I stayed for a few days in Trujillo, trying to process some of the things I'd been seeing over the previous two months, and rest before my last few intensive days in Honduras and returning back to the States. I found one of those places that backpackers might look for online—not too expensive, out of town and pretty remote, right on the beach, all the right key "green" phrases, good directions. And it was beautiful...

...but I really should have stayed in town. I had forgotten about the expats. I lived for two years in Cairo as an expat, and was horrified to see how within weeks of each new batch of middle-class United Statesians' arrival, they had already begun to complain about the help. I tell you, there is nothing more unbearable for me than going to parties with unremarkable gringos drinking too much alcohol (to spite the Muslim abstainers all around them) and telling stories of how their maid persistently neglects to dust the top of the fridge, or how they set clever traps to outsmart her (leaving precise amounts of cash out, etc.), or comparing maids by religion, ethnicity or gender. It's George Orwell's lower-upper-middle class, people who go to the colonies so that they can "play at being a gentleman." Oh, and we mustn't forget U.S. expats' other favorite topic in Egypt: sexual harassment. It was very much a lynching South narrative; the nerve of them, the savage brutes, how dare they lust after our women. Or after their women, for that matter. I'm not saying there wasn't harassment (though I never felt it), just that the obsession with it was disproportionate and served other purposes.

You may think I'm digressing here, but actually this is all in the service of explaining the scene at the hotel/hostel. No one spoke Spanish well. The food was expensive and atrocious, since it was a mix of gringos and Europeans in the kitchen trading labor for housing. And despite the laid back, hippie atmosphere, the politics were more golpista than those of any Hondurans I'd come across so far. I had made the mistake of replying fully who I was and what I was doing in Honduras. It's not that I ever hide my identity, but at this point I had embraced the old bourgeois colonialist fantasy in which the anthropologist removes herself from the field to reflect upon it. Pure idiocy. Of course, I was not quite as naive as I'm making myself sound here; I went to the place with a well-developed sense of irony. But not enough of one to recognize my hosts and fellow guests as subjects, interlocutors, and important pieces of this puzzle, whom I should approach as such.

The weathered old ladies from an outlying European nation who ran the place smoked and drank from dawn until dusk. I asked one of them how the coup had affected business. She complained that although everything had been just fine, really—there were very few problems at all—all the embassies issuing their warnings had had a bad effect on business over the previous year; things were only now starting to pick up. I was surprised. I had driven past the Bajo Aguán region, past the town of Guadalupe Carney on the way to the location...we were in one of the most violent, militarized regions of the country where the drug traffickers and/or large agribusiness owners who had violently usurped a vast majority of the land ruled with an iron fist. Those same people had both been involved in the planning, financing and execution of the coup, and have benefited massively from it. They have tortured and assassinated numerous resistance members who have dared to reclaimed their stolen lands, and violently attacked radio stations and hospitals (like Luther's) that have defied their logic. They have been responsible for the amassing, at different points, of thousands upon thousands of military and paramilitary soldiers (many of the latter probably from Colombia), of private security forces, of vast amounts of weaponry. Otto Reich has helped with this.

So I asked again. Really? Totally safe? Even with the siege at Bajo Aguán? With all the militarization of this region? She responded that if you're going to be killing people, then something like that has to be expected. It was the fully developed La Prensa narrative of the dangerous drug-running campesinos stealing the land of the patrón, the same patrón (Miguel Facussé) who's acquired half of Honduras through his own hard work.

She was angry at MUCA ("those people") for harming productivity, hence progress, in Honduras, and creating more poverty. "All they achieved was to burn the plantation and put production behind and that means people lose their jobs," she said, angrily. "It's always the poor people who suffer the most. These people say they're helping the poor people but they're just hurting them by taking away their jobs, and jobs are hard to come by here." Dumbstruck, and not wanting to make an enemy of her, I nodded, and marveled at the completely empirical evidence-free closed logical circle that this woman, who appeared to think she was helping Hondurans by bringing enterprise where there had been none (similar to the medical brigade Luther had told me about a couple days earlier, "instilling values" in Hondurans) had managed to create. Ex-pats' ideological bubbles are even more impervious than local oligarchs to critical thought (some of the most rabidly golpista blogs are written by gringos living in Honduras); but that's thanks to the bubble they already live in, I suppose.

But for a point of comparison, let me show you part of the translated transcript (incomplete, because it's my typed notes- I didn't want to waste my audio recorder batteries on it) of an interview I did with a late 20s/early 30s Honduran guy who was a regular at the place. There seemed to be a steady stream of local English-speaking guys hoping to pick up the prototypical loose gringa. While he certainly wasn't hitting on me, he let me know repeatedly that, since I was interested in studying the effects of the coup, I had to interview him. He, perhaps he alone, could Explain things to me. Despite my patent disinterest in the interview and the fact that it was past midnight on a day I was scheduled to take a 4am bus back to Tegucigalpa, he insisted. So I dragged out my computer, listened, and typed.

Okay. There are 3 sectors, 2 of them extremist: Resistance and golpistas, and the people who are not allowing their lives to be taken over by all this. I like the middle (el centro).

Both of those groups were extremists. The resistance defended Zelaya to the death. Numerous people died for Zelaya. First, let's define the resistance. Supporters of Zelaya, regardless of what he said they would follow him. If he said the sky was yellow, they would say the sky was yellow. Zelaya was a good president for the first two years. [but all politicians are liars and corrupt...] My father is a politician, and he's a liar and corrupt (mi papa es politico y es mentiroso y ambicioso).

I am neutral. I voted for Elvin Santos, for the mayor I voted for Aguilar. I voted for my father for diputado, from the National Party.

Here people are sick. They're either Nationalists or Liberals. Very few people listen to candidates' platforms. These last elections were very different from other years; they were very loaded. In Honduras, for me, the best president has been Carlos Flores because when Mitch came Honduras was seriously affected by it and he brought in a lot of foreign aid.

[Wow. I'd never heard anyone characterize the tragic post-Mitch aid fiasco as a success. Not even close allies of Flores. Never. I mean, it was horrifying, calamitous, corrupt, disaster capitalism at its lowest. Wow.]

I am a teacher, and I feel firsthand the problems of the country. When Zelaya started out, the first thing he did was to increase the minimun wage of the workers.

[I broke in: but not even to the government-established amount necessary to cover survival (canasta básica)]

Sure, but then what happens? The owners of factories, when they mandated the increase in minimum wage had to fire their workers because Hondurans aren't good workers, they're really lazy. There's a clock that marks your hours but that doesn't mean you're working. So what did the businessmen do? They kept their good workers and fired the irresponsible ones, that's not the businessmen's fault. I'm a supervisor, and I look for teachers who want to work under my command.

My father is a cattle rancher. He has to pay workers, and their salary increases, but if he finds out that a certain worker is always requesting breaks or days off for whatever reason, right?, because here in Honduras people have excuses for anything. If you have a worker who comes to work even though they're sick, you say, wow, this one really cares about his work. So if my father sees someone [come to work sick], he says to him "Now, why don't you go home and rest instead."

In Honduras lots of things fail: the hospital system, healthcare, education...why? The UN, right?, always has an index for those things. The problem is that the father says "Don't go to classes today, go out and sell tortillas because your mother is sick." Who's responsible for that? It's a lack of education. If you are a responsible father, you want your kids to get a good education.

Here there is a macho system in which only the women have to work. The majority of men, what do they do? They drink out of control, right? [my interlocutor seemed to experience no sense of irony from the fact that at this point, he reeked of alcohol] Here, there are teachers who arrive drunk to work. How the hell can they give the children a good education that way?

Micheletti was different from Zelaya because he tried to impose a relative peace, that's all he tried to do.

What Zelaya didn't understand was that if you have worked all your life to be able to work your land, but if your excess capital makes it possible for you to work only half of your land, under your name, but keeping the rest...it's true, right?, that there are lands that aren't productive. But if you have poured your sweat into this land, it's what you want for the future. Zelaya gave incentives to people so that they would try to become owners of those lands. [note: the you he's referring to here is large landowners; the people are the people trying to retrieve their stolen subsistence farming plots]

Jaime Rosenthal bought the land from the Tacamiches. [note- these are a group of people who have been multiply displaced, first from the original Tacamiche in Lima Vieja, from which they were violently ousted by the Honduran military on behalf of the Tela Railroad Company, a subsidiary of Chiquita, in 1995 on land part of which is now a golf course in an extension of the Zona Americana there] He has all the land from Saba to Quebrada de Arena. Rosenthal bought those lands at a fair price.

Facussé paid a relatively high amount to those people for their lands...you know how it is, the land is worth 20 thousand but if people are desperate you only offer 10. Facussé bought those lands...but then they went and took them back, Zelaya promised they could. Zelaya's plan was that the workers would rob the lands that they had already sold and then they would pay a portion of their profits (tarifa de producción) to Zelaya's government.

Zelaya said that if the land wasn't being farmed, they had the right to farm it. They wanted to sell, and buy the lands with the money they earned from sales. But you can't do that; we have a saying here: "Saludar con sombrero ajeno" ("Greet someone with somebody else's hat"), which refers to appropriating someone else's work.

From the moment that they [Facussé et al] saw that they were stealing their money, their work, they said, what's up?, we need to do something about this—we need to remove these people from power, and on that point they're very correct when they say that it was the powers that be [who carried out the coup] but why? Because Zelaya convinced people to steal. I'm not going to work my whole life for something just to see them come and steal it from me.

["So what did Micheletti do?"]

With Micheletti's government, they took the lands away from the people who had stolen them...people had been going on the lands, saying "this is mine."

Some people occupied my father's land in that way, and so my father, what did he do?, He went where they were and said "Look, this land is mine. I worked for it. If you want I can help you with things, but I can't give you my land for free."

We are people, we are human, we have to talk.

In Micheletti's government, with the curfews, there were two possible interpretations. It totally fucked with my partying. When I went anywhere I had two options: I could say "these sons of bitches why are they fucking with me?" or I could say "they are here for my security."

I have had friends for my whole life and that friendship depends on a thing called respect...If you are a cultured person (persona educada) you won't set a car on fire or spray graffiti on the walls, that is a crime.

There was also the appropriate Peace March (la dichosa marcha de la paz), those marches were peaceful.

In our constitution there are things called artículos petrios [articles set in stone], and once you put a law in the constitution...[he stumbled a bit when I pointed out that the artículos petrios had already been changed various times by others, but since I was engaged I didn't write down his exact comments].

I'm a neutral person. I'm not with the golpistas or the resistance. You know that a coup d'etat means the army takes power, but what happened was constitutional, so the so-called coup wasn't really a coup. It was a forced succession (sucesión forzada). You can't be telling people to do shit that's against the law [here he's referring again to Zelaya's support for agrarian reform]. There are such things as morals, you understand me? You can't kill people.

[But who got killed?]

The workers, the foremen, they [peasants reclaiming their lands] killed family members and everything...

My friend's father has lands, that's where the Tacamiches are. I don't know where they're from or anything. But they came with weapons and wanted to kill my friend's father, because if the owner isn't around they can take his lands. The coup was lived here very differently from how it was lived in Tegucigalpa—we do have to call it a coup, after all. There it was all politics. Here it was violence.

There were a number of different journalists and they asked my dad, and he said "I just want what's best for this place." And Adan Funes, he's done so much for this town, but from the moment he got close to Manuel Zelaya [ominous elipses...]. Pepe Lobo won because of the whole Mel Zelaya thing, because the majority of the Liberals didn't vote, and there were some who voted for the UD.

Zelaya bought Harleys and super expensive horses and everyone started to say "what the hell?" ("qué oooondas?")

...and then I finally managed to wrap it up. It was pretty interesting, after all, although I feel a bit nervous putting it out there with so little analysis. But part of my point here is, as confused as his arguments were, they had some nuance. He at least realized he had to make a nod to the social problems that led people to take the actions he defined as immoral for which they were, again according to him, justifiably sanctioned. Not so with the expats- just cut and dry.

Earlier that day, I'd gotten into a conversation with one of the young women from the States working behind the bar. This woman had just finished an undergraduate science degree in California and was planning to go to med school, taking time off for a Central American adventure. She'd been living with her boyfriend at the place for well over a month, and was regularly volunteering at the local hospital in Trujillo, going from school to school vaccinating the kids. I asked what they were vaccinating against and she told me H1N1. Now I'm no doctor (or, well, anyway), but something struck me as odd about that.

"H1N1?" I asked. "Really?"

She explained that the healthcare workers she was assisting wanted to be prepared when it came—not if—and they didn't want it to become an epidemic. I asked her to think about it, though. Who was profiting from this? She said it was quite expensive, around 50 US dollars a pop, and she thought it was paid for with US money (USAID, maybe, she said). Doesn't that seem a little curious, I asked, almost as if it's a drug company racket, since H1N1 appeared over a year ago and really didn't amount to much of anything, and surely the virus has mutated by now. She fumbled a bit, saying, yes, it does seem like it's been around a while, but since it started in Mexico and all, and...well...

I actually rather enjoyed the 10-hour bus ride back to Tegucigalpa (with only one pit stop). I missed the pace, the people, the cool climate by then. We passed a bridge that had seen better days (I wish I'd managed to ask what this one's particular story was)

...and a clown at a bus stop. Honduras has a lot of clowns.

I stopped at a supermarket to pick up wine for dinner at a friend's house and scribbled down a reminder to note that at Honduran supermarket checkout counters you can buy not only condoms, but also disposable vibrating cock rings.