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.