Notes from the State Department protest yesterday

Having received false intelligence that some good friends from Honduras had arrived in DC, I dragged myself out of my up-all-night blogging stupor to bike across town to participant-observe the noon rally at the State Department. The first thing I noticed about the State Department: not bike friendly. Note to self: find DC Critical Mass.

I arrived right at noon, and immediately started worrying if the protesters were going to show up- mostly out of selfish horror of having to hang out at the government center. Not a person in sight but security guards and wanna-be-wonks (and a few real ones, I s'pose). For five long minutes I wandered around, and then saw a bunch of mostly disheveled white folk unraveling banners. I went over and double checked, worried they might be pro-coupers, but their signs dispelled that concern.

While folks were still gathering and figuring how best to hold their signs in the breeze, a large group of multi-culti teenage kids, awkwardly attired in business suits, the girls also in makeup and heels, came out of the building. As they came out, one girl jumped up & down in excitement on seeing the protesters, "Oh! I want my camera! This is my camera moment!" Although she sadly didn't have her camera on her, the protesters took shots of their captive audience, who in turn listened with interest to the SOAW folks and pored over their fliers [the below images don't demonstrate that interest, but I actually was impressed that they did seem to be listening]. They all had GYLC badges on. http://www.cylc.org/gylc/

A big white army-shaved cop came over and asked me (for some reason, maybe age?) if I was "in charge" here. I told him I didn't think anyone was in charge, but he could talk to me if he wanted. Of course, there were people who were more in "charge" than me- I had very little idea of what was going on right there & then. My little intervention to challenge his idea of a necessary hierarchy didn't last very long. I called over another guy who deftly dealt with questions of number of protesters, permit, etc. There was no permit (How could there be on such short notice? What a mockery of democracy) but the "in charge" guy said he expected under 15 people. What was funny is that there were already more than that there, and many more came, but his confidence, knowledge of the law and symbolic capital seemed to go a long way. The cop was satisfied, and he and his colleagues just hung out in formation on the sidewalk parallel to the protesters for the next hour.

A young GYLC woman walking by me (I kept on the outskirts, writing notes and taking pictures) asked in a Spanish accent, "What does "coup" mean?" "Coup d'etat," I said. "Golpe de estado." "¡Ah!" she said. "¡Hablas español!" It's a golpe de estado, she happily told her other Spanish friend. She apparently hadn't heard about it, but seemed excited. I was trying not to be cynical about the "Global Young Leaders." I was trying to believe that they weren't just thinking "Yay! I went to Washington and I even saw a real live protest!" but were actually paying attention.

About a half an hour into it, they started making speeches. The first I took note of was a Salvadoran refugee (I believe this was his label) who had been at the OAS action the previous day. He said (not exact quote): I joined the guerillas in El Salvador, the FMLN, not because I was a terrorist but because the military made a coup d'etat and that was the last time I believed in elections. I hope president Obama will do the right thing [I didn't catch what the right thing was, but the general talking point yesterday was that he should formally declare it a coup and withdraw aid, which he seems to have done today].

Then an older very blond-haired guy who had lived in Honduras in the 80s went up to talk about Negroponte. He said that it is not enough for the Obama admin to say Zelaya must return [which, by the way, they hadn't done]; according to U.S. law they must remove all the military. Actually, I have to admit a bit of confusion here. They did cut off military cooperation, but it's almost unthinkable that they'd remove the U.S. military there, with U.S. corporate interests as entrenched as they are, and I'm not sure if he meant cutting off aid or military presence.

Then someone from CISPES spoke. Philippe helped found that organization, and it's still pretty active in the Bay Area. I hope that at least out of this horrible repression we will see a resurgence of the kind of solidarity that existed then, and I do see some of that. Anyway, CISPES guy was calling out the U.S. ambassador to see what role he played in the coup. For reasons I can't divulge here, I'm predisposed to give Hugo Llorens a little bit of slack on that front. He's certainly no Negroponte, and I suspect he did not personally support the coup. That said, as the representative of the country that trained the golpistas as torturers and dictators, and that has actively worked against the formation of anything resembling democracy in Honduras for so many decades, he has much to account for. It would be a much bigger statement than any Obama's made yet to recall him.

A chant began. Reinstate Zel-A-ya. The mispronunciation bothered me, but I tried not be a snob about it.

The president of Friends of the Earth U.S. spoke. FOEI had pretty good turnout (or at least a bunch of signs) and have been supportive in general: http://www.foei.org/en/blog/foei-statement-on-honduras

One of the best speakers was an older woman from Dorothy Day House (http://dccatholicworker.wordpress.com/) who called on the crowd to look at the corporate connections. Too few people were saying this, and she was spot on. As my post about the OAS protest Tuesday should have made clear, it all comes down to money.

After the speakers, one of the organizers took the bullhorn and gave a long explanation of the meaning of the simple chant "¡Golpistas, no! ¡Democracia sí!"

The crowd awkwardly but enthusiastically began chanting and marching. Mario joked to me that it was part Spanish class, part protest, didn't I think? "The gringos like chanting in Spanish," I scribbled in my notebook. They really got into "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido." Brief intervention: my wry critique is anti-solidarity, and symbolically violent, but now that I've typed it in, I'm just gonna face that it's there. I admire the work all these folks were doing. No one has the whole story, and even if I did, it wouldn't exempt me from the responsibility to act. Quite the contrary.

Here's the problem, again: for a lot of the speakers it's about reinstating Mel. But it's quite clear that this is about much more than Mel. In fact, except for having provoked it by being kidnapped, Mel has relatively little to do with what is really a class war, ebbing and flowing [perhaps the wrong metaphor] for decades. Much of the vocal Central American left, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is not necessarily anti-authoritarian; just anti-right-wing-authoritarian. My friend jokes that, being the only one, he is the president of the Anarchist Party in Honduras. So the same former FMLN self-described guerrilla member who spoke earlier talked about how he didn't want to see his children have to fight a guerrilla war in Central America, and that it was the will of the people that they reinstall Zelaya immediately. But many of the people "spontaneously" flooding the streets of Tegucigalpa over the past week are not doing so in support of Zelaya but against the ongoing military-corporate repression of which this coup is just a particularly poignant example.

Mario asked me, chuckling, if I though he could get away with getting up on the big cement planters/anti-tank barriers to take pictures of the crowd without getting in trouble from all the cops (or secret service or whatever they were- I need to get my DC law enforcement straight). A bunch of crewcuts walked by, amused at the hippies.

I took a few shots of the crowd:

...but I wanted that overhead shot. I went up to the big African American cop closest to me and asked if I could take a picture from the barrier (doing his work for him). He laughed, "I don't know why you asked me. I'm not gonna go over there and tackle you, if that's what you're asking." I got up and took a picture:

...but then did see him walking toward me. I had my shot and decided against taking another, so I hopped down and went to thank him. "I had to come over so it looked like I was gonna tell you to get down," he explained.

The march closed up with a brief speech by Claudia from the Share Foundation (http://www.share-elsalvador.org/).

Those Salvadorans are organized. My new landlord and his wife, both Salvadoran, were at the protest at the embassy on Monday. I can't believe I'm actually glad to have a landlord. After she spoke, one of the organizers told everyone to get out their phones right then and call the White House (202-456-1111) and State Department (202 647-4000) and demand the cutoff of all U.S. Aid, but just as everyone had their phones out, the guerrilla ran up with his guitar shouting wait! wait! one more thing! and played a rousing bilingual rendition of We Shall Overcome.