The System Is Armed

To make our martial law-imposed curfew movie night more comfortable, we barricade the mattresses into a makeshift couch. The room is a mess. Everywhere you look are opened-up computers, and the alarm system is strewn out all over in a mess of different-colored wires. To complete the bombmaker-chic look, our machetes and Sandinista paraphernalia are also lying around on the floor.

Enter fifteen policemen with helmets, body armor, and semiautomatic rifles. They're walking by our window looking for the prominent Zelaya supporters staying in the hotel. But we don't know this, and dash frantically to stash away our cache of suspicious-looking equipment. Aware that most guests here are Americans leaving Honduras, we are a little worried for the first half of Walk the Line. A good choice. The runner-up, Enemy at the Gates, might have seemed like an ominous choice.

(Hopefully you're laughing at us. We were perfectly safe the entire time.) The point is that when the excitement happens here, it's a little more crazy and confusing then the international press presents it. But of course the New York Times only has so many inches to devote to a country like Honduras. It's not a straightforward right-wing military coup resisted by a marginalized left-leaning underclass. The laws matter less than the guns behind them, and both sides hold them in contempt. So right now it's a panicked situation where frightened people are making decisions under tremendous pressure.

That's the idea if any would-be thief breaks into the administrative building of Alvaro Contreras school to steal the computers there. We spent today playing with power tools, drilling holes in the cinder block to install the control box, keypad, siren, and motion sensors for the alarm system we purchased. Tomorrow, on go the grisly-looking metal doors that look like something out of a horror movie. Then we will finally be able to move the computers and our hotel room will return to looking like a primitive armed encampment, rather than a highly sophisticated terrorist hideout. It's good to be physically putting things in place. At the end of the day we were dirty, hungry, and exhausted. I took a brief siesta on piled sacks of donated World Food Programme corn.

We think it might be poetic if we go operational on the fourth of July.

This will be an awfully fun report to write. We have been here for earthquakes, rising gang violence, a veritable mass murder next door, and now a coup d'etat. And that was only the first month.