We met on a sort of traffic island with tables. Jhonny Lagos, who is the editor-in-chief of El Libertador, a newspaper in Honduras, said meeting indoors was too dangerous. “We’re scattered around the city now. Our office isn’t safe. So we’re working on laptops, in cafés, from home. We’ve had death threats.”
Lagos was sweating in the morning sun. He was a burly man, forty-four, hyperactive, unshaven. It was two days before Halloween. The month before, two men in ski masks had snatched his graphics editor, Delmer Membreño, off the street, he said. “They hooded him, drove him out of the city, put him on his knees, beat him, kicked him, burned him with cigarettes, put a 9-mm. pistol to his head. He thought he was going to die. They took his shoes and cameras and told him they were going to do worse to me—they called me Jhonnycito. They said they would kill my children. Then they left him there. He went to Chile last week. He’s in bad shape, psychologically.”
Lagos handed me a copy of El Libertador which included a story about Membreño’s abduction. There were photographs of the burns on his face and arms. “I’m not leaving,” Lagos said. “They should leave. I’ve committed no crime. They’ve committed many crimes.” He meant the de facto regime that has ruled Honduras since a military coup on June 28th. “It’s a combination military coup, business coup, religious coup,” he said. “It all pertains to the oligarchy that controls this country.”
I noticed that he was carrying a fat paperback of Plutarch’s “Lives.” Lagos grinned. “I heard that Benjamin Franklin read this book and was influenced by it. Do you know if Benjamin Franklin read Plutarch?”
The coup went down in classic fashion. Two hundred soldiers stormed the Presidential palace just before dawn. They overpowered bodyguards, shot out the locks, and pulled the President, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, from his bed. They handcuffed him, threw him on the floor, and cursed at him and beat him. Then they bundled Zelaya, still in his pajamas, into an armored car, took him to a military airfield, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.
The problem was that military coups are passé in Latin America. Honduras had enjoyed regular democratic transitions of power since 1982, when a military government was replaced by an elected one. The afternoon of the coup, the plotters sought to legitimatize their actions at a special congressional session, producing a resignation letter from Zelaya. The letter was a forgery—it even had the wrong date, a remnant from a plan to carry out the plot a few days earlier. They also claimed to have had a secret arrest warrant, but there are suspicions that it was produced after the fact. Zelaya was certainly deported on no legal basis. Still, the legislature quickly named the coup’s leader, Roberto Micheletti Bain, the new President. It was a “golpe profiláctico,” its supporters said—a coup meant to prevent whatever was coming next.
The golpistas had some support. President Zelaya had managed to alienate the legislature, including much of his own party (he and Micheletti were both in the Liberal Party); the country’s businessmen; the Catholic Church hierarchy; and the Army and the police. Honduras is often said to be controlled by ten families. To the extent that that is true, almost all ten had come to loathe Zelaya, and the many newspapers and radio and TV stations they own were, naturally, comfortable with the coup. Also supportive were those Hondurans, not all of them wealthy rightists, who had been alarmed by Zelaya’s increasingly close relationship with Venezuela’s populist leader, Hugo Chávez.
That left a lot of Hondurans, though, who were appalled by the coup, and the streets and highways soon filled with them. The Army and the police met them with tanks and tear gas, clubs and rubber bullets, and, in some cases, live ammunition. A curfew was imposed, and various civil liberties were suspended. There were deaths, disappearances, and mass detentions. Still, the protests went on. Zelaya may have lost the support of the country’s traditional institutions, but he had gained a large following among teachers, labor unions, and peasant organizations. Even people who had not particularly liked him came out to protest. His policies were not the issue; democracy was.
The international response was hostile as well. Honduras was suspended from the Organization of American States, and the coup was condemned by the United Nations. No country recognized Micheletti’s de facto government. The United States, although no friend of Chávez and wary of Zelaya, suspended all non-humanitarian aid. The U.S. visas of Micheletti and other coup leaders were revoked. The golpistas were privately stunned, I was told, by the firmness of the U.S. reaction—this would never have happened if the Republicans had still been in power. Even their promise to hold Presidential elections on schedule, in late November, left the Obama Administration unmoved. The results of those elections would not be legitimate unless the coup was reversed and Zelaya restored to office, the Administration said.
But the signals from Washington were mixed. Congressional conservatives rallied around the coup leaders, who, along with allies like the Latin American Business Council, have reportedly spent at least six hundred thousand dollars on Washington lobbyists and lawyers. (Lanny Davis, the former Clinton White House special counsel, and his firm pocketed much of that.) By early October, nine congressional Republicans had visited Honduras, vocally supporting Micheletti’s regime. One delegation was led by Senator Jim DeMint, of South Carolina, known for his vow to “break” President Obama over health-care reform. DeMint had been blocking confirmation of two key Obama diplomatic appointments in Latin America.
Zelaya did not go quietly into exile. A week after his overthrow, he tried to fly back to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Tens of thousands of people came to the airport, but the Army blocked the runway with trucks and troops. At least two demonstrators were killed, and Zelaya’s plane could not land. He next tried to enter on foot, through a Nicaraguan border post, but was foiled again, and another young supporter was killed. Finally, on September 21st, Zelaya sneaked back into Honduras, concealed in a vehicle, and turned up, with his wife, at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa. Roberto Micheletti assured Hondurans that Zelaya was not in the country, that he was, in fact, in a hotel suite in Nicaragua. Then Zelaya appeared on national television. Thousands flocked to the Brazilian Embassy, which is on a small street in a hillside residential neighborhood. They were beaten and dispersed by soldiers and riot police.
A standoff ensued. The regime issued threats and ultimatums: Zelaya would be arrested if he stepped outside the Embassy. Zelaya was defiant. The Brazilians were discomfited but steadfast. The United States was officially aghast. The U.S. representative to the O.A.S. called Zelaya’s return “irresponsible and foolish.” The troops surrounding the Embassy made life miserable for those inside—limiting deliveries of food and medicine, blasting music, and shining powerful arc lights. The hundreds of Zelaya supporters who had crammed into the compound dwindled to a couple of dozen. Among them were several journalists, who managed to send out unnerving reports of food-borne illnesses and suspected chemical attacks.
I managed to reach Zelaya by phone, and asked him what would happen if he was not restored to the Presidency. “The country will continue to be isolated, the crisis will deepen,” he said. His voice sounded almost serene. He called the golpistas “dictators.” Negotiators were meeting daily at a Tegucigalpa hotel, under the auspices of the Americans and the O.A.S., trying to end la crisis, but Zelaya wasn’t sure that his team was talking to the right people. “When you have a military regime, I imagine the military makes the decisions,” he said.
The main sticking point was Zelaya’s restoration. The coup leaders said they would never allow it. His dismissal, they argued, had been legal, and he was now charged with treason, among other things. Vilma Morales, the Micheletti team’s spokesperson, and a former head of the supreme court, told me that Zelaya could “face criminal trials. There is movement on some of the charges already.”
Zelaya had told me, “I am not someone who remains quiet in the face of insults. I don’t bow my head or bend my knee before those who want to enslave me and take my freedom. But I resist peacefully, and that’s what I have asked the people of Honduras to do. Our demonstrations are peaceful, because we don’t want to answer with violence those who attack us with violence.”
That was true, but when I arrived in Tegucigalpa, in late October, I found a widespread belief that a word from Zelaya could spark an insurrection. His supporters had formed a broad alliance known as the National Resistance Front, which has its base among workers, students, and campesinos, and in the many dirt-poor barrios marginales that surround Tegucigalpa. Zelaya’s daughter Xiomara Hortensia, who is known as La Pichu, cuts a distinctive figure at resistance rallies. She is twenty-four, slim and glamorous. She is known for singing boleros, accompanied by her father on the guitar. The resistance provides her with bodyguards. La Pichu and her sister cook their father’s meals, which are carried into the Brazilian Embassy by a U.N. team, in order to reduce the risk of poisoning. She told me that her father wasn’t guilty of treason or corruption or anything else: “My dad came back here because he’s clean.”
But the resistance wants more than Zelaya’s restoration. Its members want to change Honduran politics and society, to rewrite the country’s constitution, replacing a system that has failed to deliver prosperity or social justice—according to the World Bank, more than forty per cent of Hondurans live in extreme poverty—with a more direct, “participatory” form of democracy. The President seems almost incidental to their aspirations. In fact, as a redeemer figure, Manuel Zelaya is a distinctly odd choice.
Everybody calls him Mel. His family was part of the old rural aristocracy, and he grew up on a ranch in Olancho, which is the Texas of Honduras, famed for its tough, proud ways. Zelaya, who is fifty-seven, wears a big white Stetson and has a big black mustache. In a campaign video called “Viene Mel” (“Here Comes Mel”) he gallops through a meadow on horseback, brandishing the red-and-white flag of the Liberal Party.
In 1975, when Zelaya was twenty-two, fourteen activists, including two priests, were massacred on his family’s hacienda. It was an era in which death squads killed campesinos suspected of supporting agrarian reform. Zelaya’s father was said to have participated in the killings and, along with a local military commander, went to prison for the murders. (He was granted amnesty in 1980.) I heard several versions of this story, including one from a close associate of the victims, Rafael Alegría, a campesino from Olancho who is now a leader of the National Resistance Front. In every version, the young Zelaya visited his father in prison often, and never accepted that his father was guilty of anything beyond bad judgment.
Zelaya is often described in foreign press reports as a “leftist logging magnate,” which old friends find amusing. “Mel wasn’t rich—his family’s money was mostly gone—and he was certainly never a leftist,” one told me. When Zelaya served in the national congress, he was mostly known as a bon vivant. The big money in Honduras, formerly in bananas, cattle, timber, and land, is now in banking, energy, telecommunications, mass media, and the outsourcing factories known as maquilas. The country’s élite is so small, though, that basically everyone in it knows everyone else, and when Zelaya was elected President there was no reason to think that he would inconvenience his friends.
He surprised them. His cabinet included businessmen, but also determined reformers. “His rhetoric for the poor was beautiful,” Carlos Hernández, an anti-poverty activist, said. “Here comes this man cutting the figure of a campesino, with the hat, travelling the country, sitting down with anyone, having coffee, rolling beans in a tortilla with his hand. Giving them a hundred dollars. They’d never seen a President like this before.” Hernández himself was not impressed, but many poor people were.
Zelaya’s populism was never humble, and always self-dramatizing. He did lower school fees and ram through an increase in the minimum wage—it remained less than two dollars an hour, and it didn’t apply to foreign-owned maquilas, but it was enough to enrage many business owners. Zelaya made more enemies by opposing the privatization of telecommunications. He also made an oil deal with Venezuela. The terms for Honduras were excellent, but energy companies and big importers, who included some of the country’s richest families, lost out. Hugo Chávez, moreover, seemed to be Zelaya’s new best friend.
Unlike Chávez’s other allies (in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba), Zelaya never turned against the United States. He did not target U.S. corporations, and he coöperated with American military drug-interdiction efforts. Still, in September, 2008, Otto Reich, a Cuban émigré and former Bush official, issued Zelaya a pointed warning in an interview with a Honduran newspaper: “If President Zelaya wants to be an ally of our enemies, let him think about what might be the consequences of his actions and words.”
Reich also accused Zelaya of corruption. There is no question that corruption was a problem. When Zelaya took office, Honduras was, according to Transparency International, the most corrupt nation in Central America, and its dismal ranking persisted under Zelaya. The congress, the judiciary, the press—all were seen by Hondurans as basically for sale. Zelaya’s relations with legislators deteriorated as the congress, at the behest of its traditional sponsors in the private sector, blocked his reform efforts and judicial appointments. Fatefully, Zelaya turned to the Army. In the nineteen-nineties, as the region’s wars wound down, Honduras—which, though not at war itself, had been the main staging ground for the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras—did a better job of distancing the military from politics than did most of its neighbors. But Zelaya, seeking domestic allies, made the Army’s wish list a priority. He revived, as people say, the protagonismo of the military.
The Honduran left—peasant organizations, unions—was slow to embrace Zelaya. Then, in 2008, Zelaya began to push the idea of a “Fourth Urn.” In the elections scheduled for November 29, 2009, he proposed that, alongside the traditional ballot boxes for local, congressional, and Presidential candidates, there be one for a referendum on whether to hold a constituent assembly and rewrite the constitution. The Honduran constitution, which was produced under the last military government, is seen as a prime obstacle to political reform: the executive branch is weak; the Army has extraordinary responsibilities; faulty reasoning and contradictions abound. (Óscar Arias, the Costa Rican President and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has described the Honduran constitution as “the worst in the world.”) Now the left began to like Mel better, and the élites began to consider overthrowing him.
His opponents alleged that he was trying to remain in power—that the first thing he would change in the constitution was the clause restricting Presidents to a single four-year term. Zelaya claimed that that was absurd; he would be out of office long before the constituent assembly, if it was approved, convened. But he offered a compromise: a nonbinding national referendum in June, 2009, asking voters if they wanted a Fourth Urn in November.
The referendum became the showdown. The supreme court and the congress ruled that it would be illegal. Zelaya rejected the ruling, and asked the Army to distribute the ballots. The head of the armed forces, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, refused. The Army was clearly switching sides. Zelaya fired Vásquez, who was promptly reinstated by the supreme court.
The coup came on the morning of the referendum. The leaders of the left believed that it was not Zelaya whom the golpistas feared but the popular movement. If so, the coup backfired. Popular resistance surged—it achieved protagonismo—and it was organized around the goal of reversing the coup.
American fast-food chains have enjoyed generous tax exemptions in Honduras, and they dominate shopping streets and malls, both commercially and visually, their bulbous plastic signs layered over the tropical sky: Burger King, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts. The main act of violence committed by the resistance to date seems to have been the torching of a Popeye’s in Tegucigalpa. (Anti-coup activists told me that they thought the regime itself had burned the place down in order to discredit them.) Soldiers often massed suddenly in front of banks and hotels. These deployments can be unnerving—all the drawn machine guns. Driving back to my hotel one night, I ran into a military roadblock. Soldiers in camouflage gestured angrily with their rifles. I drove for miles through the deserted city to find another route.
One afternoon, I came upon a badly injured protester lying next to the driveway between a Chili’s and a Popeye’s. He was a light-skinned man in his fifties, and he had been clubbed so hard in the spine, apparently with one of the forked iron bars used by the security forces, that he could not move or speak. His friends were loading him into an ambulance, as a group of soldiers watched from a nearby McDonald’s parking lot.
“We had a permit,” a young woman told me. “But they attacked anyway.” Her eyes were streaming—a tear-gas bomba had bounced near her. She said her name was Carla Rivera. She was an accountant with two children. Her T-shirt had a face stencilled on it—not of Zelaya but of Francisco Morazán, a nineteenth-century military leader who is the national hero. Rivera said, “They wear hoods, but we’re not allowed to wear even bandannas”—she coughed and wiped her eyes—“against gas, against cameras.”
“They take our pictures for their terrorist database,” her husband, Francisco Castillo, a real-estate agent, said. He was tall and calm. He introduced me to an elderly woman standing nearby. “María Elena,” he said. “She’s a nun. She was kicked out of her order for being here.” His wife was now doubled over: the tear gas was making her ill. “What can we do?” Castillo said. “Just let them have our country?”
Zelaya’s term was supposed to run until January 27th, and the coup’s opponents are planning to boycott the elections unless he is restored. The elections are still scheduled for November 29th. “We will work to delegitimatize these fraudulent elections,” Alegría, the peasant leader, told me. “And after November 29th we will delegitimatize the leaders produced by the fraud.”
It was hard to see how elections could be held freely and fairly in the atmosphere of state terror that gripped Honduras, but the Micheletti regime is determined. The two main candidates for the Presidency—Pepe Lobo, of the National Party, and Elvin Santos, of the Liberal Party—are out campaigning, their rallies surrounded by soldiers, and every day the pro-coup newspapers carry stories about the Army’s heroic poll preparations. Those who would boycott the elections are called terrorists, anarchists; the leader of the national bar association thought that such people could perhaps be charged with sedition or terrorism.
Micheletti, in his television appearances, tends to glower, and speak from the side of his mouth, a bit like Dick Cheney, and often seems to be keeping his temper just barely under control—until he abruptly bellows, “Viva Honduras! Viva Honduras! Viva Honduras!” Micheletti was in his thirties when he finished high school, while living and working in New Orleans, where he ran a clothing store. According to an opinion poll in October, only twenty-eight per cent of Hondurans looked on him favorably. He and the other coup leaders have lately tried to use soccer to improve their position. The national soccer team just qualified for the World Cup, for the first time since 1982, and the country is ecstatic about it. Soccer matches play continually on TV, interspersed with patriotic footage of the Honduran Army marching and performing maneuvers, all to the same cry: “Viva Honduras!”
One problem with all this is that the mother of the team’s captain, Amado Guevara, is a passionate opponent of the coup. She presented La Pichu with a soccer shirt autographed by her son for Mel, the nation’s prisoner-savior. This put young Guevara in an awkward position, since Micheletti had invited the team to the Presidential palace the day before. Guevara denied that he had been involved in sending the shirt. For that, his gallantry was widely questioned. Was he calling his own mother a liar? Was he insulting La Pichu?
Across from my hotel was a livid graffito: “Do something patriotic—kill an Arab.” It referred to the large Middle Eastern community in Honduras, made up primarily of Palestinian Christians, who began arriving more than a century ago and have done exceptionally well in business. Indeed, a majority of the richest families in the country are of Palestinian origin; they are called turcos. The other extremely successful immigrant group, although smaller in number, is, in a nice twist, Jews. The two communities, by all accounts, get along quite well.
Yani Rosenthal is the scion of a leading business family. He was Zelaya’s chief of staff for the first two years of his Presidency. We talked on a sunny balcony. I had heard people say that the oligarchy was panicking, sending its families to the States for safety. Rosenthal, a compact, natty man in his forties, didn’t seem to be panicking. His family owns, among many other things, a newspaper and a TV station, which propelled him, willy-nilly, into coup politics. “We had a bomb thrown at the station after we let two of Mel’s ministers speak from hiding,” he said. “The government threatened to raid us, but I called this guy I know in la resistencia and he called a few thousand resistance members to defend our station and they were there in minutes and were successful. We got lucky. They’re not usually so efficient.” At the paper, he said, he tries to compel his editors, who are anti-coup, to provide balanced coverage: “For every three pro-Mel op-eds, I say they should run three anti. But Micheletti’s still pissed at me.”
Rosenthal laughed. Overbearing politicians came and went. He made it clear that the U.S. had not revoked his visa. Life went on. “Last week, we went to the cays to catch the red-snapper run,” he said. “There are just a couple of weeks when they migrate through there. After the first cold fronts roll off North Carolina, you know, the fish head down to Venezuela, and we caught it perfectly. Two hundred fish in a day! Fantastic. My daughter usually goes with me on those trips, but she’s in school in Boston. She’s so jealous. ‘Daddy, it’s so cold here.’ ” He gave another laugh, showing small, fantastically white teeth.
The Honduran economy, already in recession, had now, with the coup, stalled completely, Rosenthal said. “Tourism stopped. Private investment stopped, both foreign and internal. Foreign aid—that was six per cent of the G.N.P. People here are keeping their money in cash. Not even in property.” As a businessman, he understood the private sector’s support for the coup. “But you have to wait,” he said. “No matter how unpopular your President is. What were Bush’s poll numbers in June, ’08? The U.S. waited for Bush’s term to end.”
Manuel Acosta Bonilla, a former Honduran Ambassador to the United Nations, is a coup supporter. “The whole world’s against us, and all we did was get rid of a bad President,” he said. Acosta is an ample older man, with thick glasses and a gravelly voice. He thought Micheletti should simply leave Zelaya in the Brazilian Embassy. “Pull back the Army,” he said. “He’s going nowhere. He has no forces.”
We were sitting in Acosta’s study. I glanced at a framed photogravure portrait on the wall. “General Manuel Bonilla,” Acosta said. “My great-grandfather. Twice President of Honduras.” Acosta chuckled. He, like Zelaya, is from Olancho. “Melito, Melito,” he said softly. “I knew his parents.” He sighed, took a sip of coffee. “Mel is a phenomenon of a banana republic.”
Acosta had been great friends, he said, with John Negroponte, the American spymaster-diplomat who reportedly oversaw the Contra operation in Honduras. He said that he wished Washington would send Negroponte down to straighten things out.
The presumed omnipotence of the United States was a theme I heard from all points on the Honduran political spectrum. Rafael Alegría, the resistance leader, told me, “Obama could tell the Pentagon to tell the Army to go back to the barracks and reverse the golpe. Definitely.” A local journalist wasn’t so sure about Obama. “He’s hemmed in by other hard-right interests there,” he said. “But the Pentagon? They could solve this in a second. The U.S. can do anything.”
The United States did turn up the pressure on the regime in late October. Hillary Clinton called Micheletti and harangued him, reportedly, for half an hour. Afterward, he joked that she seemed to have a limited vocabulary: “All she kept saying was ‘restitution, restitution, restitution’ ”—that is, Zelaya needed to be reinstated, period. Washington sent a high-level delegation to Tegucigalpa to try to end the stalemate. La Pichu told me by phone that she hoped that an agreement could be reached, but that “a lot depends on the final text.”
On October 30th, an accord was finally signed—“a historic agreement,” Hillary Clinton said. “I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that, having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order, overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue.” The Obama Administration had, it seemed, defended a critical principle of a new American diplomacy: coups would not stand. The headline on the Washington Post’s editorial was “A WIN IN HONDURAS.” On Reuters, it was “HONDURAS’ ZELAYA SET TO RETURN TO POWER.”
Zelaya declared himself satisfied. “We are optimistic that my restitution is imminent,” he said. He was still stuck in the Brazilian Embassy, but Thomas Shannon, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, who led the American delegation, said that the U.S. was working on getting him out.
La Pichu was right, though. A lot depended on the final text of the agreement, which turned out to require a congressional vote on Zelaya’s restoration. Optimists assumed that this would amount to a formality. They were mistaken. Days passed. The leader of the congress asked the supreme court for an opinion. A “verification commission” that included the U.S. Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, met with all concerned. Then Solis, after a day in Honduras, returned home. Micheletti, who had assured the verification commission that he was ready to step down, began to vacillate. He went back to an earlier position: that Zelaya should also renounce the Presidency. (In the end, a symbolic gesture—ceding power to his own cabinet, for the week of the election only—was as far as Micheletti would go. Even then, if “peace is threatened,” Micheletti said, he would take the reins again immediately.)
I was reminded of something Zelaya had told me before the agreement was signed. “It’s up in the air, what the international community will do in the face of the insinuations of this totalitarian government,” he said. “It’s up in the air, its capability or its impotence. We will be able to evaluate it in the days ahead.”
Four days after the accord was signed, Thomas Shannon jolted Honduras, and much of Latin America, by suggesting, on CNN en Español, that, even if Zelaya were not restored to the Presidency, the United States would recognize the results of the November elections. Two days later, Senator Jim DeMint lifted his hold on the confirmation of Shannon to become U.S. Ambassador to Brazil. Hillary Clinton, DeMint said, had assured him that the Administration would recognize the upcoming Honduran election results “regardless of whether former President Manuel Zelaya is returned to office.”
The next day, November 6th, Zelaya pronounced the accord “dead.” It looked as if an old-fashioned coup could still succeed in Latin America, after all. ♦
