Fear and Loathing in Honduras

Sometimes, a single piece of physical evidence can overpower thousands of words of speechifying. A reporter for Telesur TV takes the cameras to the presidential palace, to show viewers evidence of the June 28 coup. A slat has been kicked out of the president’s bedroom door. The door has been so warped that for a moment the TV people can’t figure out how to open it. An even larger section is missing from the door to the president’s daughter’s bedroom. Inside the president’s own room the bed’s still undone, and a pair of dress shoes rest awry on the floor. Everything is just as President Manuel Zelaya left it when he was taken at gunpoint to the plane that renditioned him to Costa Rica.

The post-coup government in Tegucigalpa is trying to convince the international community the coup was a “constitutional succession.” But the doors smashed during the military raid tell another story. Even the military’s top lawyer has admitted to the Miami Herald that the kidnapping of the president was an illegal act.

It was like original sin. From the moment the Honduran military erupted into the president’s bedroom on June 28 and told him to drop his cell phone, something was broken in Honduras. A quarter century of peaceful democratic life doesn’t come easy in Latin America. Honduras had a good streak going there.

De-facto President Roberto Micheletti has told the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the governments of virtually every other country in the world that they can go to hell. They all demand Zelaya’s reinstatement as president. But instead, Micheletti has vowed to stay in power. The increasingly hard line of the post-coup government has pushed Honduras to the edge. Tegucigalpa’s streets fill with protests and counter-protests, so do the highways in the countryside.

When the coup occurred, Zelaya was unpopular, politically isolated, and as he always had been, a bit erratic. He wanted to consult the voters, through a ballot measure, on whether or not they’d be favorable to a rewrite of the Constitution. He denies his purpose was ultimately to strike out a ban on re-election, but that’s what his many opponents allege: that he wanted continuismo, to remain in power indefinitely. If President Zelaya was as unpopular as opinion polls showed (with only a quarter of the population approving of him), then the measure should have easily been defeated. Even if it had not, Zelaya still would have faced several political challenges if he had wanted to lift the ban on re-elections: Honduran voters could have stopped him. If they had, the history books would have made little room for Manuel Zelaya. But now with the capital Tegucigalpa toxic with political rancor he has got the moral high ground. If violence erupts, he might blame, with a great deal of persuasiveness, the coup that burst through his bedroom door and caught him in his pajamas.

Now, Latin America’s more colorful presidents are making veiled threats against the post-coup government of Micheletti. Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, said that it would be a”declaration of war” if any of his diplomats are harassed. “They should give this guy a tranquilizer,” joked Jaime Bayly, a talk host on Mega TV news in Miami, while discussing Honduras a few days ago. Nicaraguan diplomats at the Organization of American States yesterday made sinister allegations the coup promoters were preparing violent actions, which they would then blame, Reichstag fire-style on destabilizing elements from Nicaragua and Venezuela (Zelaya allies).

The battle lines are drawn in Tegucigalpa, lets hope they’re not crossed. It will be especially hard for citizens in Tegucigalpa to keep their swords sheathed if, as he has vowed, Zelaya returns in person to rally his supporters.