The now ironic special issue of La Tribuna, Saturday October 15, 2005:

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Festival dry cleaners, always quick to the draw, informs the public that "We can't get the [oil] stain out of the Gulf, but we can get it out of your clothes!"

The next day, going to Cafe Paradiso, I had a look at the beautiful overgrown house right across the street. My friend told me that shut-ins lived there, an old couple (not surprising given the state of repair). Sometimes, she told me, they would come to the gate, hand a passerby 10 lempiras and ask them to buy some juice, but they never went outside the gates.

On July 4th, I missed the party at Zamorano. Damn. More than any other year, I would have liked to have been there. Instead, I was in the house, hooked into my various electronic devices but nonetheless failing to catch up on my work (as you can see, since I'm writing this almost 10 days-scratch that, 2 weeks- later...)

The speakers started blasting static out of nowhere. Turned out the speaker ants had gotten into them again. Apparently they love the glue; my friends have lost numerous electronic devices to them...

On the 5th, I was poaching the wireless in the UNAH library when I got a call. Was I going to show up to give the talk that had been scheduled at CPTRT on sexuality in resistance? In half hour? Ohhhh...scheduling snafu, I'd thought it had been cancelled...but I made it in any case, hooray for cheap taxis. A number of friends (new and old) showed up, and we had a fantastic discussion about the non-profit industrial complex and the need for greater militancy within queer groups and the greater need for sexuality to be explicitly incorporated as a central element of Resistance.

On the way over, I noticed this odd pairing of billboards inside the highly securitized grounds of the "safe, bicultural and disciplined" American School. One, the creepy patriotic eagle, and two, coup financier Camilo Atala's Ficohsa insurance, advertising friendship/amistad. "The only way to have a friend is to be one" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

FICOHSA is pretty much everywhere, and appeared overnight some years ago, almost as if it were funded by drug money. I posted earlier a picture of the headquarters with a soccer jersey the size of the building. Here's one of the lit billboards that dominate Tegucigalpa, illuminating the sky in front of the Picacho:

And a friend's visa. A longtime business of the Honduran Arab elite has been sponsoring soccer teams and thus fomenting rabid patriotism (el opio de las masas). A lot of money gets laundered along with all those football jerseys.

One disappointment (for me, not for those who knew him from the start) was Polache's idiotic nationalist song in honor of the World Cup team. Not gonna link to it- it doesn't deserve more publicity than I've already given it here.

I got a ride back to the university to attend the event in honor of Isy Obed (we've been spelling his name wrong all year) with a couple people who'd attended my talk. From the front passenger seat, I pointed to the stuffed gorilla, laughing. The young man driving smiled at me and said "Un goriletti. Lo puedes golpear si quieres," and proceeded to golpearlo. I took this shot while the Goriletti was recovering from the blow:

The next morning, more death porn in the news A teacher killed in El Pedregal:

I noticed the edificio rojo had been repainted, twice, since a month ago. June 6th:

July 6th:

I later went to UNITEC with a friend, Mario, who teaches there. He fiddled with his credit card, trying to get into the parking lot, swiping it this way and that, telling the guards it doesn't work. They came by and said no, you have to swipe it on the side with the bar code (not the stripe). I ask "¿te cobran por entrar?"—"They charge you to enter?" "No te cobran es gratis, sólo es por seguridad es que had habido muchos secuestros acá"—"They don't charge you, it's free. It's just for security since there have been so many kidnappings here." He later noted that the commute have become much much longer since that policy had been implemented. You could wait over an hour to get in when there was a line.

Inside I went to a training for new professors. Marlon Breve, former minister of education with Zelaya and now, among other things, person in charge of training new faculty at the UNITEC, spoke for a good hour in a freezingly air-conditioned "smart" classroom. Felt a bit like AUC, so much wealth concentrated in such a militarized, segregated environment, so much poverty surrounding it. Breve was nice and quite welcoming.

UNITEC is part of the Lariot Group, he told the attendees. But they shouldn't worry that the already private university (the one trying to open a five-year MD training program and force the vastly less expensive and higher quality medical school program at the national university UNAH to shut down) would become commercialized. El Lariot Group adquirió una marca, UNITEC, y esa marca no va a dejar que se comercialice. The Lariot Group acquired a brand, UNITEC, and that brand will not allow itself to become commercialized.

Breve lay out UNITEC's goals (imagine three columns, I can't be bothered to html them):

RETOS
Eficiencia Calidad Crecimiento
Tecnología Emprendedurismo Internalización
Ejes Trasversales Institucionales

Speaking of UNITEC's technology strategy, Marlon quoted "Think Globally, Act Locally" and a bit later said something positive about UNITEC's promotion of the neoliberal anti-worker labor control workplace restructuring ERP model in its business school (ERP doesn't get translated, apparently).

Mario told me, to my suprise, that a good number of faculty members at that school identified with the resistance. Despite its elite status, they're paid a pittance. And he had had his students carry out studies about political attitudes, and it turned out a majority of students defined the coup as a coup. That elite private university, turned out, wasn't as completely golpista as its administration wanted it to be. It certainly wasn't as bad as the Cardemal's Catholic University, he said, where he had friends who taught (and a young friend of mine was expelled for belonging to the resistance). There, it was prohibited to wear red shirts after the coup. Really.

Mario explained to me a detail you probably already knew, but I'm still putting the pieces of the puzzle together: Ana Pineda, (undeclared?) golpista and Lobo's special human rights minister (part of the whitewashing strategy to counteract international condemnation of his continuing human rights violations), was previously the executive director of the Fundación Democracia Sin Fronteras (Democracy Without Borders), founded by Bob White's Center for International Policy...the FDSF is not identified in any way with the opposition to the military coup d'etat. Before that, Pineda had been, among other things, Ramon Custodio's right hand. They had some sort of falling out some years ago.

Later that night, Mario squinted at the menu. He couldn't see out of his right eye these days, he told me. It happened on January 27th, just after Mel's plane took off. He just thought his vision was going and was going to just get some glasses, but his wife urged him to get another opinion. He went to a specialist, who explained to him that there was some sort of lubricating sack behind the eyeball, and when there is a prolonged period of stress and adrenaline excess, and when suddenly that relaxes, the sack can explode, causing temporary blindness or extreme loss of vision in the eye. Because his biological reaction to the stress was so strong (not to mention symbolic), the eye doctor sent Mario to a psychiatrist. He didn't want to go, he would have done anything to avoid it—only crazy people go to psychiatrists, he said. But then he spoke with a friend who was a shrink, and he reassured him that only a tiny minority of his patients were really crazy. The rest were just sad, or stressed out like him.

The next day, I went with a young friend to his old job, so he could help me buy some cheap used electronics. While we waited in the lobby for one of his friends to come out, another old work friend of his came by. She was a pretty young woman, maybe 6 months pregnant. I don't know if he was surprised at this or not—he hadn't seen her in a while—but he immediately and affectionately reached out his hand and rubbed her belly the whole time they spoke. I was struck at how different the pregnant lady etiquette is here. I'm quite sure my habitus would direct me to slap a male friend in the face, should he touch my stomach (in whatever state) without asking me first. But she didn't seem to mind at all. Leaving, he was surprised at my surprise. Why wouldn't someone touch a pregnant friend's belly? It's a shame, though, he added. She had just had lipo done, and her boobs too—no, wait, that was another friend from his former job—but anyway, she had been really pretty.

Next day, more death porn:

An ironic choice for Tropigas mascot (perhaps more appropriate for neighboring Televicentro), although certainly it came before the post-coup significance of gorillas...

And a message for Ferrari also outside Televicentro:

Tiempo's front page: Woman dressed as man found dead

My favorite Honduran word, for the rich, weighty, pained and pointed significance:

And outside Maduro's house, with its high barbed wire fences...

...a partially erased message: "the government fucks you, so fuck it," over a more erased message to Maduro directly.

The next morning, I called a number that my friend, I'll just call him Josef, kindly dug up for me...or rather, re-acquired, at the funeral of Luis Morel, a tremendously loved militant from way back and founder of the popular bloque. Everyone who was anyone in the Frente was there. I had wanted to go myself, but felt it somehow inappropriate (I still retain my Puritan funeral habitus, after decades of anthropological study, what can you do?) and plus, was dead tired. In retrospect, of course, I should have gone. It's doubtful anyone would have minded- rather, they would have welcomed me with the idea that I would write about him. And the reports-back from friends in the frente were fascinating. Cesar Ham showed up with bodyguards and no one would speak to him. Emo, the well-known and rather unstable Indian resistance member (as in, from India) was shouting inappropriately by the casket about the people united will never be divided, and calling for some sort of uprising. On a further side note, I had seen Emo, with his wild beard and eyes and over-the-top revolutionary rhetoric, being interviewed outside the concert at the UPNFM by a golpista TV station on the day of the anniversary. I had said to Javier, who I was walking with, that that was a strategy to discredit the resistance—pick the guy who most completely fulfills their stereotype of the raving unwashed masses, encourage him to ramble at full capacity, and feature him as the representative. Javier looked nervous, and I had obviously spoken too loud, as another man said to me "he's a member of the resistance and he has just as much of a right to speak as anyone else." Duly chastised, I reflected on how my own embodiment of prejudices had led me to take that symbolically violent position, and was afraid—would I have taken such a stance against media portrayals of the black block (yes, a decade ago) and, by extension—whether I admit it to myself or not—their actions? But I'm always thinking strategy, and about how a movement can succeed, whatever success means, when it embraces loose cannons.

In any case, the report-back highlighted not media coverage, but proper norms of behavior at a high-level resistance funeral, and both Ham and Emo breached them, according to my emic friends. But much else was also going on, including (as mentioned before this long side-track), Josef's acquisition for me of a militant nurse phone number. I called nurse Leda Sanchez, and was kindly given an appointment for that afternoon.

In the meantime I had to go off to meet some young scholars at the MUA café, Café 1331. They had sent me the summary of the results from the two surveys they administered at the marches on Mayday and the June 28th anniversary. From the results, I had arrived at certain critiques that they explained away quite well with the actual surveys and by explaining the actual processes by which they arrived at the sterile data. Their observations, and recounting of their internal debates on processing the raw data, were fascinating, and I begged them to break away from the marketing model of statistical presentation and focus on what they'd edited out instead...the never-ending anthropologist's struggle for meaning. For example, on the question "What political ideology do you prefer" (I had imagined the question to not be open-ended as such, based on the results) the answers were basically left, right, and center. It turned out that this had been a particularly difficult question, as few people understood what was being asked, and the questioners had had to explain it, but trying hard not to influence the respondee (always with the idea of optimal "scientific" objectivity- I had a friendly chat with them about that too). I told them that the follow-up question, e.g., "what do you mean by left?"; "what do you mean by center"; "what do you mean by 'refoundation'?" or my favorite, "what do you mean by democracy?" was way more interesting than the first, and that they should recognize as well that they're doing organizing work (like it or not) and asking people to define democracy is one of the most important tasks they can contribute to that in this forum.

We spoke again of our shared concerns about intolerance within the FNRP of diverse opinions, and the tendency to label anyone who disagreed a golpista. It's a problem of boundaries; I am certainly inclined to agree that certain actors who say they are opposed to the coup have actually firmly supported it—e.g., UD leaders participating in the elections with the promise of high posts in Lobo's government and giving the State Department an excuse to claim full participation of the Left, thus legitimating the continuity of the coup. However, the labeling of other actors who have been criticized and/or ostracized for taking unpopular stances, like Armando Sarmiento—who committed the apparently mortal sin of speaking with the whitewashing truth commission, after having been one of the most steadfast, eloquent and effective opponents of the coup since the moment he drove to the Toncontin runway to try to block the plane carrying Zelaya from taking off—as golpista is, in my mind, stupid. There is a lot of talk of strength in diversity and respect for different opinions, but in practice, we agreed that this was a particular weakness of the Frente. My young friends told me of a development they were particularly worried about: the announcement of the imminent formation of a tribunal de honor, which would monitor different groups within the FNRP, and if those groups strayed from the party line, expel them. I hope this is an exaggeration...

They gave me a ride to the Colegio de Enfermeras Profesionales:

Turned out Leda Sanchez was the president of the organization, having won as part of a slate of candidates who ran on an opposition, resistance platform, against the golpista reactionary old guard. The professional nurses have had the reputation of being much more conservative and elitist than the auxiliary nurses, largely due to their relative class position. But the recent elections in this professional (not sindical) organization, in which the old guard campaigned against the opposition slate solely on the basis of the latter being resistance (confident in the historical right-wing voting patterns of the association's members), saw the highest turnout of any elections in the organization's history (around 50%; 1,000 out of 2,000 members voted, while in other elections only 200-300 nurses had voted), and the resistance platform won with over 75% (even after 60 of their votes were anulled).

Their discourse was solid patient care. Said Leda: "nos metimos a esto por la parte humanitaria mas que todo no por la parte politica"—"we got involved in all this more for the humanitarian than political reasons." In an audio-recorded conversation with Leda and 4 other members of the board of directors that lasted two hours (gonna take a while to transcribe that one...), they described their efforts to block police torture of protestors; efforts to provide aid at the Nicaraguan border last July when Zelaya symbolically crossed over; their solidarity work in the hospital together with certain resistance doctors, nurses and auxiliary nurses; their own experiences of going on marches—some even in uniform, prohibited by the Colegio's then-golpista leadership; and more.

A few of the quotes I managed to type out during the interview:

"Tambien fuimos sometidos a mucho hostigamiento que los dejaramos morir que no nos preocuparamos por ellos"—"We were ourselves subjected to threats, that we should let [the patients who came in beat up by the police and military] die, that we shouldn't worry about them."

"Enfermería es una entrega, ya no tenemos miedo"—"Nursing is a calling, we no longer are afraid." -- This was in relation to a story about how that morning, just outside the office, a man had been beating up a woman on the street. They had gone outside, yelled at him and protected her. "We are not afraid."

Leda: "They told me that at Pedro Magdiel's burial they heard someone shout the word 'ALERTA'—infiltrators from the DNIC had been caught. I was there more as a photographer than a nurse. I went over and told [the enraged funeral attendees] to not hurt them, because they wanted to beat them up. The agents told me, 'if you leave us they will kill us.' Imagine- I did this for them. We formed a circle around them, I got beaten up myself for protecting them."

When they were running in the Colegio elections, they said, the other side denigrated them because they were resistance, and with racist attacks because there were three black women, 2 of them Garifunas, on the slate, "but they didn't realize that actually helped us."

I offered any sort of support I could provide, and they asked me to give a training (capacitación) on unionization of professional nurses before I left. They were very excited about bringing their militancy to the next level. One of the nurses told me, "Como enfermeras no tenemos todo lo que a nosotros nos pertenece. Nosotros estamos desprotegidos porque tenemos en la cabeza que nos pertenecemos a un grupo burgues."—"As nurses we don't have all that we should have. We are unprotected because we have the mistaken idea that we pertain to a bourgeois group stuck in our heads."

One nurse—one of the most militant, who had defied the Colegio's previous leadership by marching with the resistance in uniform, asked me if I could help them find jobs. Since there weren't enough available...I explained that that didn't fit too well within the paradigm. Hondurans have a need for more nurses, right? Then, instead of giving into the individualizing neoliberal model, nurses should draw on their symbolic capital to fight for well-paid jobs to be made available here in Honduras. She seemed to agree enthusiastically. Of course it's hard to tell when I'm playing the multiple roles of ethnographer, professor, would-be union organizer, and (presumably) fabulously powerful gringa, why people agree with my arguments. Just as my students are more likely to accept my arguments because of the tyranny of grades, the power dynamic between me and my Honduran friends and interlocutors always leaves me wondering whether people who say they agree with me really do, and if they do, whether I persuaded them with my logical prowess or with my class position or habitus. And why my desire to create a Cartesian separation (as if the performance of an argument could be so neatly segregated)? I guess because I want to know it will be reproduced in my absence...and then, damnit, the injerencia question...

The next day, outside the CPTRT, a graffiti that thought outside the box:
Vegetarianism: Don't eat animals

...and more of the new old standards:
Billy Joya son of a bitch your hours are counted (JPM)

I then went to a friend's house up in Las Palmas, a neighborhood that people in La Kennedy are afraid of. It was beautiful. Winding dirt roads, houses crowded together in all different colors, vendors selling fruit, everyone hanging out in the doorways of their houses, a gorgeous panoramic view of the mountains around the city. I met her family inside. They were surprised she'd brought me up there, apologizing for how humilde the house was (it was small, but well-kept and, I thought, lovely). Such apologies, usually meant as a compliment (however tergiversado) about my openness in contrast to my expected superiority compex, always make me squirm. Still, it was fun to meet them. We looked through photo albums and played around with a young niece. Because she was negra—so they said—it was the big joke in the context of the South African World Cup to ask her where she was from. "¿De dónde sos?" they asked her. "De Africa" she'd respond, to their amusement. Since they'd convinced her she was from Africa, it was fitting that Shakira's Waka Waka was her favorite song (ugh).

While waiting for my friend to get a haircut at the local peluquería, I took some pictures of the La Tribuna sitting around. Businessmen give the "OK" to the new "jobmania"—in reference to the new law weakening labor protections and encouraging part-time employments without benefits with the unconvincing rhetoric that more jobs will result, thus ameliorating economic woes caused by the same neoliberal model of which this restructuring is part and parcel. Other headlines: "Despite the ALERT, they go on strike" attacking health sector workers going on strike for better patient conditions despite the president's "national emergency" declaration regarding dengue, made on the heels of his long vacation ignoring the same in South Africa, on the public dime. Also, "Shouts and disorder greet the approval of the new law: 'We realize that some people are interested in fomenting anarchy' -JOH [Juan Orlando Hernández, president of the Congress]." The article describes a group of representatives of various organizations of the "so-called 'resistance'" caused disorder outside the Congress.

A page of death porn:
Shootout in El Calán leaves three men dead
Man shot dead near the Anthropology Museum had been accused of robbery [thus, clearly, meriting his death]
Minor killed by multiple gunshots

And the narco golpista backed fanny lu (in small letters, it's cuter that way!) concert at the "Plaza la Democracia" outside the presidential residence. It had been announced all over town, sponsored by FICOHSA, La Tribuna and the embassy of Colombia (among others).

We went back to Centro Comercial los Castaños where I met with Juan Almendares to talk about several issues I'd been looking forward to discussing with him. Like Luther Castillo when I visited him a week later, Dr. Juan was something of a celebrity figure, people stopping every few minutes to shake his hand, to greet him. And he reciprocated the attention in a way that seemed to make everyone feel just as special, right back. I asked if he wanted something at the café, and he first asked for water, but when he realized it was only available in bottles he changed his mind and asked for an herbal tea instead. Which they served me in a styrofoam cup...

A very old man came by and they hugged, delighted to run into each other. He sat down with us, and we spoke of a variety of different environmental/social disasters, in particular the gulf spill, the golbal dependence on petroleum, and Obama's enthusiatic capitulation to big oil, which didn't surprise anyone at the table. The subject of the national emergency declared over dengue came up. "Eso es producto de la destrucción ambiental del país," ("that is the result of environmental destruction in the country") said the old man, explaining the increase in vector mosquitos: "¡Ya no hay sapos!"—"There are no more toads!" Apparently a few days later on the radio Dr. Juan made the rather incredible claim that deforestation was responsible for dengue because all the forest animals had died off, forcing the mosquitos to come to human-inhabited areas for fresh blood. This provoked a heated argument among my hosts, who took differing positions on his claim.

That night I had dinner with friends and arrived late to hang out with Josef. I spoke with him about the big assembly planned in Tocoa for the following couple days. Since Sunday was a closed meeting, I asked how the delegates had been chosen, and he told me by each central committee regionally. But what about the regions where there wasn't agreement about who was in charge? That was a problem- some regions had two separate delegations, one from the Bloque Popular and another from the Liberal Party, and he didn't know how they would decide which to let in. The Liberal-BP divide was going to be a problem, wasn't it, I asked, given the unreconcilable ideological gap around bipartidismo? To my surprise, the most hard-line communist I know in Honduras responded dismissively. "This is politics," he responded. "In politics, you have to be willing to cede anything."

The following evening I went to a lovely dinner at my friend the poet's house. I had given up on finding her, but ran into her at a restaurant and made plans. As with so many friends on this visit, I did not find time to have the depth of conversation I would have liked to with her, but had a great time nonetheless. The poet told a story about how she had been at the movie theater bathroom with her daughter, when everyone started clearing out all of a sudden, shouting golpista, golpista. Myrna Castro had come in to pee. The poet shouted to her daughter to hurry up, get out of the bathroom, but her daughter took her sweet time. When she finally emerged, my friend the poet reprimanded her: "Why didn't you come out!? She's a gran golpista!" "Mamá" she shouted, "¡me hubieras dicho!"

Then another guest, a very entertaining young man who everyone had thought would be a golpista but who turned out full resistance, told a similar story. He had been going into the Paiz supermarket and saw Armida López Contreras, quickly said ¡golpista! and looked away as if he had done nothing. He then lost sight of her and went searching all over the supermarket to find her. Failing in his quest, he went instead to the unattended store intercom and announced, "A la señora golpista, que se salga del establicimiento"—"We ask that the señora golpista leave the establishment immediately."

Yet a third guest, another entertaining man about my age with a teenage daughter with a revolutionary poodle, told another story. He had a cousin who was a retired colonel who had told him that they only way to solve Honduras's problem was like they did in El Salvador. Killing 80,000 people. He and the poet laughed at the horror of the idea, and she said "why kill 80,000 poor people when all you really have to do is kill 1,000 rich people?"