If you ask a Honduran what he is up to on a lazy summer evening, he may shrug and say, contemplando la immortalidad del cangrejo: I’m pondering the immortality of the crab. I love this expression. It means just kicking around, killing time, shooting the breeze, but, unlike its equivalents in English, contains not a whiff of murderous intent. Instead, there is conundrum–a mind subsumed in the mysteries of nature, as if a swamp-stirring, hardscrabble crab could tease us out of thought…
I’ve been toying with this phrase a lot, lately. This is a strange time to be in Honduras, and there are many crabs to contemplate. Hondurans themselves seem a bit bewildered by what is happening to their country. They are a relatively easy-going, peace-loving people, who quietly abided the political turbulence that tore apart much of Central America in the 70s and 80s and beyond. (Of course, the American military bases here weren’t quite so mellow). But now they find themselves polarized, bedeviled by the spectacle of a government divided and political party turned on itself, forced to take sides in defense of a democracy that seems suddenly fragile in the face of internal power struggles and threats of international isolation.
It is August in Tegucigalpa, two months since the golpe de estado decried by graffitists all over downtown. I’m standing on a balcony overlooking the rugged southern end of the city, sipping lemonade. Thick strands of strato-cumulus graze on the surrounding mountains. Tegucigalpa sprawls in every direction–an overgrown village spilling out of its valley, climbing and consuming every intermittent hill. City and clouds often rub shoulders, especially in the rainy season, which is now.
Suddenly a plane drops through the cloud cover and glides into the heart of the city. (Flying into mountainous Tegucigalpa is an experience akin to canyoning). It is larger than a commercial airliner, fat & grey. I can’t quite make out the markings, but the shape looks familiar: bottom-heavy fuselage, top-fuselage wing: a Boeing C-17, U.S. military transport. Have I fallen asleep, woken by jet roar several decades earlier, in the Reagan-Iran-contra 80s, like some Rip Van Wrinkle in reverse?
I switch on the news: the plane just arrived is indeed U.S. Air Force, but its cargo this time is diplomatic–six ministers and the Secretary of the Organization of American states come to conduct their long-delayed fact-finding mission and to recommend steps toward political reconciliation. They are met by demonstrations and protestors of both stripes–those who support the current interim government, and those who either support the deposed President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, or support the democratic process in general, and believe that whatever “crimes” the president may have committed should be dealt with by due process and not by military intervention.
The debate, such as it is, has been polarized in the official media to such an extent that this particular nuance is lost on those who support the coup. In this camp, which includes the powerful and well-connected and most of the business elite, as well as large numbers of ordinary working people (at least those with TVs), they are simply glad to be rid of this “hijo de Chavez,” as they call him (referring to Venezualan President Hugo Chavez) by whatever means. As President, though, Zelaya wasn’t particularly popular, and his term was about to expire. Why not simply let him fade away?
The country is far from civil war, yet an insoluble tension persists. There are demonstrations almost daily in Tegucigalpa, largely peaceful. Three weeks ago someone set fire to a school bus after it hit one anti-coup demonstrator (in Honduras, retired U.S. school buses are used for public transportation). He was hurt, but no one knows how badly, even now. The video played and replayed on the TV news like the first fires of Armageddon. Afterward, there were charges in official media outlets (TV & newspaper) that the street marchers were mere anarchists, and counter-charges in dissident outlets (internet & radio) of infiltrators and government provocateurs, but nothing came of it, except more confusion, and deeper entrenchment in positions already held. Ah, but whichever side you’re on, there’s something beautiful and terrible about a burning school bus, all that orange consuming yellow, black plumes rising from black-lettered metal like literacy dissolving into unsigned smoke.
I spoke last week with Rommel Gomez, a journalist working for Radio Progreso, which broadcasts from the aptly named city of El Progreso, about 200 kilometers north of Tegucigalpa, near the Caribbean coast. Radio Progreso is one of a scant few organizations doing any sort of investigative or watchdog reporting from within Honduras at the moment. (Dissident TV stations, like Cholusat Sur, from the south, have been taken off the air). Not long after President Zelaya was ignominiously shipped out of the country wearing his Sunday pajamas, soldiers came to shut the radio down, he told me, but the town rallied around it and forced them to withdraw. They continue to broadcast despite constant harassment, and the people of El Progreso (born Progressives, they) continue to hold daily demonstrations against the coup and in defense of the radio in the town’s parque central.
Still, Romel Gomez moves about these days with great caution. He has been detained by the authorities and photographed, had his i.d. papers photographed, all in an effort to intimidate him and other like-motivated journalists, some of whom were tortured in the 80s and know what to be afraid of.
“I believe in the principles of democracy and free speech,” he says, standing in the dimly lit halls of the small broadcast station. “Our station lets everyone have their say, even those who are pro-coup. But most of our listeners are working class people who’ve endured the machinations of government for a long time. In a way, this coup may be a blessing in disguise–galvanizing people to stand up for their democracy and push for a long overdue change in politics-as-usual, Latin American-style.”
Not long after I spoke with Rommel Gomez, I found myself on the island of Utila–just off the north Honduran coast but a world away from the mainland–trudging gingerly through a mangrove swamp. My fiancee and I were doing some volunteer work for the island’s Iguana Research Center, releasing captive-bred “swampers,” as the indigenous species of iguana is called, into the wild, and doing population counts in the surviving habitat. By all accounts, Utila is a mellow, low-key place, made even more so this summer by the general absence of tourists. Locals hadn’t seen such a dearth of visitors since the tourist boom began in the early 90s. They too were experiencing a reverse Rip Van Winkle moment, which they seemed to be taking in stride.
Walking through the swamp, our guide Osgood Mann was teaching us how to spot iguanas against the camouflage of tree bark. The trick is to look for their hanging tails. Doing a good, hot morning’s work, we counted 18–not a bad score for this species in recovery.
On the way out of the swamp Osgood stopped to catch some fat red crabs to send with a friend home to Tegucigalpa. The swamp was loaded with them: the big ones had ancient, furrowed faces; the small ones looked like they were cradling tiny fiddles. When I asked Osgood what he thought about the troubles on the mainland, he shrugged, and tossed out a sweeping curse or two for everyone, from Mel to Chavez to Obama. Deep in the mangrove swamp, it seemed that Honduras would survive this moment as it has many others, patiently, obdurately, that the immortality of the crab was assured.
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Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and teaches literature and writing at Everett Community College. He is the editor of the travel journal Mare Nostrum. A collection of poems, Solar Prominence, was published by Cloudbank Books.