A Coup In Honduras
Roger Noriega
Meeting in urgent session in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, the Organization of American States (OAS) issued a demand that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya be restored to power, calling his ouster earlier that day "an unconstitutional alteration of the democratic order." The OAS Permanent Council proclaimed that it would not recognize any government resulting from that "coup d'état." Pretty strong stuff--but too little, too late.
Manuel Zelaya began his four-year term as president of the Central American Republic of Honduras in January 2006. The harsh fact is that most of his countrymen regarded Zelaya as a capricious blowhard who was too incompetent to do any permanent damage. Not surprisingly, when it came to shredding the Honduran constitution to allow him to seek a second term, they declined to go along with his clumsy power grab.
Most Latin American countries limit their presidents to single terms, mindful that too much power held for too long might produce a dangerous strongman. This phenomenon is common enough that Latins found it necessary to coin a word: caudillo. Caudillos had fallen out of fashion until Venezuela's dictator, Hugo Chavez, burst on to the scene in 1998.
Once he was elected in 1998, Chavez rammed through constitutional amendments that concentrated most of the powers of the state in his hands. In the coup de grace against Venezuelan democracy, last year he engineered a "reform" that permits him to seek the presidency indefinitely.
Chavez has urged his acolytes in Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Nicaragua--upon whom he has lavished vast sums of foreign aid--to shove aside constitutional norms to impose their will. That is precisely what Zelaya was attempting to do when he came up against the country's other democratic institutions, which declared unconstitutional a popular referendum that he hoped would bless his second term.
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