En Tegus

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - "El pueblo Hondureño esta despertando!" Hector, my taxi driver from the bus station, said as we splashed up and down the capital city's potholed streets. "The Honduran people are awakening!"

The resistance is strengthening. Government officials, the engineers of the coup against former president Manuel Zelaya, los golpistas, are committing atrocious acts towards the people and democracy, according to Hector. He flips the radio to Radio Globo 88.7 FM, a pro-Zelaya station, and turns the volume up. Silence. He says the government took 88.7 FM off the air "because they are the only ones who speak the truth!"

This was my welcome party to Honduras. The curfew had already set in by the time I arrived, at 6 p.m., and the only place anyone was driving at that hour was home. He dropped me off at Hotel Granada, a comfy and cheap little place not too far from the city center. I hadn't eaten dinner and didn't realize how early the curfew set in, so I was sitting in my room starving, though comforted by an e-mail from my dad informing me that the Alabama Crimson Tide beat Arkansas 35-7 this afternoon.

Finally I went downstairs to ask the clerk if there was somewhere, anywhere to get some sustenance. He said the convenience store next door was closed but taking walk-up customers. Outside of there I met a young man who's name I didn't catch, but when I said I was hungry he said the restaurant he works for was still open and I followed him to it around the corner. After talking with the guards for a second in front of a retractable fence in front of the establishment, they unlocked it and let me in. I had some gringas and a beer while I watched the bar staff put up a sheet between one half of the bar and the street. People picked up their beers and went behind it, so I decided to follow just as a cop car full of big guys with big guns rolled slowly by.

A Salvadoran man turned Honduran citizen was sitting across from me and leaned over to speak to me in very broken English. I offered to speak in Spanish but he refused. He told me Zelaya is a very corrupt man, a trafficker of narcotics even. He and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez both. Zelaya isn't interested in being returned to power to satisfy the will of the people. He just likes the power. He said the political instability here isn't as bad as the former president would like people to believe.

"I'm from El Salvador. I lived through the war there," he said, pausing, then raising a finger and smiling. "This is not a war."

It's clear to me this city is full of people with opinions who want to be heard. Buildings are spray painted with graffiti in favor of both Zelaya and his replacement, Roberto Micheletti. One TV station airs nothing but the hard government line, saying Zelaya is trying to bring foreign powers in to meddle with Honduran politics, subverting the will of the people, etc. Another channel lets people call in, half of them railing against the golpistas' violations of the constitution and the other half lobbing the same accusations at Zelaya. Both sides are adamant, and it's hard to know who's telling the truth.

It looks like I'm going to get a crack at it though, along with the countless other foreign journalists here. My editor at The Nica Times has already told me he wants me to file something from here this week, and, it's official, I'm going to be The Christian Science Monitor's man on the ground here.

I may be in Tegucigalpa a lot longer than I thought, which is fine with me, because things are happening here. Even the empty streets are buzzing with that intangible that's getting my adrenaline up. I'm meeting up with my eventual roommate and Bloomberg stringer Blake Schmidt tomorrow, and I'm hoping he can help me get caught up to speed on how things have been here. I've got a lot to digest and not much time to do it in. I've got to hit the ground running.