Americas Quarterly

DISPATCHES FROM THE

The international community should not have been suprised when Hondurans defended their new government, a U.S. journalist reports.

When more than 200 soldiers stormed the house of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, rousted him out of bed, and gave him a one-way ticket to Costa Rica, Latin America had a gut-wrench-ing sense of déjà vu. In the first successful military

coup since the Cold War, the region’s long nightmare with de facto governments had stunningly been reconjured in tiny, impoverished and all-but-ignored Honduras.

Two days later, I entered the country to report the story by trekking

across a bridge from El Salvador in a 6:00 a.m. downpour. All flights to Tegucigalpa, the capital, had been cancelled. History gave me every reason to expect the worst: death squads, torture, “disappearances,” and other tactics of state terror had always accompanied coups in the region.

But the atmosphere that Tuesday was hardly sinister. A few helicopters buzzed overhead, and soldiers manned government buildings. Yet the streets bustled and stores were

open for business. While international condemnations of the coup scrolled across the CNN en Español news ticker in every hotel lobby, young locals seemed to have adapted quickly to the 9:00 p.m. curfew, heading to bars and dance clubs while their parents were still eating dinner.

Most surprising, many residents seemed to be cheering. On the morning I arrived, thousands of demonstrators wearing white T-shirts and waving plastic national flags filled