If President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are sincere in their professions of enthusiasm for democracy and popular rule, they should join every other state in the region and withdraw our ambassador from Honduras. They should also suspend all U.S. military aid to the country until its democratically elected president is restored. NYT reports:
The United States, which provides millions of dollars in aid to Honduras and maintains a military base there, is the only country in the region that has not withdrawn its ambassador from Honduras. France and Spain have also recalled their ambassadors.
If they don’t, and if the military junta that has illegally seized control of our regional neighbor Honduras stays in place, we can chalk this up as another example of “saying one thing but doing another” that seems to be becoming an all too frequent pattern by the Obama administration.
BMG raised the most money for Obama for America of any blog in the country except for DailyKos. It pains me to see such a wide gap opening between the candidate we supported and the president we got. I accept that six months is not four years, and the 2012 presidential campaign will not begin for another year or two, but the record to date, especially considering the large Democratic majorities the administration has to work with, raises questions.
Discuss
23 Comments . Comments are closed.Militarty junta?
They were acting under orders of their Supreme Court, and the new President is the leader of their legislature. They are following the laws of their Constitution, while the old president was ignoring it and acting like a dictator. Aren't we supposed to be for the rule of law there?
Exactly
A president who was acting contrary to the Constitution was removed through means contrary to the Constitution. While he should have been removed differently, he was acting unliterally and again diktats by other branches which he was legally required to obey.
I'm not saying anyone is covered in glory here, but this is deeper than a standard coup.
Utter rubbish
CNN:
Of course there was a pretext. Coups almost always have pretexts. But a quick show of hands and a forged letter of resignation hardly rises above the run of the mill.
By all means, defend the coup. Maybe there are good arguments for it. But don't insult people's intelligence by pretending that this is anything other than a group of military officers pushing pushing out a democratically elected leader.
Insufficient knowledge
Bob, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't feel I know enough to agree with you, either. I've read that the country's Supreme Court ordered the president removed from office, and it seems that the Congress has designated the new president. There is, as you say, some issue about whether or not the president resigned.
Do you know enough about Honduran constitutional law to say that this was illegal?
TedF
Eight soldiers pointing guns at the president, hustled out in his pajamas
Hardly sounds like the normal constitutional protocol for replacing the president.
Just read the writing on the wall.
Maybe
On the other hand, the president apparently has a "presidential guard" that the soldiers disarmed. Again, I just don't know enough to know whether this was unjustified.
TedF
He was removed from the country at gunpoint
That's not the rule of law, that's the removal of the president (regardless of the order from the Supreme Court) to another country - pretty crummy due process if you ask me.
Maybe
Maybe you're right. On the other hand, "That's not the rule of law ... regardless of the order from the Supreme Court" seems to me to be prima facie wrong. But as I say, I don't know enough about Honduran law to say.
TedF
Invective and CNN aren't enough
BBC
So he was doing an illegal electoral act contrary to the wishes of the duly elected and appointed government of his country.
So charge him with a crime
and put him on trial. This is a coup, because he's been kicked out of the country. Even if he's guilty (of the heinous crime of asking the people if they'd consider changing the constitution), the supreme court didn't conduct a trial, the president was not able to make a defense.
This is the equivalent of the court ruling that the war in Iraq was illegal and calling on the military to oust Bush and Cheney. I'm not sure about the process for removing the President under the Honduran constitution and this might be legal, but if it is, it stinks.
Thank you
As I said originally, nobody is covered in glory here. But to think "Latin America + presidential evacuation = anti-democratic coup" -- as is the flavor of some posting here is simply incorrect. This is the second coup to take place in Honduras recently -- the first was committed by the president. Of course, it didn't involve soldiers waving around guns so it got no press.
The process was not followed, this is true. The president should have been removed by other means, but no mistake, he should have been removed.
okay I'll bite
I'm no expert, and I'll admit I've got a soft spot for leftist regimes in Latin America. I'll also admit I'm far more likely to forgive or ignore the transgressions of regimes who veer towards the left than I am of those who veer to the right. So, I'm sympathetic to Zelaya, and not so much the congress.
That being said, you're making the claim that what he was doing was illegal and a coup. This guy says the court was wrong. That in spite of the supreme courts actions, what Zelaya was planning was totally legal.
He argues that the vote was a non-binding question of whether to convene a national assembly to re-write the constitution. This would get around the problem of the constitution barring the president from running again or amending the constitution to allow anyone to run again.
So it's not clear what he was doing was illegal, immoral or wrong. Maybe it's all of those things, but I'm not sure. What is known, however, is that this November there's going to a presidential election and Zelaya isn't a candidate. So to characterize Zelaya's actions as a coup in line with what happened to him is stretching it.
It's also worth noting that the guy who's illegally taken over as president lost in the primary to be the next candidate, so he's got some incentive to grab power and has shown he's willing to play ball with a military coup... In everything I've read Zelaya was setting himself up to run for the next election under a new constitution - if the people of Honduras were okay with that, maybe we should be too.
Depends.
"This would get around the problem of the constitution barring."
I don't know anything about the Honduras constitution (or functional equivalent), but it could be that the executive is barred from introducing ballot questions, or that all ballot questions must go through the legislature. If so, his protestations that it was just a wee tiny little non-binding thing might not fly at all legally. In such a case his attempts would be a power grab - however minor or reasonable. Of course, I'd hope there would be some kind of impeachment process that was supposed to be followed before it came to guys with guns.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were legal violations on both sides here. (Sounds embarrassingly Border-ish, but there it is.)
Should be $quot;Broder-ish$quot;
?
Broder-ish?
Yes.
Broderism:
I can't speak to the accuracy of it, but the linked article says he can
It's also possibly true that there were legal violations on both sides, but the consequences of those violations are very different. In one, we get a non-binding ballot question, on the other we get the removal of a President by gunpoint.
Obama should get in line with the international community and pull our Ambassador from Honduras.
And George Bush and Dick Cheney never lied about Iraq
Sarah Palin is pro-environment, and John McCain understands economics.
When eight soldiers point rifles at the chest of the elected president and hustle him onto an airplane out the country, that's a coup.
If the law was being followed, they could simply have arrested him and charged him in court.
Tolerance for this kind of illegality weakens the United States because it builds popular resistance to us in countries from Mexico to Argentina, not to mention outside the Americas. We're the world's biggest debtor nation. Without the support of others to finance our deficits, get ready for a substantial drop in the U.S. standard of living.
?
How are presidents usually arrested? The eight rifles are surely customary, I would expect no fewer, out of respect.
I don't understand why or how he is in Costa Rica and not in jail though, whether it is a coup or Constitutional, what's he doing there? Perhaps that is also the custom?
get ready for a substantial drop in the U.S. standard of living.
Oh, absolutely!
President Obama is doing exactly the right thing
As prior comments observe, the situation in Honduras remains murky. President Obama is doing exactly the right thing by staying focused on our national priorities in the absence of a compelling reason to act quickly in Honduras.
In doing so, he models the leadership behavior I would like to see closer to home.
$quot;absence of a compelling reason to act quickly in Honduras$quot;
How about U.S. relations with the hundreds of millions of people who live south the Rio Grande. Do you think they don't remember the sorry history of this country's deposing of various elected governments, encouraging the murder of leaders we didn't like, and generally riding roughshod over their ability to run their own countries?
Or let's look further afield. Our soldiers are fighting and dying, allegedly, for the principle of democracy, self-governance and freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. It completely undercuts those missions for us to tolerate a gang of generals in our own neighborhood who decided to replace their judgment for the will of their people.
News travels fast these days. The whole world is connected. There are many compelling reasons -- economic, political and strategic -- for the U.S. to act immediately on the subject of Honduras and support democratically elected power transitions.
Democracy vs perceived US national interest
The nation's website has an analysis:
Apparently Zelaya started out on the "center right", supporitng CAFTA, etc. but has moved left and now hangs around with Chavez and co.
The author chalks the US reluctance to take a strong stance in favor of restoring Zelaya up to:
concern about a major US military base; apparently declaring the incident a "coup"
and a desire to bring Zelaya back into the neoliberal fold
The Nation template
They'd write that story about any Latin American nation that was going through this sort of thing. Zelaya was similar to Morales in Bolivia -- he reached very far, and pushed to accrue power regardless of the Constitution, and when he got pushed back started aping Chavez. The same way that any leader in the Cold War who got pushed back by a pro-American legislature went running to the soviets.
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