Last night I went out with some friends. One topic of conversation was the Honduras CIA headquarters, which is located near the Toncontin airport. Apparently late last June or early July, it got a new layer of barbed wire fence. I went to bed early, and was woken up by a full-on blasting Lady Gaga's Alejandro from the adjacent hotel room, the ladies in there singing right along. The pleasures of budget fieldwork...

I got baleadas at one of my favorite places in Tegucigalpa. The outside stove wasn't fired up, but it still looked pretty great:

Everyone's watching the big Olimpia-Motagua match. It's called the Clásico Capitalino (golpista owners Ferrari-Olimpia vs. Atala-Motagua) and is the big-earning rivalry match. Before the game, coverage focused adoringly on the massive police presence, there to prevent more deaths than necessary. "Siempre cada año hay muertos," a friend I went to visit in Las Palmas (adjacent to la Kennedy) explained to me—every year there are deaths. She asked her niece which team she was rooting for. "Yo soy Mo...no," the four-year-old corrected herself, shouting "¡yo soy Olimpia!" Ha- her aunt said dismissively, you don't even know which team you're with. The girl, unphazed but now more resolute in her Olimpia fandom, ran and grabbed a very docile cat to play with.

On the way there I'd picked up a bottle of tequila to bring her family (they're fun social drinkers who all claim to not really be drinkers), and couldn't resist also buying the ultra-golpista rag Hablemos Claro (roughly,"Let's be Frank," owned by Rodrigo Wong Arévalo, director and host of the reactionary news show Abriendo Brecha), upon seeing it at long last accept Pepe Lobo into the fold.

"Finally..." the cover shouts, followed by what can be loosely translated as "PEPE GETS BALLS." The occasion of their joyous celebration? Lobo's ordering last week's brutal repression of teachers who were demanding a stop to the privatization of education in Honduras, and the return of the over a hundred million dollars stolen by Micheletti functionaries from their pension fund. They forget to mention the demands in the article, instead painting the employees of the educational sector as people who got their jobs through sex with their superiors, and who regularly rape their students, and then chastising the left for stalling discussions and then using uncivil language in referring to coup-supporting proponents of privatization, the denial of labor rights and the right to protest as golpistas. Lobo is celebrated for returning to his puño firme (strong fist) roots, and quoted as saying:

a los niños, a las niñas demos la oportunidad de educarse, que así como peleé mucho con los delincuentes, voy a pelear contra todo aquel que quiera hacer algo que afecte a nuestros niñas y niñas.

So in translation, Pepe Lobo, who favors privatizing education, thus making it impossible for a vast majority of Honduran children to have access to it, who in 2003 passed the Ley anti-maras effectively criminalizing poverty, now criminalizes advocates of public education:

Let's give boys and girls the opportunity to be educated, and let it be known that just as I fought against criminals, I will fight against all those who want to do anything that affects girls and boys.

Here's the start of the cover story in the mag, gleefully framed as Gobierno vs. maestros above the manly man photo of Lobo (no small feat):

...and oh, what a surprise...look what precedes it: a glowing review of Unos Pocos Con Valor, the fictionalized account based on a parallel universe "true story" in which cops are all good and anyone who calls themself a revolutionary is actually a criminal. The short puff article notes that $100,000 in production costs for the filming in the past year (since the coup) was covered by donations from (unnamed) private corporations.

Walking out, receiving quite a few stares in this neighborhood infrequently visited by gringxs, I noticed some graffiti I hadn't noticed on my trip this summer:

We are few but (crazy), Mel Las Palmas is with you

Palmeños [people from Las Palmas] in resistance:

The oft-quoted (and oft-misspelled) excerpt from Neruda's poem in solidarity with the people of Central America, "the night is long and Morazán keeps watch":

• Golpistas out of Las Palmas!
• My country or death!
• Join together, nation!

...and maybe not exactly the message Mel wants to hear, but interesting:

• MEL, ULTRA [ineffectively crossed out] IS WITH YOU!!!

Ultra is one of the soccer gangs, commonly thought of as a pretty violent gang, one of the replacements for the 18 and MS that were everywhere 7 years ago.

In the colectivo taxi back, it took me too long to get my camera out, and I may have posted this earlier this summer, but in case I didn't...
No to the privatization of archeological parks! (hopefully I'll get back to get a better shot before I have to go back to DC)

Back at the hotel I tried to figure out the number of the sim card I purchased on the black sim card market. It's interesting how these things work, and always a reminder of how dangerous surveillance is. Just like an implantable RFID chip—except thankfully in this case you can still throw your sim card out—if your information falls into the wrong hands, you're toast. That's the thing. It's law-and-order arguments that convinced many governments to track all cell phones, after one of those Muslim terrorist scares. Muslim terrorists use cell phones, we were told, so we'd better give the government the ability to track all our cell phones. In Egypt you have to hand over your passport and heaps of other information to get a card; here it's a bit easier but there's no way to go anonymous through official channels. And given that the military is in control of the institutions of government, particularly telecom, and they busy themselves with torture and death squads...somehow it's not really about Muslim terrorists anymore. I mean, tracking us all down sounded good on the Wire and all, but in reality it's about intimidating people like me (a threat they wouldn't dare follow through with, or am I just foolhardy?) and much more seriously, intimidating, tracking down, and at a not uncommon extreme, torturing, disappearing and killing Hondurans who act democratically, speak freely, and demand rights and participatory government. To repeat yesterday's point, it's not a few bad apples in the police and military—the whole damn combined institution is rotten.

It took me a while to figure it out. I was in the conundrum of not being able to call someone so they could tell me my number because I didn't have any credit, and not being able to get credit because I didn't know my phone number. They've probably found me again already, but as my friend don Leo said earlier this summer upon suggesting his driver accompany me to the phone store and give his name instead of mine, "the least you can do is make their job a little more difficult."

I walked down the street, past the place I'd planned to go—at 7:30pm it was already closed, to a nice outdoor pupusas joint, empty except for a couple guys who were intently watching the game. The waiter asked me with no small degree of shock, "¿y no le da miedo a usted andar sola por aquí?"—"You're not afraid to walk around by yourself here?" I got a pretty good sopa de mariscos, which made me yearn for the North Coast, where the sopa de mariscos would be worth dying for, if that were the only option. (seriously, "sopa de mariscos or your life?" would be a hard question to answer in Tocoa).

After the game ended, the television got curiouser and curiouser. First, the original Star Wars movie came on, putting me in a media time/space warp. Then on a commercial break, I learned that for only 100 Lempiras I could get a ticket to the event called "Faith in Times of Crisis" (La fé en tiempos de crisis) sponsored by Cardinal Rodriguez's (the "Cardemal's") Catholic Foundation for Educational and Social Communication and his Channel 48 (click here for an utterly uncritical yet interesting case study of Channel 48, which I originally found here), and presided over by one Salvador Gomez.

Facebook tells me a little more:

Canal 48 "El Canal de la Solidaridad" El Domingo 19 de Septiembre a las 10am en el parque de pelota del Lempira Reina Tegucigalpa Estará Salvador Gomez con la predica "La Fe En Tiempos de Crisis" y el 20 de septiembre a las 6:30 pm en el Honduras Maya "Unidad en la familia". Acompáñenos 25 August at 12:10

• YYYY likes this.
• XXXX Y el 20 en el Maya Cuanto Cuesta? Donde Venderan los Tickets? 25 August at 12:12 ·
• Canal 48 "El Canal de la Solidaridad" En el Honduras Maya la cena-prédica costará Lps. 500. Pueden comprar en El Canal, en la radio católica, en la librería San Pablo en el mall multiplaza y en Uno más para Cristo en el mall el Dorado. 25 August at 15:43 ·
• XXXX Gracias, Bendiciones:) 25 August at 15:45

And here's a weird ad for the same. More of the viciously golpista Cardinal's efforts to opiate the masses.

And then, weirdlier, a really long ad sponsored by the Honduran government, consisting of legalistic bullet points displayed on the screen read over by an authoritative male voice about how Canal 8 belonged to the government, which wasn't, repeat wasn't, breaking the law.

The story is a twisted one, and has to do with the fact that oligarch Elias Asfura owns the channel, as in the rights to the signal, and there's some sort of strife between him and the government channel that occupies that signal. Asfura is a close ally of right-wing Nationalist Tegucigalpa Ricardo Alvarez, and thus of Ricardo Maduro. And Micheletti fits in here somewhere.

Word from outside the UNAH is that despite a total lack of protestors, there was an impressive number of soldiers, well over 100 by the gates. Julieta Castellanos has cancelled classes for the first two days of the semester; tomorrow, and Tuesday, the day of the national general work stoppage (paro cívico).