Faced with demands from lawmakers in his own country urging him to take firmer action against the dictatorship in Honduras, at a recent press conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, President Barack Obama said that those criticizing the US for not intervening enough in Honduras are the same people who say, “Yankees, go home!” And according to him, “you can’t have it both ways.”

With this statement, Obama is grossly simplifying a request that is being heard with increasing force across Latin America. Obviously, only somebody who is very confused could be asking for an “old-style intervention,” with marines and bombings. In short, an “invasion.”

It’s also pretty obvious that what is expected of the president of the United States is not that he “press a button” -whatever button that may be- to replace a Roberto Micheletti puppet  with a Manuel Zelaya statue.

This week, the United States declassified and released CIA top secret documents that reveal that in 1971 Brazilian dictator Emilio Garrastazú Medici and then US President Richard Nixon had held secret talks to coordinate interventions in Chile, Cuba and other Latin American nations “to prevent new Allendes and Castros and try where possible to reverse these trends.”

Such interventions led to the coup that toppled Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. The declassified reports also confirmed that, with the consent of the US, Brazil’s military intelligence was involved in rigging the Uruguayan election of 1971 to prevent the advance of the leftist coalition Frente Amplio that is currently in power.

It has also transpired that at the time a “Nixon Doctrine” guided US relations with Latin America. Nixon saw Brazil’s military government as a critical partner in the region. Then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger highlighted Garrastazu Médici’s support of the Nixon Doctrine in Latin America, under which, Brazil was to be a surrogate regional power acting in the interest of the US. “There were many things that Brazil as a South American country could do that the U.S. could not,” Nixon told his Brazilian counterpart in the memos.

Who is to say that another “doctrine” does not to exist right now, one whose name we have yet to discover. Politically, Nixon has long been rendered a historical ruin, and Brazil has changed enormously since the early 1970s. This new doctrine is most likely to have appointed Colombia for the role of intimidating Latin America, to make several regional players feel threatened by the clearly defiant attitude of Álvaro Uribe - the Garrastazú Medici of the moment.

What is happening in Honduras is looking increasingly more like a balloon probe, an on-the-field trial to test Latin America’s and the world’s capacity for reaction and action in the face of a flagrant violation of the rule of law. Each hour that Micheletti stays in power is time that coup perpetrators have won for themselves, and not just Honduran coup perpetrators.

Has the United States opted already for a new “doctrine” to “halt the progress of the left in Latin America”? Are the US military bases in Colombia and the coup in Honduras part of this “doctrine”? What comes next then? What could be the most efficient way of derailing the development of popular governments that -with many differences and weaknesses- are trying to consolidate themselves democratically in the region? Could it be by spreading fear of a new wave of ultra rightwing coups? Or a fratricide war pitting Latin Americans against each other?

In Honduras, dictator Micheletti has just declared publicly that US ambassador Hugo Llorens had been informed beforehand of the plans to stage the coup. Llorens is a US citizen of Cuban descent who has been said to be connected with the infamous Otto Reich, another Cuban who served under George Bush as Under-Secretary of State and who is said to be behind the failed coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. More and more people are beginning to find points in common between the Venezuela incident and the Honduran coup.

But without going into possible conspiracies and speculations, the history of Latin America is full of evidence pointing to the United States as promoter, supporter and protector of all the rightwing dictatorships suffered by the region. If we are to believe Obama’s statements, Honduras’ current dictatorship would be a first.

Which is why Latin America’s call to the government of Barack Obama is not for an invasion, or for an “intervention” of Honduras. What Latin America is asking for is that Obama intervene in his own country to detect and defuse any forces that are propelling the probe balloon, that he freeze, for example, the assets stashed away in US banks by characters who are financing and supporting Micheletti’s dictatorship, and that he formally severe all ties linking his country’s ultra rightwing military factions with the Honduran armed forces.