It’s a great three-act script worthy of a Hollywood movie. “Based on a true story.” Hand over the Oscar, thank you.

In our 21st century marriage of entertainment and journalism, this is the story the mainstream media (MSM) would like you to believe transpired in Honduras during the summer of 2009. Americans were fed the tale of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, champion of the impoverished, ousted at gunpoint in his pajamas in a classic coup engineered by power-hungry elitists. Clips of Zelaya demanding his rightful reinstatement were interspersed with stock footage of civil unrest in the 1980′s, unrelated political demonstrations, and Hurricane Mitch. US President Barack Obama declared the coup illegal, and she-bear Hillary Clinton promised to see Zelaya put back in power.

But Honduras didn’t stick to the script.

As most of us who actually lived in Honduras during that fateful summer can attest, the actual events were far different than the Hollywood script MSM was jamming down American throats. I recently stumbled across an excellent article summarizing the role of MSM in deliberately misconstruing the facts about the coup to fit their storyboard.

Storyboarding the News: How the MSM Turned the Honduran Crisis into A Comic Book – by Mark Klugmann

To “storyboard the news” is to replace straight news reporting with a pre-shaped comic-book narrative, an edited fable sustained by selective reporting.

Victims of media fraud suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will be excused for hearing the phrase as a riff on Guantanamo, that “storyboarding the news” occurs when the MSM submerges the facts underwater until the truth surrenders.

The truth about Honduras – such as why the so-called “coup” was not a coup at all – was left by the MSM on the cutting-room floor, edited out of the news reporting because it did not fit into the storyboard.

You can read more of this article at: http://bigjournalism.com/mklugmann/2010/01/06/storyboarding-the-news-how-the-msm-turned-the-honduran-crisis-into-a-comic-book/

Upon receiving the good news of the curfew’s end, we laughed, swam in the sea, played poker, drank rum, played trivia, jumped in the pool, and laughed again. It was as if all of West End was celebrating an early release from house arrest. Spirits were high, the beer flowed, and, for a brief instant, life as usual resumed.

But then we stumbled home, tuned in to the world news, and recalled how despondently screwed we are.

I really don’t know what to make of this situation… it completely breaks my heart, really. I spent a good hour crying as I packed some stuff. I’m not ready to leave. This is home. This is five years of my life. This is dreams pursued and dreams lost. This is Roatan, and I love my life on this island.

My plane leaves in eleven days. I don’t know if I’ll be on it. Not yet. I’ll keep you posted.

Make sure you read Micheletti’s letter to the Washington Post in the article (also available at http://lagringasblogicito.blogspot.com/2009/09/washington-post-moving-forward-in.html). It shows a leader with a level of intelligence rarely found in this part of the world, and point-to-point reiterates my arguments against Mel Zelaya. Too bad the rest of the world sees this guy as the De Facto Dictator of Honduras.

Until later, pray for me and this crazy situation. It’s certainly not your average day at the office……

News of Zelaya’s return hit West End, Roatan, around noon yesterday (21 Sept 2009). Phone and internet connections became jammed by the heavy bandwidth load of people logging on to find out the news. The facts were scattered, but one thing loomed certain: Zelaya was indeed back in Honduras.

At 4:00PM, Roatan Municipal Police drove down West were ordering all businesses to close and everyone home. An curfew was in immediate effect until 6AM today. Both Hondutel and TIGO internet connections dropped out by 5:30PM. Digicel phone signals were weak and I was nearly out of credit. Like the RECO riots of last year, I was completely cut off from the outside world.

I arrived in West End this morning to find the town eerily desolate. The reason was soon made apparent: police patrols were ordering everyone to return home for a 24-hour curfew. No time to get food or other living essentials. Go home now.

So I’m stuck at my 90F apartment with ten strips of bacon, a gallon of water, a bag of refried beans, a pound of cat food, my Wii, limited internet connectivity, no phone service, and one orange hairball named Einstein meowing at my feet. Awesome.

Welcome back, Mel.

Slash throat.

She grabs her buddy’s alternate air source and tugs. It doesn’t budge. She jerks down again. Nothing. It’s snagged on her buddy’s strap.

Her eyes widen with panic.

My left hand twists her valve open. I can feel the air pulsing down the tubes to her convulsing lungs. “Okay?” I signal. She breaths deeply, rapidly. I lock my arms on hers and look in her wide eyes. “Breathe… breathe…” The bubbles slow. She’s shaking, but I’m not letting her go anywhere. Not until she’s ready.

“Okay,” she signals.

“Okay. Do it again,” I sign.

Our second attempt at the Air Depletion and Alternate Air Source skill from the PADI Open Water Diver course goes without a hitch. As we surface, she’s obviously a bit agitated. “I didn’t like that out of air thing.”

“It’s not fun, is it?”

“No.”

“Good thing is, you should never have to use it. If you get in the habit of checking your air every few minutes and tell your buddy when you get to half-tank and low-on-air, there’s no reason you should ever run out of air. But it’s good to practice this skill so that in the unlikely event that is did happen you would be prepared. It’s like having Triple-A when you’re driving on a long road trip.”

Then I splash seawater at her with my hand.

“Hey, why are you doing that?”

“Your mask is on your forehead.”

“So?”

“It’s a sign of panic. Remember? That’s a beer fine.”

She sighs sarcastically.

“That’s two for me at Beer O’Clock? C’mon, let’s go down and practice that skill one more time, and then we’ll go try and find the octopus living under the log.”

I watched reruns of the Jetsons as a kid and was entirely convinced that the 21st century was going to be nothing less than kickasstastic. Flying cars. Jetpacks. Soulless robot slaves. Hell yeah, Class of 2000, we’re the Leaders of the 21st century!

So where’s my jetpack now?

My grandpa used to cut out newspaper clips of the lunar landings and space shuttle launches and laminate them. He gave them to me as gifts. I first spied the rings of Saturn through some dude’s telescope at a camp ground in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. I went to community college lectures on black holes and the formation of the solar system with my undoubtedly bored father. My childhood dream was to be an astronaut. NASA promised us a man on Mars by 2010. I flapped around the elementary school playground pretending to be that man.

I watch as a telecommunications satellite—merely a white dot against the moonless sky—flies in a straight path across Scorpio and the pearly smear of the Milky Way. Ripe seagrapes rustle in the branches of the nearby trees as a gentle Caribbean breeze sweeps off the dark water of Half Moon Bay. I am reclining on a dock 5m/15ft above sea level, staring at the unfathomable vastness that lies beyond the atmosphere of our water-covered sphere, and genuinely loving my life.

I will never set foot on the red planet. I doubt I will ever be wealthy enough to afford a flight in space. I find airplanes a bit unnerving. My childhood fantasy of being an astronaut is dead.

But every day, I strap into my personal subaquatic “jetpack” and cruise weightless through the unfathomable vastness of inner space. I have ventured—three times!—to 1500ft under the sea and come face-to-face with alien life. I have been fortunate enough to spend a majority of the last five years of my life exploring the caves, canyons, walls and shallows of Roatan’s amazing coral reef.

It’s my adulthood reality, and I love it every day.

A drop of water appears on my laptop screen. Then another.

I barely have time to shut my Mac before the heavens open up. West End High Street dissolves in to a muddy smear. Half Moon Bay shimmers like a pot of gold as the amber light of the setting sun glimmers and sparkles upon the rippling surface. Children wrestle in the golden waters of the shallows, their laughter piercing the air as lightning crackles across the sky.

We retreat into the dive shop. The rainstorm whites out the bay. Oh well, crack the beers. There’s nowhere to go and nowhere we’d rather be.

Goldfinger is running the V-Planner to plan a Trimix dive on the Josie J shipwreck. 245ft for 15 minutes—long enough to secure the plaque he welded in honor of Marc Wesler (1971-2009) to the shipwreck. He prints off a sheet of paper and laminates it. “Dive plan and contingency plans,” he explains as he mounts them to his slate. “This dive shouldn’t be too hard to pull off, but,, you know, no taking chances.”

(Marc Wesler, 30 March 1971 - 13 June 2009)

“No kidding. Unlike other shops.”

“What? Are they diving the J again?”

“Yeah man. I was diving the other day off Black Rock and as we leveled off at 110ft over the Josie J, I saw something white below me. Two freakin’ divers swimming around the wreck. Single tanks. No surface support. “

“Idiots.”

“Yeah, I was pissed off. They were doing it right in front of my customers too, ya know? What the hell am I supposed to tell them when we get back on the boat?”

“That they’re idiots.”

“Well that was pretty much what I did. I just hate seeing this crap going on again. These kids are going to get themselves killed and it’ll make the whole island look bad.”

“Yeah I know. I want to post a sign on the wreck that says ‘If you can read this and only have one tank then FUCK OFF!’”

“But then I saw a manta ray.”

“No way.”

“Look, pictures.” I open my laptop. “About seven feet wide, gliding right at me as we ascended up from the wreck. Insane. I lost 20 bar as I screamed and pointed. The whole group saw it.”

“I hope it comes around when I’m putting this sign down there.”

“I know dude. There’s been crazy stuff around here this week! Sharks, eagle rays, tons of turtles. I saw an octopus sitting right out in the open today. And I found that encrusted computer keyboard at 130ft on El Aquario. It’s great—except we’re just missing the customers.”

“No shit. This paycheck is gonna suck, eh?”

“Say goodbye to the high season.”

We tacitly acknowledge our collective disappointment. My eyes drift to a weathered political cartoon on the wall. In faded black and white, four commie macaws screech in unison: “Restore the Dictator in Honduras!” The computer monitor portrays the burning façade of the El Heraldo building in Tegucigalpa. Poorly translated English reveals that supporters of ousted Honduran President Mel Zelaya have hurled Molotov cocktails into the newspaper company’s headquarters. Just another day in post-coup Honduras.

“Got any back-up plans?” I ask.

“Just these.” Goldfinger slaps the dive slate around his wrist and flips through the contingency plans. He drags deep on his cigarette. “Guess I can go weld for a while in Canada. I just don’t want to leave. You?”

“No idea. I wasn’t planning on leaving. Not yet. Not this way.”

My adulthood reality is coming to an end.

The one-two punch of the global economic recession and Honduran constitutional crisis has KOed the tourism industry on Roatan. In light of the world economic downturn over the last year, West End businesses were faring well. The dive industry was down about 20-25% on 2008’s numbers, but there was still an ample supply of incoming customers. Recession or not, it was shaping up to be another mind-blowing summer of diving and fun.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, the Honduran government couldn’t figure whether to impeach or overthrow their elected President. On 28 June 2009, they decided to do a spectacularly sloppy job of both. Early that morning, the Honduran military arrested President Mel Zelaya in his underwear on the doorstep of his Presidential estate, stuffed him in a plane, and sent him into exile in Costa Rica. The Congress authorized his purported resignation papers and instated his successor, Roberto Micheletti.

Sounds like a coup d’etat right? Well, sorta.

The military acted under the orders of the Supreme Court and with the support of the Congress (in which Zelaya’s own Red Party held majority). Roberto Micheletti, the Speaker of Parliament, Red Party member, and next in line in presidential succession, took over the interim government. The military immediately transferred power to the Congress—still controlled by Zelaya’s Red Party—and life continued peacefully for a few days.

Word of the supposed coup d’etat spread across the AP wires. While the interim government worked to maintain peace in the wake of the transition, the American news networks erroneously labeled footage of pro-Micheletti peace marches as pro-Zelaya protests, recycled old news clips of Hurricane Mitch battering the Honduran coastline, fabricated statistics of popular support for the ousted President, and did their absolute finest to scare the piss out of any American (who, until he turned on CNN, didn’t know Honduras from Atlantis) away from ever setting foot in my tropical paradise. Needless to say, diving vacation reservations disappeared overnight.

It’s a “coup” that could only happen in Honduras.

In the wake of widespread international condemnation—including suspension from the OAS (Organization of American States), termination of funds from the World Bank, and calls by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban Presdient Fidel Castro to reinstate (by force if necessary) Zelaya immediately—the interim government remained steadfast in denying Zelaya reentry to Honduras. The Supreme Court outlined its case against Zelaya: that his proposed referendum for extending presidential terms beyond four years was a violation of the Honduran constitution; that he defied a unanimous vote by Congress forbidding the vote by leading his followers to forcefully retake the voting ballots from a Honduran air force base; and that he was constitutionally obligated to step down immediately. The interim government was resolute: If Mel Zelaya attempted to enter the country, he would face immediate arrest. The Archbishop Cardinal of Honduras pleaded with Zelaya not to return, warning that his presence could cause a bloodbath.

Well, no cowboy worth his ten-gallon hat can turn down a dare like that, y’reckon?

Mel’s first game of chicken took place in the skies above Tegucigalpa on 5 June 2009. As a metallic bird bearing the mustached ex-President circled the airport, trucks and soldiers filled the landstrip to block his return. Pro-Zelaya protestors clashed with the military and the first bloodshed of the coup was drawn as a bullet pierced 19-year-old Isy Obed Murillo Mencía’s skull. I got drunk as hell on rum as I suddenly found myself an unexpected prisoner in a beautiful beachside condo when the cops screamed down the West End High Street declaring an immediate curfew.

I woke up the next day to cotton-candy clouds illuminated in the morning light overhead, the subtle jackhammer of a hangover in my head, and the country I have called home for nearly five years in turmoil. My stomach was tangled in knots from a night of anxious sleep tempered only by mass quantities of alcohol. I staggered out into a world of uncertainty.

The following day, as Costa Rican President Oscar Arias volunteered to mediate the crisis between Zelaya and the current Honduran administration, I volunteered to return to bed and sleep away the previous night. I awoke shivering in a bed soaked with my own sweat. What the hell? I changed the bedsheets and returned to sleep. Forty-five minutes later and it’s the same scenario. Okay, this ain’t right. I retreat to the comfort of my hammock. Thirty-minutes pass and I’m doubled over in cold chills. The beeping thermometer in my mouth confirms my fears: 102F. This ain’t right at all.

It lasts a week. The doctor’s say it’s a bacterial infection. Feels like the last time I had dengue to me. Every exhausting day is followed by an even more hellish night. I awaken from fever-induced nightmares to find my mattress thorough saturated—both sides—with my sweat as I lay trembling in the fetal position.

Dawn breaks to the sound of roosters and diesel generators. My electrical fan sits motionless as the room temperature rapidly rises. RECO (Roatan Electrical Company) is an angry god who must be appeased by throwing virgins into the volcano every so often or he will banish us to the darkness. Unfortunately we have neither volcanos nor virgins on Roatan, so RECO spills his wrath out at the most ungodly of hours. Too tired to read and too weak to think. I swelter in my hammock, lost in fuzzy memories of the past, accompanied by the island soundtrack of children playing baseball in the street.

In high school I worked as a lifeguard for four insanely boring summers. When the teeny-bopper brats I was supervising broke pool rules, we would put them in “time-out” and make them watch their peers splash in the water as they sat on the pool edge. (This was opposed to my preferred method of punishment: waterboarding. It’s not officially torture, and it’s equally effective on spoiled children as it is on terrorists.) Inevitably, one of the little bastards in timeout would sneak a leg, foot, or even a toe in the forbidden water, stare me directly in the eyes, and tacitly dare me to blow my whistle. It was a silly game of chicken.

Zelaya played his second second silly game of chicken on 24 July 2009 when he decided to stick his big toe across the Honduran border for thirty minutes. Like a whiney eleven-year-old stuck in time-out, Zelaya glared at soldiers of his own supposed army from the demilitarized zone between Honduras and Nicaragua and dared them to resist his triumphant return. He then returned to the safety of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s arms, sucking on his thumb with one hand whilst flipping the bird with his other towards his ousters.

The weeks wane on. When I finally find the strength, I venture into West End to buy some fruit from the produce trucks. The effects of the coup are apparent: the Dionysian fever-pitch lifestyle that typifies our summers in Roatan is replaced with the somber flu of uncertainty; the beaches are vacant; the dive boats are empty; the restaurants, deserted. As Mel Zelaya courts the OAS and Hilary Clinton with his version of the coup, a barrage of international travel advisories slapped against Honduras slowly asphyxiates the Bay Islands.

The downward spiral is accelerating. Mel Zelaya is urging his supporters to boycott and disrupt the upcoming presidential election in November, insisting that, due to the coup, he will remain the Honduran president even after his elected term has expired in January. Civil unrest mounts on the mainland: there have been sporadic outbursts of violence, a handful of strikes, and a few more deaths.

The true tragedy of the coup lies in the starving stomachs of the country’s largely impoverished population. Internationally isolated from much-needed foreign aid and investment, the people of Honduras face a long hard road to economic and political recovery—and this road will be strewn with the corpses of several thousand Hondurans, whether from violence or starvation, before the final destination is reached. The constitutional crisis will undeniably define the future of Honduras as a sovereign nation/ Unfortunately, the Honduras government(s) has done an amazing job of screwing it up thus far.

Meanwhile, the Caribbean paradise of Roatan continues life as usual: peaceful, beautiful, relaxed, quiet– but despondently deserted. West End is a ghost town (though arguably the most beautiful ghost town on the planet). The bars are half-full with the same familiar faces every night—familiar, but more weathered, and there are fewer as time passes. The rainy season looms and a mass exodus of expatriates is underway. “I’m leaving tomorrow” is suddenly not a lie of Roatan.

It’s the best laid plans of mice and men. Mel Zelaya just shot Lenny in the back of the head.

“You gotta want it! What do you want?”

“Jack! Jack! Jack! Jack!” I shout.

Dr. Jekyll stares me down from across the table. “Forget about it. Not gonna happen.”

“Jack! Jack!”

“Here we go.”

“Jack!”

Goldfinger turns the river card. Five of hearts. My heart falls.

“Two pairs queens-nines beats your jack-nines. Show me the money!” Dr. Jekyll cackles.

I reluctantly push the rest of my chips across the table. “Son of a…”

“Hey, good game,” Dr. Jekyll says as he shakes my hand. “For a loser. Now get me a beer.”

I only get two strides towards the beer cooler before my Open Water student intercepts me bearing two cold Salva Vidas in her hands. “I think I owe you these.”

“Ha! Thanks, I had forgotten, but I’ll take ‘em.” I hand one beer over to Dr. Jekyll and take a hearty swig on mine. “How’d you like the diving today?”

“I loved it! That turtle was so friendly! And what was that weird flat fish? White, kinda the size of a pancake…”

“Peacock flounder. Really cool fish. Masters of camouflage. They can change their colors and patterns to match almost anything.”

“No way.”

“Seriously. I saw them in Greece on these black and red sand beaches, and their colors perfectly matched whatever surface they were on. Wild stuff.”

“So what are we doing tomorrow?” she asks, finishing her beer.

“Another video, a few more skills in the bay, and then our second Open Water dive. We get to practice the alternate air source ascent one more time.”

She rolls her eyes. “Do we have to do it?”

“Yes, it’s an important skill.”

“I hate that one. I don’t like depending on other people.”

“Down there other people are the only thing you have in an emergency. Most of the time you don’t have to depend on them—it’s just all about the fish. But should something go wrong… well… then your buddy is your lifeline.”

“But what if the hose gets caught like it did today?”

I pause to take a swig of my beer and think. I had never encountered that problem before in my previous 200 Open Water classes, and quite frankly I am still bothered that it occurred. Good thing I had my hand on her tank valve the entire time—a safety practice passed down from my IDC five years ago but never needed until six hours ago—or else it would have been much worse. Then I notice her scanning my eyes as if reading my entire inner monologue, remind myself that women have telepathy, and spin an answer as best I can. “Then you do a CESA.”

“What’s that?”

“The Controllled Emergency Swimming Ascent. Remember doing it today?”

“Which one was that?”

“Where you swam a long way going, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhh…’”

“Oh yeah.”

“It’s like a back-up plan for your back-up plan. We’ll practice a real one tomorrow at the start of our dive.”

“Cool. So, what are you up to tonight?”

“Not drinking.”

“Next you’ll say I love you.”

“At this rate, probably,” I reply, finishing my beer.

“Look!” She points towards the bay.

The beach is bathed in a Martian glow. We walk onto the dock to watch the last crimson sliver of sun vanish behind the rugged outline of retreating thunderheads. To the south, bolt lighting streaks down across massive thunderheads accumulated over the Honduran mainland. Land crabs, their alien eyes independently pivoting in all directions, scurry horizontally across the rain-pocked beach. Like Neil Armstrong taking his famous small step, I leave a line of footprints on the sand as I stroll to the water’s edge. Under a pink sky, Half Moon Bay looks like an oily smear of otherworldly liquid. Is this the shore of Titan’s liquid methane seas?

Or is this just my adulthood reality fading away with the sun?

Feces, meet fan.

West End police have imposed a curfew and barracaded the intersection in order to promote the public peace during this night of political upheaval. Though grossly inconvenient for West End business, the move is justifiable given the recent turn of events on the Honduran mainland. Police patrols are currently strolling the streets, blaring messages to “stay in your homes” over their crackly loudspeakers.

Ousted Honduran President Mel Zelaya’s attempts to land in Tegucigalpa today sparked civil unrest in the nation’s capital, as thousands of pro-Zelaya supported rushed the airport. Zelaya is currently in asylum in El Salvador. Two people have reportedly been killed in Tegucigalpa, drawing the first blood in this otherwise peaceful coup (or Constitutional balance of powers, as Zelaya opponents assert).

Meanwhile, thousands of Roatan residents marched in French Harbor and Coxen Hole in support of the interim administration, waiving blue and white signs painted with “Peace and Democracy.”

With a double rainbow brilliantly arching over thunderheads to the southeast, the sun melts into the glowing ripples of Half Moon Bay, spilling the surface with the oily shimmer of diffracted light. We huddle together on the balcony as the stars come out, the rum saturated laughter of a house party flooding the air, haunted by the lingering unspoken question. We do not know how this night will transpire, but we know the night is here and now and beautiful.

How many more do we have?

Before you read any more, know this:

Everything is fine on Roatan. Please keep coming to our island!

“They arrested the President.”

I stop, nearly slipping on the wet tiles of the dive shop, and lower the scuba cylinders hoisted in each hand. My skin still glistens with sea salt and sweat, my mind lost in its mental menagerie of groupers, snappers, barracudas, and jacks encountered on the previous dive. The cacophony of banging tanks and bustling interns fades into the background.

“Army moved in this morning. Two-hundred guys surrounded his house and arrested him. Dragged him out in his pajamas.”

The Boss points to the computer monitor. I quickly scan the displayed website. My gut twists.

Fifteen minutes earlier, I was floating through a weightless silent world as a kaleidoscope of aquatic life frolicked about me. Rivers of blue creole wrasse rippled over the reef, carving living waterfalls around protruding barrel sponges. Parrotfish hovered at forty-five degree angles as translucent cleaning shrimp crawled through their nostrils and gills. A hawksbill turtle glided beside me, heads mere feet apart, our eyes sharing mutual expressions that, down here, everything is right with the world.

Surface side, everything seems wrong.

As word of the President’s arrest circulated the world, I avidly tracked the news reports flowing across the web. The facts don’t match up; each report seems biased towards its originating country. I have been following the progression of events in Tegucigalpa as the crisis neared its boiling point; though I do not claim knowledge of (nor wish to be involved in) Honduran politics, this is the series of events as I best understand:

• Honduran President Manuel Zelaya proposed that a non-binding public referendum be held to vote whether to call a National Assembly to rewrite the Honduran Constitution— specifically, to remove the one-term, four-year limit imposed on the Honduran Presidency.
• The proposed referendum was rejected by Congress and the attorney general. The Supreme Court ruled the referendum illegal on two points:
  • Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution, which forbids former chief executives from being re-elected President and requires any citizen proposing such changes to cease carrying out public office.
  • Article 42, Section 5 of the Honduran Constitution, which states that citizenship is lost for inciting, promoting, or supporting the continuation or reelection of the President.
• Impeachment proceedings began against Zelaya; however, the Honduran Constitution, which was ratified in only 1982, lacks a clear constitutional process for impeaching and/or removing a sitting President.
• President Zelaya ordered General Romeo Vásquez to use the Honduran Military to distribute the referendum on Sunday, 28 June 2009. Vásquez refused on grounds that the referendum was illegal and to distribute it would violate the Constitution. Consequently, Zelaya fired Vásquez, but the Supreme Court ordered he be reinstated.
• The morning of the referendum, 200 military personnel, acting on Supreme Court orders, surrounded Zelaya’s house, arrested him in his pajamas, hauled him off to an airport near San Pedro Sula, and flew him to Costa Rica.
• Congress voted unanimously to accept a purported letter of resignation from Zelaya, who has personally denied composing any such letter.
• Acting President Roberto Micheletti ordered a 48-hour curfew to stem potential violence and began assembling a new Presidential Cabinet.
• Many foreign leaders, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and United States President Barack Obama, have condemned the arrest as a coup and refused to work with the interim government. The UN has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement.

Personally, I laud the defense of the national Constitution and condemn the methods with which it was defended.

This is Honduras— therefore, the mishandling of the situation does not surprise me. In a country robbed of its culture by centuries of exploitation, foreign manipulation, and self-destructive corruption, this fledgling republic has scare experience upon which to base a peaceful balance of power. For many Hondurans— deprived for decades of true independence by many of the nations currently criticizing the coup— there exist no conceivable means of impeachment other than the democracy of a loaded gun.

Despite the international outcry, nearly every Honduran I’ve spoken with has been in support of Zelaya’s removal. The President was largely unpopular throughout the last year, enough that his own party led the call for his impeachment. Cheers when out around the island when the news broke. But now, feeling the sting of the international criticism, the most oft-repeated Honduran mantra seems to be “respect our sovereignty.”

Funny the way it is: foreign troops invading another country and disposing of its leader against the will of its people is considered promoting democracy, whereas a national military removing its own leader with the support of the people is undemocratic.

Politics truly is mankind at its lowest.

On Roatan, all is fine so far. The sea is still calm, the water clear, the fish vibrant, the scenery incredible, the drinks flowing, and the laughs rich and heartfelt. We laugh about how this “terrible coup” has wreaked havoc on our lives: there’s tanks rolling down the street, the locals are loaded, and there’s a submarine in the bay. Just a few hundred miles from the epicenter of a swelling international sore, Roatan truly feels a world away. It’s just another crappy day in paradise.

But on the horizon looms the mounting cumulus nimbus of uncertainty. Transportation around mainland Honduras has been interrupted, stranding coworkers and visitors across various parts of Central America. Travelers have already canceled their plans out of misguided fears planted by US travel advisories. And the rumblings of international condemnations indicate the storm is far from over.

Any setback to tourism is a clot in Roatan’s economic arteries— and our island’s heart, still shaken from the recent earthquake, now trembles with the adrenaline of apprehension. The memories of three agonizing days of black outs, blockades, and disrupted business from last year’s RECO protests linger in the minds of the island residents. But supposed coup or not, life goes on as usual— businesses are open, the bars are full, and the scuba diving is phenomenal.

Yes, life goes on; and on Roatan a good life it is.