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Honduras Tells Chavez and Obama to Butt Out

By Larry Johnson on June 29, 2009 at 9:23 PM in Current Affairs

By now most of you have heard of the “coup” in Honduras. The media, ever ignorant, is going with the story line that the military has ousted a democratic leader. Here’s the AP view:

Police and soldiers clashed with thousands of protesters outside Honduras’ national palace Monday as world leaders from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez demanded the return of a president ousted in a military coup.

Leftist leaders pulled their ambassadors from Honduras and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called for Hondurans to rise up against those who toppled his ally, Manuel Zelaya.

“We’re ready to support the rebellion of the Honduran people,” Chavez said, though he did not say what kind of support he was offering.

But there is a lot more to this story then most of the press is reporting.

For starters the ousted President, Zelaya, had become close buddies with Chavez of Venezuela and was pushing to over turn the Honduran Constitution that limited Presidents to one term. This was not your typical military coup. This had the backing of the legislature and the judiciary. But Zelaya is doing a good job of playing the victim and we have seen a decided leftward tilt throughout Central and South America. Besides Chavez you have the leaders in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia with bona fide ties to the radical left.

This was an ultimate fuck you to the United States by the Hondurans. They did not look to the United States for protection or advice. They acted on their own. In the past the United States has had success working behind the scenes to keep the military out of government. It is now clear that the Honduran power structure does not care what Washington thinks and is going to protect itself from falling under the influence of Venezuela’s Chavez.

The irony here is that the President Zelaya was trying to thwart the law in Honduras and was seeking a Chavez type solution, and yet he is now playing the victim with some success. The WSJ Online adds this snippet:

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

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.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

What should the US do? I think Hillary’s cautious comments (in contrast to pretty harsh comments last night) this afternoon strike the right tone in contrast to Barack’s condemnation of the Hondurans. Although we normally want to discourage military intervention in politics this time it was justified. The Honduran President decided to usurp the Honduran Constitution. It is important to note that the However, the military move was not motivated by a desire to protect a parochial military issue. A majority of the legislature and the judiciary back what the military did.

The U.S. needs to get engaged. If we let the gang led by Chavez, Castro, Ortega take the lead then we are ceding the people of Honduras to the thuggery of Venezuela’s Chavez.

Here’s my full disclosure. I was the Honduran analyst at the CIA from 1986 thru 1989. I also lived in Honduras running a community development in the campo back in 1978. Honduras is not Guatemala, where you had a government that embarked on a policy of exterminating the Mayan culture. In Honduras the military has been one of the middle class roads for upward mobility. The Honduran military is not a tool of some landed elite. Their intervention sends a pretty strong message that they are not going to sit by idly and let their nation go the way of Venezuela.