico.

The struggle against the coup d'etat in Honduras - and the oligarchy that brought it - has gone into overtime. Nothing happens overnight in this neck of the woods. But when it happens, it does so with history-making power and glory. Stay tuned...

Update: With more evidence of the Peter Principle at work, here's State Department spokesman Robert Wood at today's daily press briefing. He gets a tough line of questioning on the US position regarding Honduras, and he can't give a straight answer to any substantive question because his boss, Secretary Clinton, and the White House guy whose job is to "handle" the State Department in Latin America, Dan Restrepo, are still trying to have it both ways, leaving their spokesman with nothing to do but stammer:

QUESTION: There’s a similar report on Honduras, actually, about it this morning that a assistant secretary has written Senator Lugar to say that the U.S. is softening its stance on the Honduras coup and does not want to place any sort of lasting penalties on the Honduran Government – the interim government. Is that true? Or how would you best characterize the position --

MR. WOOD: The best way I can characterize this, Kirit, is that we are not softening on our position with regard to Zelaya. We have been – as you know, we have been working hard to try to get both parties to take up seriously the San Jose Accords. We think it’s the best way forward for resolving the political situation, political crisis in Honduras. We believe this is the best mechanism for it. And we’re going to continue to try to convince both parties and go from there. But a coup took place in the country, and –

QUESTION: Well, you haven’t officially legally declared it a coup yet.

MR. WOOD: We have called it a coup. What we have said is that we legally can’t determine it to be a military coup. That review is still ongoing.

QUESTION: Why does it take so long to review whether there’s a military coup or not?

MR. WOOD: Well, look, there are a lot of legal issues here that have to be carefully examined before we can make that determination, and it requires information being shared amongst a number of parties. We need to be able to take a look at that information and make our best legal judgment as to whether or not –

QUESTION: It seems to be taking a very long time.

MR. WOOD: Well, things take time when you’re dealing with these kinds of very sensitive legal issues. So we want to make sure that –

QUESTION: Have you made a decision on whether to impose additional sanctions on the de facto government?

MR. WOOD: No decision has been made to do anything right now, other than support the San Jose Accords and the mediation process.

QUESTION: No, I understand. But have you made a determination whether – whether – not to impose sanctions? I mean, this report and this letter to Senator Lugar suggests that you’ve made the decision not to impose sanctions.

MR. WOOD: Look, I’m certainly not going to talk about the details of the correspondence that we have had with a congressperson or senator. I’m not going to do that from here. I can – what I can tell you is that the United States is doing everything it can to try to support the return to constitutional democratic order in the country. And we’re going to do what we think is best to try to move that process forward.

QUESTION: But my question wasn’t about the letter. My question was whether you’ve made the decision not to impose new sanctions on Honduras?

MR. WOOD: And what I’m saying to you is that where we’re focused right now is on supporting that process and trying to get the two parties to come to some sort of a political settlement. But beyond that, I don’t have anything to add on that question.

There's a good answer ("yes, new sanctions are coming"), an evil answer ("no, there will not be tougher sanctions," which is what a State Department lawyer wrote in the letter to the Republican Senator), and an incompetent answer ("After more than a month, we don't have an answer") to every question. The State Department is wallowing in incompetence in a way that makes US citizens on both sides of the Honduras question feel ashamed of their country. Sit on that picket fence long enough and you end up with nothing but splinters where the sun don't shine.

By Al Giordano

AUGUST 4, 2009, SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS: The order was printed on the hijacked stationary of the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL, in its Spanish initials), executed by a military judge, and delivered to Radio Globo’s flagship station on 88.7 FM in Tegucigalpa at noon today: charged with “sedition,” the people’s radio station will be closed by decree, it proclaimed.

But the station continues to broadcast here in San Pedro Sula at 104.5 FM and also from 14 other cities throughout the country, in defiance of the order, which had been solicited by the Armed Forces of Honduras clandestinely on July 31 and granted today by the illegitimate coup regime.

This highly illegal situation – in which Armed Forces that claim to obey the orders of civilian authorities are the ones giving the orders to the regime over which media may broadcast and which may not – makes a lie, again, of the legaloid claims to be a civilian coup. But it’s the military – the same one that invaded and closed Radio Globo in the early hours of June 28 – that is calling the shots in Honduras today.

Honduras Indymedia was there at noon, in the capital city, and photographed inside and outside the station at the moment that the order was delivered. Its report (in Spanish) and the photographs appear here.

This morning’s televised threat by coup General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez to “go after them” – the leaders of the civil resistance to the coup – also included broadcasters and journalists.

Radio Globo, after its first shutdown at the hands of military soldiers, won a court order to reopen and has broadcasted constantly since June 29. If not for its news team and conductors and the thousands of calls they have received live on the air from Honduran citizens, the nationwide public would not know the real facts about what has been happening to their country. Thus, the military coup’s thirst to censor Radio Globo’s signal.

Repression has also been on the rise here in the country’s second largest city, and so has the resistance. Yesterday, Monday, August 3, as a peaceful caravan headed to protest outside the Honduran Arab Club where coup “president” Roberto Micheletti would address business leaders, National Police violently intercepted the participants, arresting at least 24 and wounding at least 47 men, women, children and seniors.

After beating and arresting the caravan participants for the crime of riding in cars toward a peaceful protest location, the National Police converged on the city’s central square. According to pro-coup daily El Tiempo, they did so “because they had information that resistance members were reassembling in that location.”

Local stores and businesses near the square, upon viewing the violent charge of the police, began closing their metal gates to protect themselves and their customers. Among them, Mr. and Mrs. Miguel Mejía, proprietors of a cyber-café. “In the building, police were seeking various pregnant and elder women who they sought to arrest because they considered them part of the protests,” wrote the pro-coup daily. When the Mejías did not open the gates, the police arrested them. You can see that scene in this photo:

The central park of San Pedro Sula has been the site of constant round-the-clock demonstrations since July 2, when troops invaded its City Hall and Mayor Rodolfo Padilla Sunseri disappeared. Narco News has learned that Mayor Padilla has been in exile ever since, due to the threats on his life. The coup regime attempted to install William Hall Micheletti – nephew of the coup “president” by the same last name, and third place defeated candidate in 2008 for the Liberal Party nomination for Mayor – in a local regime mirroring the national coup.

The response by the Municipal Workers Union was to close City Hall and it has remained locked and protected by peaceful protesters for more than a month now.

Tomorrow, from every corner of the country, national marches toward San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa will begin, scheduled to converge on the two cities early next week.

As the repression escalates, so does the civil resistance.

When Radio Globo’s eight p.m. hour team signed off shortly before nine p.m. for a regularly scheduled paid half-hour Evangelical broadcast tonight, the broadcaster added two words: “This is Radio Globo… in resistance.”

By Al Giordano

AUGUST 4, 2009, TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS: Five members of the Honduras coup regime's military brass went on the pro-coup Televicentro Channel 5 from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. this morning in the capital city to defend their actions over the past 38 days since they kidnapped the elected President and forcibly exiled him from the country.

There, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, issued an exasperated threat to the leaders of the social movements organized against the coup:

"They lie and they lie and they lie forty times until it becomes the truth when they call us golpistas (coup mongers). Saying that we're golpistas is a strategy. They call us 'assassins.' It's an effort to demoralize the troops. When they do this, they are committing a crime, first and foremost, that of defamation. We're going to go after them. They are acting with impunity."

In sum, the coup's maximum military leader is apoplectic that the Honduran population sees the coup as a coup, and the military that enforces it as part of that coup, and he wants to seek scapegoats for the fact that public opinion has turned against him, as if public opinion might change or at least shut up if only enough repression could be heaped upon it.

Offering heavy doses of defensiveness and delusion, the coup's military leaders spent an hour this morning on TV 5's Frente a Frente ("Face to Face") program offering their spin on the events that are shaking this nation of 7.5 million people to the core.

Comandante General Miguel Angel García Padget of the Armed Forces said that the coup was necessary to stop "socialism and communism dressed as democracy." He referred to the right wing authoritarian governments that preceded the Latin American wave of center-left electoral victories as "the true democracies."

Admiral Juan Pablo Ramírez of the Honduran Navy put it this way: "The State is threatened by talk of a Constituent Assembly (Constitutional Convention). The whole system is going to fall to the interests of a small group."

The Admiral did not explain how a Constitutional Convention, with delegates elected democratically by the entire Honduran electorate and representing every region, would somehow be captive to a "small group." And the sycophantic talk show host mediating the TV round table, a pasty faced clown of faux-journalism named Renato Alvarez, of course did not ask for any clarification.

Air Force General Luis Javier Prince complained that unnamed protest leaders "are trained in the way they do things."

"Why are they applying the same tactics from the 1980s of protests and blockades? They should forget about the protests," added García Padget, the Honduran equivalent of the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Also appearing on the program this morning was Venancio Cervantes Suazo, sub chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The five military officials appeared in uniform, leaving little doubt of two major factors about to impact on the ground here throughout Honduras: One, that they are besides themselves that the population sees them as illegitimate coup mongers and assassins of the people and, two, they consider it part of their job to "go after" leaders of the civil resistance and want that known far and wide as a tactic to scare off the protests.

Further evidence of the panic in the Armed Forces can be found on its very own web page, littered with such propaganda messages as this one from July 31:

"Ever since the political crisis in Honduras began, persons that don't deserve to be called citizens have been dedicated to cover the capital city walls with graffiti."

The omnipresent graffiti - not just in the capital city, but in every town this reporter has visited this past week here - contains the very messages and words - "golpistas... asesinos..." with the names of General Vasquez and other coup leaders that the general complained about today and said was his motive to now "go after" the leaders of the civil resistance.

Serbian community organizer Ivan Marovich who was here for three days last week observing and speaking to three different meetings of civil resistance organizations, including, on Saturday, the leadership of the National Front Against the Honduras Coup d'Etat, made the following observation to Narco News:

"I get the sense that the coup regime doesn't have an end game. It doesn't know how to resolve the national conflict it has started. I think they must go to bed each night praying to God, 'Please, Lord, just make the protesters go away.'"

In the coming days I'll offer an extensive report from my notes of Marovich's other extremely helpful observations through a community organizing lens, shared with the civil resistance movement here

For now, I'll add a couple of interesting facts: Serbia, like Honduras, has a population of seven million people. The opposition to the dictatorial regime that Marovich and others toppled through nonviolent resistance in 2000 was up against 100,000 national police officers that used repression to try and stop the protests. In Honduras, the entire Armed Forces counts with only 9,000 soldiers and officers, and the entire National Police force counts with just 14,000 police.

In other words, civil resistance in a country of roughly the same size of population beat repressive forces four times larger than those the coup regime can count on in Honduras.

That's why the coup generals are scared and lashing out, looking for scapegoats.

They have less force to deploy and frankly their leaders - General Vasquez and coup "president" Roberto Micheletti - aren't anywhere near as savvy, crafty and Machiavellian in evil super-villanry as the dictator Slobodan Milosevic who Serbian citizens dethroned across the Atlantic nine years ago.

It is also relevant to note that Marovich's movement in Serbia was opposed by Washington, which backed the dictator Milosevic for the first eight years of its struggle, and it was only in the last three months before it toppled the regime that US policy changed course and backed the resistance movement. (And it only did that after a failed bombing campaign by NATO served to complicate and delay the victory of the resistance; such were the bombastic Clintonian policies of the 1990s that today, again, retard Washington's erratic response to the Honduran coup.)

Do the math: The civil resistance to the coup counts with hundreds of thousands that have already demonstrated their strength and numbers in the streets. The Honduras coup has only 23,000 police and soldiers trying to hold back the popular wave, and not even those are unanimous in defense of the coup (the national police briefly held a strike last month, when the coup needed it most, forcing the regime to immediately grant bonuses and higher pay in order to get them back on the repressive beat - yet the moment that the money runs out to keep paying those higher salaries, the mercenary police forces won't be available again).

The clock is ticking on this coup regime. And on television this morning, one could see the fear in the eyes of the macho generals that try so hard to show a fearless face. Their days are numbered, not because the other countries of the hemisphere and the world reject the coup, but so much more importantly, because the Honduran people are organizing to put a stop to it all by themselves.

The coup generals don't have an end game.

The civil resistance does, and is unanimous in it: The toppling of the coup regime, the reinstatement of the elected government, and a Constitutional Convention to remake their nation in a more authentically democratic form.

What happens in the circus up above, whether in Washington, San José, Caracas or other foreign capitals, becomes increasingly irrelevant. The outcome determinative battle is already underway on the ground. And, as in Serbia nine years ago, the international position will follow its perception of which side is going to win, a dollar short and a day late.