It's Still a Military Coup in Honduras

We’ve watched, listened, and reported as diplomats have deluded themselves (and insist to others) that “diplomacy” alone can solve all problems, as coup defenders remain stuck in the Oligarch Diaspora’s “Chávez Derangement Syndrome” and cling to a fantastically false spin about the oxymoronic concept of a “legal coup,” and as some of their counterparts on the academic left got stuck fighting past wars with their own brand of “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” and one probably could have, sadly, predicted each of their formulaic reactions in advance.

For all the talk of “democracy” – both sides of the Honduras dispute claim that flag, but only the coup opponents have a clue as to what it means – I’ve heard very few voices out there that have, really, any devotion to authentic democracy when the going gets tough.

That’s as true of journalists and communicators as it is for everyone else. We've watched the corporate media correspondents slip into their old comfortable shoes of disinformation, while a certain sector of left media shrunk from the duty to combat such simulation but, rather, obsessed more narrowly on their sputtering spin that this was somehow “Obama’s coup.” (If it is not, then that would require more self-reflection of their own presumptions than their hurting brains care to shoulder: it has been seemingly easier for some to remain on automatic pilot, the facts and new geopolitical realities be damned.) Meanwhile, we’ve done and are doing what is in our character to do: Investigate, report and analyze the hard news, while exposing its simulation by the dominant corporate media. Others have done that very well, too: We’ve already praised the singular work of TeleSur, and also of the courageous Hondurans who have broken the information blockade from below, filming coup abuses and the massive protests against them on their cell phones and uploading important videos to YouTube. And we’ve cheered as many corporate media organizations have become dependent on those reports-from-below in their own coverage.

I’d like to add another media that deserves such recognition: Few have done the heavy lifting that Chiapas Indymedia has done, mainly in Spanish, to publish the communiqués, photos and videos that document the massive and organized nature of the Honduran grassroots movements with which it has worked and supported for years. (While the world mostly ignored Honduras in recent years, Chiapas Indymedia was shipping community radio transmitters and organizing communications workshops among Catrachos; that planting and cultivating bears significant fruit today in the information that does break out from behind the walls of censorship and simulation). Too often lost in the past two weeks of media coverage has been the documentation and distribution of the struggle from below in its own words.

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