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