Posts in "Honduras"

Kelse Moen's picture
By Kelse Moen at 5:08PM
Jul 10, 2009

What Happened in Honduras

Philip Giraldi at AntiWar.Com has a good article on the Honduran coup. He lays out, in a very objective fashion, the underlying causes of the coup; as such, his article seems a good place to start for those who know little about it.  Writes Giraldi:

Last month a crisis that had been building for nearly a year exploded.  President Manuel Zelaya, a wealthy rancher elected as a center leftist in 2006 but turned populist after entering into office, proposed a non-binding referendum that would have supported amending the country’s constitution.  Zelaya said that he was interested in changing the constitution to help the poor, though he did not propose any specific remedies.  But according to most Hondurans, the particular part of the constitution that he was interested in obtaining a mandate for eventually amending was a non-amendable part that was designed to keep presidents like him from remaining in office beyond their constitutionally permitted terms. Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution reads in translation: "No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years."  A number of Latin American countries have such clauses in their constitutions to avoid the establishment of presidents-for-life, which have resulted in continuous one party rule [emphasis added].

This, I think, is the crux of the matter. The Wilsonians of the left and right might cry about "democracy" and "the rights of man," but what we really saw in Honduras was the divided government working as it is supposed to. The other branches of government saw the executive trying to arrogate power and they deposed him. Isn't it a little embarassing that now Honduras takes the Constitution and the rule of law more seriously than do we, here in democracy's Shining City on the Hill?

Perhaps most importantly, Giraldi ends with a moral:

[The coup] is a Honduran problem that cries out to be left alone.  It is not the business of the United States, its president, and secretary of state.

One would think not. But, in the land of the NSA, we don't know the meaning of the phrase "mind your own business."


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Don Rasmussen's picture
By Don Rasmussen at 6:51PM
Jul 3, 2009

Honduras: What to Make of World Reaction

"We love our democracy, but we do not like Zelaya"

"We love our democracy, but we do not like Zelaya"

When news of the events in Honduras broke on Sunday morning, the response from the international media was immediate and piqued.  "Coup in Honduras" flashed across millions of TV screens around the world.  As hundreds of newsroom directors rushed to find Honduras on a map, the sense from the media was indignation and shock.  References to the "bad, old days" of Central America abounded, recalling vicious and often bloody military take-overs.

Enter into this environment the deposed man himself, Mel Zelaya, speaking from a conference room inside the airport in Costa Rica; a visibly irritated Costa Rican president Oscar Arias by his side. Zelaya proceeded to spin a harrowing tale of a military siege and being roused from his bed, forced to hide to avoid the flying bullets, and finally being beaten and hustled off to a plane bound and unaware whether he would live or die.  The media carried the news conference live and picked up Zelaya’s story as gospel feeding the emerging narrative of a return to those bad, old days.

Through it all, the government said little and had no prepared media response.  Zelaya’s claims went unchallenged and the government has spent the last week digging out of the public relations nightmare.  The reaction of world leaders was therefore little surprising.

Therefore, I am not so quick to put President Obama firmly in the camp of Hugo Chavez.  I think the administration's response says more about their relative inexperience and emotion-driven way of approaching issues than anything else.  The State Department and a number of key staffers have stepped back and used more neutral language in the last couple of days, but the White House now finds itself in the awkward position of having already called for Zelaya to be restored.  However, we are hearing more talk of “a legal, transparent process” and calls for “the rule of law” rather than the shrill tenor of Sunday and Monday.

The more disturbing pattern is the failure of Obama to get on the right side of any of these foreign issues, from Iran to Honduras he has failed to pick the side of liberty, insomuch that he should be interfering at all.  As I observed on my Facebook page, Obama seems to be turning in to Jimmy Carter faster than Jimmy Carted did.


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Bonnie Kristian's picture
By Bonnie Kristian at 11:29PM
Jun 29, 2009

"Freedom and democracy" for Iran but not Honduras? It sounds like Ron Paul was right...again.

As the sole dissenting vote in a resolution condemning the Iranian government, Ron Paul recently argued that it is hypocritical to condemn one oppressive government if we do not do the same for all.  Not surprisingly, that has kind of already happened:

The contested election in Iran received widespread attention from both the traditional US media and new media sources including blogs and micro-blogs such as Twitter. Americans wishing to show solidarity with the Iranian people tinted their Twitter avatars green and also wore the trademark color of resistance. The media told us this was all part of a new digital form of solidarity. And yet this solidarity movement starts and stops with this specific Iranian election. There was no such media-led solidarity movement during the 2003 contested election in Azerbaijan or Egypt's contested 2006 election. Likewise, there is no solidarity movement in the US media for the people of Honduras where President Manuel Zelaya has just been ousted during a military coup. The media has not aggressively pursued this story despite the fact that the US is highly influential in Honduras, and the coup was led by General Romeo Vasquez, who is himself a graduate of the US Army School of the Americas. Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill reports that the School of America graduates "maintain ties to the US military as they climb the military career ladders in their respective countries."
There is little media interest in the Honduras story even though it seems the US government had advanced knowledge of the coup.

The bit about the School of the Americas (SOA) is particularly important: the SOA is a U.S. government-run training facility for members of South American militaries.  Its graduates have been widely implicated in massacres, assassinations, and the establishment of brutal dictatorships.  The situation in Honduras seems to be more of the same, and despite a situation which is every bit as severe as the one in Iran and arguably caused by the United States because of the role of the SOA, has recieved little attention from the media, Congress, or the Obama administration.  Attention from our government is probably not a good thing, of course, but its lack at least highlights our utter hypocrisy. Read more here.


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