Did Barack Obama know about the Honduras coup plot all along?

There's no continent where the liberal left in the United States has entertained higher hopes of Obamian change from traditional US thuggery than Latin America. American radicals in their sixties have been rooting for Cuba ever since they cheered Fidel Castro's triumphant entry into Havana in 1959.

Twenty-five years later, in the mid-1980s, the hottest issue for young people on the Left in the US was the brutal and ultimately successful efforts of the US government in the Reagan years to crush revolutions in El Salvador and Nicaragua. To this day the 'Hands off Central America' movement remains by far the most determined mobilisation of the US left in the post-Vietnam era.

The zig-zagging response of the Obama administration to last Sunday's coup in Honduras has now put these hopes to their fiercest test so far. The coup itself was an entirely traditional enterprise. Honduras is a wretchedly poor place - the third poorest in the hemisphere, where about 70 per cent of the population live in grinding poverty.

President Zelaya, ousted last weekend, took office as a credentialed member of the commercial and political elite and then, against all expectation, moved to the left. He ordered a 60 per cent increase in the minimum wage. This, he declared, would "force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair".

The Honduran elite viewed Zelaya, elected in 2006, with growing alarm

He joined a regional organisation, the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas - known by its Spanish acronym ALBA - a socially progressive trade pact backed by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela opposing the US 'free trade' model. He started using Chavezian rhetoric, declaring his to be "a government of great social transformations, committed to the poor". He welcomed Cuban doctors and harshly denounced US meddling in the region.

The Honduran elite viewed Zelaya, elected to his four-year term in 2006, with growing alarm and communicated their disquiet to Washington, where the military and civilian intelligence agencies were already being diligently primed by their substantial assets and agents inside Honduras, historically an important CIA and military staging post in Central America.

A large number of Honduran military commanders have their own long-term relationships with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, many of them forged during their training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here is the notorious School of the Americas where promising officers from Argentina, Colombia, Honduras and other US allies are given training in such useful skills as seizing power, hunting down leftists and torture. In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school providing expertise in torture, extortion and execution.

Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are Manuel Noriega  of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. SOA graduates were responsible for the assassination of El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians. In 2001 the Pentagon tried to clean up the School's image by changing its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. It didn't catch on.

School of the Americas alumni are thick on the ground in Honduras, including General Juan Melgar Castro who seized power in 1975, followed five years later by another graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, patron of the infamous Battalion 3-16, a death squad founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates. There is profuse evidence that these SOA men were in constant touch with CIA case officers and the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Last Sunday's power grab was led by yet another SOA grad, Romeo Vasquez, whose men bundled Zelaya, still in his pyjamas, onto a plane to Costa Rica and installed as interim president Roberto Micheletti, a conservative businessman and creature of the elites.

The rationale was an alleged effort by Zelaya to cling to office beyond a Honduran president's single four-year term. Actually Zelaya had merely asked the military to help in distributing materials for a non-binding referendum to assay whether Hondurans were interested in any constitutional changes.

The US government has admitted that officials had been in touch with the conspirators in the run-up to the coup, and also makes the preposterous claim that it was seeking to head off any coup. This is as absurd as Henry II saying he tried to talk his men out of killing Thomas a Beckett.

We can take it as an absolute certainty that CIA and Pentagon advisors were at the elbows of the Honduran plotters, giving the green light and barely bothering to maintain deniability. The coup was modeled on the initial stages of the attempted ouster of Chavez in 2002, before popular resistance put Chavez back in power. Earlier versions of the script are profuse in the archives of the School of the Americas.

The first statements from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton bear all the hallmarks of careful preparation. In the coup's immediate aftermath they merely urged negotiations with the coup plotters to "restore constitutional order”, feebly urging "all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter".

Carefully avoided was any tough demand by Obama or Clinton - still hoarse from shouts for "democracy" in Iran - for the legitimate Honduran President Zelaya to be returned to office. The plan was obviously to try and run out the clock with indecisive parleys until Zelaya's term ends in six months time.

It was only after furious denunciation of the coup and a call for Zelaya's reinstatement from the Organisation of American States, the presidents of Brazil and Argentina, the Rio Group,  the European Union, and the UN General Assembly, that Obama was forced to climb off the fence and declare on Monday that "We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras..."

Secretary of State Clinton did not call for Zelaya's reinstatement. And there have been no tough words from Obama or Clinton about the shutting down of all opposition press, the curfew and the violent suppression of free speech.

The desire among many progressives to believe that in the White House resides Gob (Good Obama) rather than Jaaap (Just Another Awful American President) is pitiful to behold. What, in Latin America, do they have to hang their hat on, regarding Gob's actual performance?

He's maintaining the embargo on Cuba and pushing for the "free trade pacts" that have laid waste Latin America for a generation. He fondly embraces the vicious Uribe regime in Colombia. True to the performance of all his predecessors, he's trying to kill off the positive changes in Latin America that have produced the heartening support for Zelaya and denunciation of his deposers.

The silver lining may conceivably be, as in 2002 in Venezuela, that Honduras represents another miscalculation in Washington of the strength of the spirit of real as opposed to merely rhetorical change across Latin America. ·