As democratic states and non-governmental groups alike condemned the coup in Honduras, ousted president Manuel Zelaya insists that he will return to Tegucigalpa on Thursday, accompanied by Latin American dignitaries, including Jose Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States. Honduras may be expelled from the OAS at its emergency meeting today.
Pro-Zelaya demonstrators have clashed with security forces, demanding that the president be reinstated. Honduran trade unions have called for a general strike against the “unconscionable” coup.
“I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter,” said President Barack Obama, while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also condemned the coup. The unequivocal U.S. condemnation was welcomed by democrats across the hemisphere for sending a clear signal that military subversion of democratic processes and institutions was unacceptable.
“It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections,” said President Obama. “The region has made enormous progress over the last 20 years in establishing democratic traditions. … We don’t want to go back to a dark past.”
The U.S. is not yet threatening to cut off foreign assistance even though U.S. law prohibits aid other than democracy assistance for any state resulting from a military coup. Clinton shook her head no when asked today if Washington was considering cutting aid to Honduras.
But the World Bank has suspended payments and new projects following the coup. “We’ve basically put a pause with our lending,” bank president Robert Zoellick said. “It’s a situation that is in flux and fluid, and in this case we’re trying to play a supportive role with the region and its overall goals to restore democracy,” he said.
“The marching of the military into the presidential residence, the removal at gunpoint onto a plane out of the country — this conjures up images of what we thought was part of Latin America’s past,” said Christopher Sabatini, policy director for the Council of Americas, a former Latin America director for the National Endowment for Democracy.
The new government denies that Zelaya’s expulsion amounts to a coup, arguing that the army acted on the orders of the Supreme Court because the president was undermining the constitution. Zelaya was deposed after the court, Congress and members of his own party opposed his plans to amend the constitution to extend his term of office.
The region has seen a disturbing trend of constitutional changes extending presidential term limits and prerogatives which undermine democracy by stealth.
In Tegucigalpa, the Congress said that Zelaya’s “repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions” merited his removal. Critics suggest that Zelaya was acting above the law in trying to push through constitutional amendments that would allow him to remain in office, exhibiting some of the disturbing characteristics of recent creeping coups against democratic norms and institutions.
The coup is “one of the first major confrontations between someone following the [Hugo] Chavez line of what we call ‘constitutional editing’ and the institutional elites that exist in a country which have taken the view that changing the Constitution should not be made subject to a [referendum],” said international human rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam. There is a “definitional problem about whether this is indeed a coup or a counter coup,” he contends.
Honduran law only allows for constitutional changes to be made by a constituent assembly called through a national referendum approved by the Congress. But, as Mary Anastasia O’Grady notes, Zelaya arbitrarily announced such a referendum, defied a Supreme Court ruling that it was unconstitutional and “had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela.”
Zelaya sacked the head of the armed forces for complying with a Supreme Court order not to facilitate the vote. According to O’Grady’s account:
Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.
But the vast majority of democrats will argue that any military coup is indefensible, that conflicts must be resolved through the political process and that military intervention invariably undermines democratic institutions, often with perverse consequences. As The Washington Post notes:
The military’s intervention may have the unintended effect of saving Mr. Zelaya. The Congress voted him out of office on Sunday by a large margin; had the generals merely allowed events to proceed according to the rule of law, the president could have been legitimately deposed or isolated.
Some observers are concerned that the strong international support for Zelaya, despite his anti-democratic maneuvers in office, could have the perverse effect of legitimizing future coups-by-stealth. “The unconstitutional act being punished is the coup d’etat, not the death by a thousand cuts that comes before — the erosion of democratic institutions,” said Sabatini.
In defying Congress and the Supreme Court, thereby provoking military intervention in the weeks running up to the coup, Zelaya knew exactly what he was doing, writes Alvaro Vargas Llosa:
In pushing the limits of democracy by trying to force a constitutional change that would permit his re-election, he set a trap for the military. The military fell for it, turning an unpopular president who was nearing the end of his term into an international cause célèbre.
Even prior to the coup, Michael Shifter – another former director of the National Endowment for Democracy’s Latin American program - was making a similar point. “Zelaya has provoked this institutional crisis. He seems to have a very strong appetite for power,” said Shifter, now with Inter-American Dialogue. “He’s trying to be the victim, but he won’t get a lot of sympathy by defying the country’s institutions,” he said.
As is usually the case with military coups, the medicine may prove to be worse than the cure. In defying not only a high court ruling, but also the legislature and attorney general, Zelaya may well have been behaving like the populist caudillo his opponents warned he wanted to be.” But the coup means Honduras’ justices and generals have forfeited the legal and moral high ground and “made them look like the Latin oligarch lackeys of old.”
The forceful response of the OAS to the coup in Honduras jars with Andrés Martinez, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “Some of the very same regional players now urging a united front on behalf of democracy in Honduras are the same leaders who in recent months have been eager to embrace Cuba and give the tropical gulag nation a pass on its lack of democracy and basic civil liberties,” he writes.
Condemning the OAS’s “selectivity in doling out moral judgments”, he notes that the group readily invokes transnational legal commitment to democracy in the case of Honduras but not in the case of Cuba. “Such selective championing of freedom could prove fatal to the cause in the region, by further emboldening autocratic forces on both left and right,” he warns.
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