Honduras now has its first Nedas. Two people have been killed and several wounded when the army opened fire on demonstrators gathering in support of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

With gunshots and teargas, the military has successfully prevented the plane carrying the elected Honduran leader from landing.

Zelaya makes an unlikely Che Guevara. He came to power as a centrist liberal from a landowning family, elected as the representative of the Liberal Party of Honduras, one of the traditional governing parties.

While the military justified kidnapping and beating Zelaya by arguing that his recent attempts to amend the constitution were the first steps to dictatorial power, the real issue for the army and their backers in Hondura’s business class is his relation to the so-called “pink tide” of leftist administrations sweeping the continent.

Zelaya, for instance, has signed Honduras up to to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a group by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia as a rival to the traditional US-backed free-trade pacts.

That’s why the American response matters so much.

Washington has a truly awful history of aligning itself with dictators and killers in Honduras. During the 1980s, the US used the country as a training ground for the Contra groups with which it mounted terrorist attacks upon attack Nicaragua. In return for assistance in that bloody business, Washington increased military aid from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million in 1984. The Honduran leadership devoted many of these resources to a murderous campaign against trade unionists, human rights workers and other dissidents. The Washington Post notes:

A CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras found that “the Honduran military committed most of the hundreds of human rights abuses reported in Honduras” between 1980 and 1984. The report added that “death squads” linked to the military had used tactics such as “killings, kidnapping and torture” to deal with people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.

Yet in 1983 Ronald Reagan had awarded General Alvarez, the commander in chief of the Honduran military and thus the man directly responsible for the bloodshed, for ‘encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras’. John Negroponte, US ambassador in Honduras, though widely accused of complicity with the death squads, was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the UN and then, most recently, to Iraq.

Given that history, the Honduran military, many of whom trained in the US, quite possibly expected support for the replacement of a man allied with Washington’s enemies (Cuba’s also a prominent ALBA member) with the more traditional authoritarian, free trading regime. You can get a glimpse of the reaction the coup plotters anticipated in the coverage provided by the Wall Street Journal. The paper enthusiastically backed Zelaya’s ouster under the Orwellian heading: “Honduras Defends Its Democracy: Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

By contrast, President Obama condemned the coup. Zelaya’s removal was “not legal”, he said, adding that “all of us have great concerns” about the situation.

Unfortunately, after that, Washington’s reaction became much more equivocal. Obama pointedly didn’t meet with Zelaya when he was in Washington; equally pointedly, Hilary Clinton did not demand the elected president’s return as a necessary component of a return to democratic rule.

These mixed signals allowed the Honduran military to believe that the Obama administration shared its pleasure in seeing President Zelaya out of the picture, albeit with qualms about the methods used. That’s why the generals think they can tough it out, crushing the protests and keeping Zelaya’s plane out of the country sufficiently long enough to quietly reach an accommodation with Washington.

So what Obama does now matters immensely. As in Iran, protesters are dying. But this time, the US could, if it chose, significantly lessen the prospect of further violence without resort to missile strikes, invasions or anything of that order.

The whole point of the coup, after all, was to drag Honduras back into Washington’s orbit. A strong signal of disapproval from Washington — like, say, cutting the extensive military ties between the two countries — would go a long way to pulling the rug out from under the whole anti-democratic scheme.