Outing the U.S. Media’s Honduran Coup Apologists

Soldiers Suppressing Protests in Tegucigalpa (Photo: R. Breve / full attribution below)

You have to hand it to them, the promoters of the weekend coup in Honduras are at least consistent. From the beginning, their line has been that their coup was necessary to preserve democracy in the Central American country. Never mind the clearly paradoxical and illogical nature of the argument– a few major U.S. publications and commentators have certainly bought it.

All these opinions rest their support for the coup on the argument that Zelaya was an out-of-control wannabe despot who needed to be reined in before it was too late. These are the facts: Zelaya, a wealthy rancher-turned-populist, was in the tail-end of his presidential term. He was avidly pursuing a nonbinding referendum, which would have asked voters if they favored a Constituent Assembly to overhaul the 27-year-old constitution. It was widely believed Zelaya’s ultimate intent was to rewrite the Constitution in order to seek re-election. The 1982 Constitution is strict about holding presidents to a single four-year term. But Honduras’s Supreme Court said Zelaya’s referendum was unconstitutional. The legislative branch also hated the idea. But President Zelaya stubbornly and aggressively forged ahead with his referendum, planned for Sunday, June 28. So the Supreme Court issued orders for his arrest. The military complied, and sent him packing to Costa Rica in his pajamas.

From these facts, coup apologists concoct the following scenario: Zelaya was set to revamp the constitution in order to make himself presidente por vida like his Venezuelan buddy Hugo Chávez. The coup was a pre-emptive strike in order to prevent this. They also argue Zelaya had to be punished for his flouting of the court’s order to put a lid on his referendum idea. The coup, in other words, removed a cancerous element from the democratic system. That’s the argument the Wall Street Journal editorial board uses when it says:

The military didn’t oust President Manuel Zelaya on its own but instead followed an order of the Supreme Court. It also quickly turned power over to the president of the Honduran Congress, a man from the same party as Mr. Zelaya. The legislature and legal authorities all remain intact.

Well, all legal authorities remain intact, that is, except for one: the chief executive, the presidente. What I’d like to ask the coup apologists is why a Honduran arm-wrestling match between branches of government justifies a coup.

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial, after praising the coup as democratic, admits it would have been better to impeach the president through legal means. Duh. The New Republic blogger Francisco Toro, in his quote above, admits the military’s kidnapping of the president was unconstitutional. But he says the coup helped restore checks and balances and quash an attempt to create a presidency with too much power, so he’s for it.

But real democrats don’t fight extra-legal actions with their own extra-legal actions, do they? By using the military as a proxy in a dogfight with President Zelaya, the legislators and judges dug Honduras deeper into the undemocratic hole.

As for the tarring of Zelaya with the broad brush of Chavismo (the creeping authoritarianism practiced expertly by Hugo Chávez in Caracas since 1998), it’s a bit like the domino effect used to justify the Vietnam War. The issue here is resolving the crisis in Honduras, not future scenarios in which Zelaya would have become a Honduran homunculus of Chávez. The facts must be examined independently of murky associations and supposed intentions.

OK: President Manuel Zelaya defied the Honduran Supreme Court by pushing ahead with his referendum to gauge voters’ opinions on rewriting the constitution. But the disciplining of a rogue president should have been a carefully considered step vetted for its constitutionality. A patient and even-handed response might have averted a polarization of Honduran society. But instead of a calibrated response, President Zelaya was chased from office at gunpoint. Honduras, among the hemisphere’s poorest nations, has now endured five days of utter chaos, and who knows how many more.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/breve/ / CC BY-SA 2.0