Short Takes
Tom Quigley
Democracy Undone
thE U.s. & thE hoNDUraN MEss
H
onduras is one of the poorest countries in the West- and authorized his removal. The head of the legislature, Ro-
ern hemisphere—a land, it has been said, where even berto Micheletti, was sworn in as president pro tem.
the rich are poor. A casual observer might expect Over the course of the summer, as Zelaya’s supporters and
Honduras’s reputation for political tranquility, favorable lo- opponents, both in Honduras and abroad, debated whether the
cation for trade, and valuable natural resources to generate ouster was a coup d’etat or a lawful action, street battles be-
some modest level of prosperity. Yet just the opposite hap- tween the pro-Zelaya “insurgents” and the police and military
pened in the twentieth century, as Honduras became, in the officials of the Micheletti government marred public debate
words of Alison Acker’s Honduras: The Making of a Banana (and resulted in several deaths). Behind the specific charges
Republic, “a beggar nation, a sieve for international aid, a lurked the strong suspicion that Zelaya had been moving the
country for rent.” country in a direction similar to the anti-American “Bolivar-
The United States did some of that renting three decades ian Revolution” of Chávez in Venezuela, with its restrictions
ago, when Central America was the Reagan administration’s on civil liberties and nationalization of foreign companies.
top foreign-policy issue. Back then, revolutionary insurgen- Zelaya, meanwhile, had returned to the country and found
cies in Central America, and especially the 1979 Sandinista sanctuary in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.
overthrow of Nicaraguan president Somoza, turned Hondu- The intricacies of U.S.–Latin American relations over re-
ras into a training and staging area for U.S. military forces in cent decades put the Obama administration in an awkward
the region. The country became known as
“the Pentagon Republic” or “U.S.S. Hon-
duras”—“a satellite,” wrote columnist Jack
Anderson, “that could be trusted, bought
and paid for by the United States.” By the
end of the ’80s, however, the Sandinistas
fell from power; peace accords were signed
in Guatemala and El Salvador; and Hondu-
ras vanished from the U.S. radar. Revert-
ing to its traditional peaceful, if desperately
poor, status quo, the country rarely got a
mention—never mind a front-page head-
line—in the American press.
Then came the events of this past June
28, when Honduran soldiers rousted Presi-
dent José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya out of bed
and put him on a plane to Costa Rica. The
ouster capped an intense political and con-
stitutional struggle. The Honduran consti-
tution criminalizes any presidential attempt
Commonweal . December 18, 2009
to stay in office beyond the elected term. Ze-
laya, a wealthy landowner and timber mag-
nate, had become something of a populist,
aligning himself not only with the Hondu-
ran Left but with the “new Left” of Latin
America—Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicara-
gua’s Daniel Ortega, Ecuador’s Rafael Cor-
rea, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. When
Zelaya proposed a referendum to seek popu-
lar support for amending the constitution (in
yamil gonzales
hopes of extending his own