Did the international community underestimate Hondurans' anxiety about Zelaya’s radical-populist allies?
While provisional returns suggest that the opposition National Party’s Porfirio Lobo handily defeated Elvin Santos of the ruling Liberal Party in last Sunday’s election, the legitimacy of the poll is being contested.
As Honduran legislators debated the future of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, an election assessment mission published findings that the poll was “generally peaceful and orderly”, and made recommendations to help move the country beyond the current impasse.
Lobo and interim President Roberto Micheletti claimed that a 60 per cent turnout indicated Hondurans’ support for the electoral process and confirmed that most citizens want to draw a line under the constitutional crisis.
The election has highlighted divisions between the U.S., which supported the election as a means of resolving the crisis, and most Latin American states which claim that the poll should not be allowed to retrospectively legitimize the June 28 coup that deposed Zelaya.
Other observers defend his ejection from office as a defensive, pro-democratic response to Zelaya’s own creeping coup that threatened to undermine the country’s democratic process and institutions.
The Honduran Congress is facing international pressure to reinstate Zelaya to serve out the remainder of his term to year-end or face continued diplomatic isolation.
The National Democratic Institute’s election assessment mission recommends that the Truth Commission proposed in the Tegucigalpa/San José Agreement “should be established as soon as possible”. The commission should clarify events before and after the June 28 coup and examine subsequent human rights violations.
Zelaya, whose supporters had urged a boycott, claim 60 percent of voters abstained.
The level of abstention was “difficult to measure,’ NDI reports, but Hagamos Democracia, a local partner of the Washington-based democracy support group, reported a turnout rate of 48 percent.
Hagamos Democracia’s count had a low margin of error, NDI president Ken Wollack told The Associated Press, and accurately projected the result: 56 percent for Lobo and 38 percent for Santos. A 48 percent turnout was consistent with a recent trend of growing abstention in Honduras. The 55 percent turnout in the 2005 poll that brought Zelaya to office was 10 percentage points lower than in the previous election.
Analysts suggest that the international community underestimated the provisional government’s perception of the threat posed by Zelaya’s association with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his radical-populist allies.
“Everybody underestimated just how widespread the fear of Chavismo — rightly or wrongly — was in Honduras,” says Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.
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