Whatever comes next in Honduras, tens of thousands of ordinary Hondurans, from its new culture of resistance, will meet it with nerves of steel, forged in the terrible repression that followed the military coup last June. At least 40 people in the resistance have been killed, more than 3,000 illegally detained, and hundreds raped, beaten, and/or tortured in detention. For every person who has bravely come forward to testify about human rights abuses, there are five behind him or her terrified to speak out for fear of reprisals. And yet Hondurans have emerged from all this with a new sense of their own personal and collective powers. What exactly is this new creature, the Honduran resistance?

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.