That Wacky Honduran Constitution

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, left, with Ecuador's President Rafael Correa (Image Presidencia de la República del Ecuador)

Another coup apologist surfaced yesterday in the Christian Science Monitor: “A ‘coup’ in Honduras? Nonsense.”

Of all the apologists, the arguments of Octavio Sánchez, a lawyer and former government minister in Honduras, are the best. He cites the 1982 Honduran Constitution, which contains four different explicit planks terminally prohibiting presidential re-election. His arguments deserve careful consideration.

In his view, the ousted President Manuel Zelaya ran afoul of these stipulations, thereby basically surrendering his presidency by default and breaking the law in the process. Hence, his arrest and forced exile to Costa Rica, while maybe unseemly, was fully lawful and in no way a “coup”.

Let us review events in Honduras: President Manuel Zelaya, scheduled to leave office in January 2010, wanted a referendum on whether or not a Constituent Assembly should rewrite the Constitution. Zelaya was suspected of wanting to seek re-election. But since expressing a wish for re-election would have exposed him to various penalties stipulated in the Constitution, he didn’t say so. In any case, he was thought to want continuismo– that is, the ability to be re-elected indefinitely.

Congressional leaders, among them interim President Roberto Micheletti, didn’t like the sounds of this referendum, mainly because they believed Zelaya to be a hand-puppet of Venezuelan firebrand Hugo Chávez. The country’s Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional. Zelaya pushed ahead anyways, at which point the Supreme Court ordered his arrest, and the Congress voted for his removal and replacement. With me so far?

In his op-ed, Sánchez points to Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution. It reads:

“No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

According to Sánchez, Zelaya’s actions showed an “intent” to reform the laws governing re-election.

But did they? The wording of his proposed referendum, which was to be held June 28, merely asked voters whether they thought a Constituent Assembly should be selected via ballot during the next national elections in November. It said nothing about re-election. I challenge coup apologists to present one single concrete piece of evidence proving Zelaya’s intent to reform re-election laws.

It’s true, the Honduran Constitution, written under the military government of U.S. stooge Policarpo Paz García in the early 1980s, is draconian on this subject of re-election and holding individuals to a single presidency. I personally think it goes a little too far. Granted, dictatorship was a huge problem throughout the Cold War in Latin America. But in most countries forbidding re-election, a six year term is deemed appropriate (Chile, Peru, Mexico). And other countries (Colombia, Brazil and Argentina) go by the U.S. system of two four-year terms.

Article 239 isn’t the only language against re-election in the 1982 Honduran Constitution. Article 4 says any infraction against the ban on re-election “constitutes treason.” Article 42 says  Honduran citizenship can be stripped from anyone who “incites, promotes, or supports the continuismo or re-election of the Republic’s president.” And Article 374 says the re-election prohibition can’t be changed, ever, even with a constitutional amendment.

In other words, there’s a straitjacket against calibrating a mechanism that’s crucial to the functioning of a democracy– the length of a presidential term and the right to re-election.

And to think that the good ole’ U.S. Constitution had no provisions against re-election until the 22nd Amendment was passed after World War II. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had served four terms in extraordinary times, but we didn’t want that to happen again. Still, U.S. presidents can still serve two terms.

Anyways, the comparisons are really beside the point. The 1982 Constitution is the law of the land for 7 million Hondurans, including the president. Even so, I don’t see how he violated it. If his intent was to seek re-election, then that needs to be conclusively proven. Because even if he had won the referendum for a Constituent Assembly, that doesn’t automatically mean the assembly would have taken place or that the re-election ban would have gone out the window. All these steps would have necessitated political negotiation and vetting by public opinion– as usual in a democracy.

Now with the coup, the constitutional order has been ruptured– the genie’s out of the bottle. The Honduran Constitution will be put under incredible scrutiny and strain until this mess is sorted out. And the coup leaders, meanwhile, have their own piece of the constitution to worry about, Article 3, which reads in whole:

“No one owes allegiance to an usurping government nor those who assume public office via force of arms or utilizing means and procedures that violate or circumvent what is in the Constitution and established by law. The acts taken by such authorities are null. The people have the right to recur to insurrection in order to defend the constitutional order.”