Honduras: A soft coup in the times of soft power?

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Were it not for the power of the images from Telesur showing the beatings and military abuse that for the past several days have been a daily reality on the streets of Honduras; were it not for the unimpeachable testimony of the blood of young people that stained the streets around Tegucigalpa Airport when the people prepared to welcome their democratically elect president; were it not for the intransigence of the international organizations, from ALBA and the OAS to the United Nations General Assembly, which have refused to recognize the coup-plotters; were it not for the alternative media, especially the blog networks that have broken the circle of silence established complicitly by the big news agencies, any naive person might believe that what’s happening in this Central American country is the nation’s return to the democratic path, by velvet-gloved means and with the unanimous applause of the institutions and the citizenry.

That is the script that the putschists and their (for now) concealed sponsors have tried to put into practice. That is, quite clearly, the new protocol to unleash and disguise a coup d’état in democratic times. Those are, apparently, the new instructions from the manual that updates the “Techniques of the Coup d’État,” written by Curzio Malaparte in 1931, which was written to remind us of the experiences of the fascist coup, or from the manuals that served as basis for the repression of the past 40 years in Latin America, with its huge sequel of murdered, disappeared, imprisoned and tortured people.

The real causes of the coups d’état in the region have remained unaltered throughout history. In essence, certain military sectors have taken arms in interminable uprisings to defend the interests of the oligarchies whenever these have considered it necessary to counter the advance (real or presumed) of the revolutionary or leftist ideas, acting against governments that are much too bold or radical, even timidly reformist, in their relation to the national sovereignty or the nation’s independence and generally opposed to a hegemonic foreign domination. That is the umbilical cord that joins the Honduran coup d’état with the coup staged on March 10, 1952, by Fulgencio Batista, or Sept. 11, 1973, by Augusto Pinochet, or the one staged by the Argentine military junta.

What has changed — judging from what we know of the Honduran case and particularly from what we can gather from the intense effort by part of the world press to make us believe — is not even the excuses for the rebellion against the Constitution, but the image that the coup-plotters want for themselves, the Freudian manner in which they conceive it, the illusions they divulge to be accepted by their people and the international community, sidestepping the inexorable judgment of history.

What does the Honduran case teach us? What are the “new features,” the “unusual peculiarities” with which a brutal, gross and clumsy uprising is being passed off as a citizens’ protest and rebellion of institutions?

From what we can see, the new recipe for what Isabel Rauber has called “neo-coupism,” is relatively simple.

Against a democratically elected president, a crisis of governance must be cooked up, with no shortage of accusations of violating the Constitution and democracy. The cook must secure a pronouncement from live forces, especially Congress or Parliament, which of course must agree with the representatives of the usual oligarchies.

If you have a judicial or electoral power with the same flavor, so much the better. Drop it generously into the pot. Stir constantly with the most disloyal and truculent campaigns possible from the big national and international media. Take to the streets the pampered children of the same oligarchic families and their political and labor clients, and don’t forget to woo yesterday’s military officers and repressive elements who are lying in wait at intermediate levels of the new administration.

With all these ingredients and the wise counsel on how they should be combined — slipped softly into the ears not as orders but as the chef’s suggestions, i.e., advice from certain diplomats and military attachés in your country — you already have all the winning recipe to execute your own soft coup in times of soft power. It makes an exquisite little dish that will charm your friends at the big-business association or the country club.

In the case of the coup against President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, the politically correct dictionary for coups d’état and putschists may have been enriched considerably thanks to the efforts of neoconservative political observers such as Jaime Daremblum, former Ambassador to Costa Rica during the Bush administration and current director of the Latin-American Studies Center of the Hudson Institute, CNN, newspapers like El País of Spain, and the blogs of the enlightened Cuban counter-revolution.

In all of them you can find almost identical concepts to describe the reality in Honduras that are deceptive, euphemistic and sly, as expressed by the disciplined spokesmen in rigorous talking points. They don’t talk about a coup, but about “the removal from power” of President Zelaya; they don’t mention the people who support him on the streets in mass demonstrations without saying that they are “leftist mobs”; they don’t say that the victims are shot by snipers from the elite Cobra unit of the Army but say the casualties are the result of “confrontations between Zelaya supporters and opponents.”

The coup-plotters are no such thing; they are army officers who have carried out “civic actions […] forced to do so by the president’s unconstitutional acts” and “at the request of the Supreme Court.” In sum, were to believe these seraphic gentlemen, Honduras today is the best of all possible democratic worlds and the denunciations of a coup that never took place were the vagaries of a midsummer night’s dream.

The administration of Barack Obama and his principles of foreign policy, in addition to his repeated slogans for change, could be the true victims of this Honduran neo-coup. Of course, so would be the people, who contribute the dead and the pummeled, and the still fragile Latin American democracies, which have watched in consternation how the tanks and the masked gunmen return to the streets.

Obama and his Secretary of State have made it clear that they don’t support the coup and that their administration advocates the restoration of the rule of law in Honduras, but the defiant bullying of the putschists, entrenched in a de-facto government that has been unanimously repudiated by all of the world’s nations, expelled from the OAS, suffering from an anemic economy, deprived of the preferential relations it enjoyed within the regional integration fostered by the ALBA, suggests the existence of veiled promises, complicit winks, handshakes under the table. And if these don’t come from Obama, then, from whom?

I don’t think that, regardless of his suicidal or gorilla-like vocation, a dark personage such as the new foreign minister of the Honduran putschists would have said of Obama that “that young Negro doesn’t even know where Tegucigalpa is” if he didn’t believe that he is supported by certain dark and powerful forces in the bowels of the new U.S. administration, remnants of the neoconservative Bushism. If this is true, isn’t such clandestine encouragement a stab in the back of the changes in the stormy historic relations between the U.S. and Latin America promised by Obama himself?

I ask this, because the focus on soft power and smart power, cornerstones of Obama’s foreign policy, means precisely a rejection of the use of coercive and military methods to solve the world’s problems, a reversal of the delirium of preventive wars and attacks against the “dark corners of the planet” that characterized the Bush reign.

And a brutal and Jurassic coup d’état such as the one committed by the Honduran Army and the oligarchy, with people murdered on the streets, with journalists hounded, with the resurrected death squads, with the abuses against accredited diplomats, with the waving of false documents and fake signatures to show that Zelaya had resigned, with the stealthy and cowardly kidnapping of a president while he slept, with the felony of the treason itself, has not a shred of softness or intelligence; it in no way fits into the new times we were promised.

Has Obama taken due note of the message sent to him from the streets of Honduras? Is Obama aware that there, along with the people who are fighting peacefully for democracy and the return of their president, the credibility of his promises and statements, not to mention also his political future, is being decided? Should we add Honduras to the mine field inherited by the current administration from its predecessor, replete with economic crises, wars and confrontations? Will Honduras bleed to death before the elections of 2012?

This may be a first message to Obama, lovingly sent by the neoconservative forces that were yesterday defeated at the polls but that remain active as political and ideological forces. Let us hope he’ll take it seriously. In U.S. politics, the postman always rings twice.

Elíades Acosta Matos, a Cuban writer and journalist, holds a doctorate in philosophy. He is a regular contributor to Progreso Weekly/Semanal.