Zelaya (second from left) may consort with leftists like Castro, Chavez and Ortega, but he 'has no ideological or intellectual convictions whatsoever,' one independent expert says.
The National Democratic Institute will deploy 20 international experts to conduct an impartial assessment of the November 29 election in Honduras. The international monitoring mission “presents special challenges”, NDI concedes, “given the sharp divisions within the country and between Honduras and the international community” since President Manuel Zelaya was deposed on June 28.
The long-running crisis could be drawing to a close if, as seems likely, Washington endorses the poll. “My sense is they’re preparing to recognize the elections,” said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, unless violence or a boycott by Zelaya supporters leads to a low turnout, in which case “it’s going to be difficult for the U.S. to recognize the winner as the legitimate president.”
But it seems unlikely that the international community will necessarily follow suit. “You can’t use an election to clean the slate after a coup,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director at the Council of the Americas. “It just threatens to roll back democratic norms in Central America by decades.”
While many on the right have claimed that Zelaya’s removal from office was entirely legal and in line with the Honduran constitution, his supporters on the left insist that the international community will dismiss the election as an exercise in retrospectively legitimizing a military coup.
Conservatives have criticized the Obama administration for ignoring Zelaya’s own attempts to mount a creeping coup d’état and demanding his restoration rather than siding with the country’s democratic institutions and the constitutional process that ousted him. But progressives have criticized the administration for supporting the elections, evidence of what they see as capitulating to pressure from Congressional Republicans who were holding up State Department appointees.
Others have condemned both sides for what Sabatini calls the tragic silliness of the drawn-out conflict (see this handy timeline of the dispute).
Many progressives have become disillusioned with Zelaya’s antics and maneuverings, realizing that he is more opportunist than committed radical. Independent experts tend to confirm such suspicions.
“He has no ideological or intellectual convictions whatsoever,” said Sabatini, a former Latin America program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy. “His ideology has always been a mélange of strange theories pulled from odd places that have no coherence and no bearing on reality.”
With one constitutional crisis potentially resolved, another is emerging in neighboring Nicaragua where Daniel Ortega is following the “creeping coup” strategy of fellow populists to end constitutional term limits.
The real danger to democracy stems from “Zelaya’s and Ortega’s tricks–a golpe desde el estado, in contrast to a golpe de estado, a coup from the state rather than against the state,” writes analyst Javier Corrales.
According to a recent report from the European Partnership for Democracy, the Honduran crisis is a “perfect example” of the conflict between the “extension of personalized political leadership” and the delicate political and institutional balances between different powers in Latin American states.
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