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<h1><font size=4><b>Toppling a Coup, Part I: Dilemmas for the Honduras
Regime</b></font></h1><font size=3>Posted by
<a href="http://narcosphere.narconews.com/users/al-giordano">Al
Giordano</a> - August 7, 2009 at 9:56 am <br><br>
By Al Giordano<br>
<a href="http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/toppling-coup-part-i-dilemmas-honduras-regime" eudora="autourl">
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/toppling-coup-part-i-dilemmas-honduras-regime<br>
<br>
<br>
</a>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.<br><br>
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 <i>Bringing Down a Dictator</i> (you can
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf4ll2EkTJs">watch it via YouTube
in six parts beginning here</a>) 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
One of the questions was:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Q. How can we cause a headache for the dictatorship?<br><br>
</dl>Marovich replied:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>That is a very good question because now we’re getting down to the
dynamics of popular resistance.<br><br>
<dd>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?<br><br>
<dd>What matters now is who is going to make the next move.<br><br>
<dd>If the regime makes the next move, you have to react.<br><br>
<dd>If you make the first move, then they have to react.<br><br>
<dd>The whole game is to calculate the next steps, to put the adversary
in a position where he can’t react well.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>This is what we called a “Dilemma Action.”<br><br>
<dd>Dilemma actions are actions that put the opponent in a
dilemma.<br><br>
<dd>Let me tell you a Serbian folk tale. The story is called The Dark
Realm, and it goes like this:<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.”<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>So what we wanted to have is a dilemma action in which the opponent
is going to regret whatever he does.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>As the saying goes, never interrupt your opponent when he’s making
mistakes.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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
<a href="http://www.tortillaconsal.com/honduras/radio_progreso_boletin34.pdf">
the newsletter of Radio Progreso</a>:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.”<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Sometimes a dilemma action can turn the enemy’s initiative against it to
put the regime on the defensive.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.radioglobohonduras.com/">“Escuchanos Aquí”</a> - 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Another example: Yesterday, the Air Traffic Controllers 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.)<br><br>
The air traffic 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
</i>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</i>. 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The coup regime - support for it or grudging acceptance of it - is built
on an illusion, one that claims it is “in control.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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….<br><br>
<br><br>
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