Global News Journal

The little coup that could, in Honduras

Honduras seems trapped in the past. Radio stations play aging hits from Mexican crooner Jose Jose and cumbia dance numbers from the mid-’80s. Women’s fashions are out-of-date and guards nestling big rifles guard beauty salons and pharmacies as they have for decades.

Politics are also mired in the past in this deeply conservative country of 7 million people. While elsewhere in Latin America a new generation of leftists has taken power, putting business leaders on the defensive to some extent and to varying degrees, Honduras’ business elite flexed its muscles when a leftist prsident hinted he wanted to extend presidential term limits.

For four months Honduras has been led by a de facto leader, Roberto Micheletti, who took over after the army, Supreme Court and Congress together pulled a coup on elected President Manuel Zelaya, who was flown out of the country. Zelaya later sneaked back in to take asylum in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. Repeated attempts at a negotiated settlement between the two have dissolved into bickering.

Micheletti has shown staying power — even after he was isolated on the global stage.  That’s because he is backed by a secretive and relatively small group of business leaders that have long wielded political power in this Central American country, which is heavily dependent on foreign aid and on its biggest trade partner, the United States. The Honduran Documentation Center think tank has documented the control that a group of intermarried families has on the country’s banks, industries such as the maquiladora factories that make clothes to export to the U.S., coffee and banana and cattle production, and power generation. The book “The Powers that Be and the Political System,” by a group of researchers, argues that the business class has increased its influence over politics since Honduras returned to democracy 30 years after two decades of off-and-on military regimes. The book says each business group owns a media outlet that helps it maintain and transfer power from the “dinosaur” leaders to the next generations of “babysaurs.”

No wonder Micheletti looks a little smug as he thumbs his nose at the international community, declaring a “unity and reconciliation” government without Zelaya’s participation after they both signed a pact to name a joint cabinet. Zelaya is backed by organizations that say they want profound social change in Honduras but apparently not badly enough to invite further repression from the military and the police and sow chaos Bolivian style with huge marches and road blocks all over the country.

A pro-Zelaya television station and radio station provide blanket coverage of the so-called resistance movement — after being briefly silenced by the Micheletti government — but most TV channels assemble morning talk shows with experts and lawmakers who support Micheletti. It’s not really a surprise. Honduras has never thrown itself in with the region’s leftist movments. All three countries bordering on Honduras — Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador — had major leftist insurgencies that profoundly altered the political landscapes in those countries whether or not they eventually came to power. Honduras, meanwhile, became a base for the U.S. counter-insurgency, or Contra movement, against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Photo captions and credits:

from Africa News blog:

Do Guinea’s dark days reveal junta’s colours?

In Guinea this week, at least 157 people were killed when security forces opened fire on a demonstration against military junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, according to a local rights group.

Much has changed since I visited the country in April and May this year. Then, the young Camara -- or "Dadis" as most Guineans refer to him – did not look particularly dangerous despite his images staring out from walls, buildings and roundabouts all over Conakry, and cassettes of his speeches on sale in the markets.

"Long live peace" was the graffiti of choice, and if expectations of real improvements in living standards were low, at least soldiers were in the barracks rather than shooting in the streets.

What was clear then was that a certain degree of patience had been extended to Camara both domestically and internationally.

Relief that the power vacuum opened by the death of former President Lansana Conte had not collapsed into violence, and populist anti-corruption rhetoric carried most Guineans through the first uneasy months. At the same time the international community swallowed its distaste for a military regime with the sweetening promise of elections by the end of the year.

As long as peace and the election timetable held, and Camara himself wasn't tempted into standing, Guineans and foreign partners would grit their teeth and give Camara and his National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD) breathing space to manage the transition.

That patience, which had shown signs of strain in recent months, has now run out. International condemnation has been swift and harsh for the deaths at the demonstration.

Honduras crisis unleashes media wars

TEGUCIGALPA – When ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya made a symbolic (and brief) return to his homeland on Friday, what could have been a potentially dangerous situation turned out to be a show for live television — a far cry from the bloody coups of the past in Latin America.

Even as he walked toward the border in sight of Honduran security forces waiting to arrest him, Zelaya, in his trademark cowboy hat, took a call from CNN’s Spanish language channel and conducted a long interview with the broadcaster.

The de facto leader of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, dismissed the scene as a media circus, “irresponsible, ill conceived and not very serious.”

Micheletti’s interim government has been using the media, too.

State television has been repeatedly playing rousing music over pictures of pro-Micheletti marches and slogans urging Hondurans to “Hold Firm” for peace and democracy. One of the most frequently played pieces is the stirring theme music from the 1980s movie about U.S. Navy fighter pilots, “Top Gun.”

Periodically, authorities cut transmission on all cable channels and broadcast announcements about curfews on local TV stations. Uniformed police officers are hosting news programs. 

At the time when Zelaya was staging his symbolic come-back on the border, state TV stations were showing a meeting of an electoral committee and a demonstration by Hondurans waving blue and white flags and holding placards (some in English) praising Micheletti and denouncing Zelaya.

When is a coup not a coup?

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was seized by the military, bundled onto a plane in his pajamas and flown out of the country. The people who took over the country last Sunday say it was not a coup.

The interim government, led by Congress speaker Roberto Micheletti, argue that Zelaya’s ouster was legal as it was ordered by the Supreme Court after the president had tried to extend his four-year term in office illegally.    They say he was acting unconstitutionally and had to be removed.    The rest of the world seems to disagree. From U.S. President Barack Obama to arch-U.S. rival Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, world leaders have condemned Zelaya’s removal and used the term “coup.”   In the days before the coup, opposition leaders said they planned to impeach Zelaya over his plan to hold an unofficial public survey to gauge support for letting presidents run for re-election beyond the current one four-year term. They said a congressional committee set up to investigate Zelaya found he had violated the Central American nation’s laws and would ask Congress to declare him unfit to rule.    Does one unconstitutional act justify another? In a democracy, is it ever justified for soldiers to seize a president and spirit him out of the country? Does the fact that Congress quickly elected a successor, who will serve only until presidential elections in November, make any difference?

  Defining the nature of the “coup” has been troubling lawyers at the U.S. State Department.   By law, no U.S. aid — other than for the promotion of democracy — may be given to a nation “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”    Two U.S. officials said the legal determination of this was complex despite the fact that Zelaya was grabbed by the military and put on a plane to Costa Rica in his pajamas.    “The military moved against the president. They removed him from his home and they expelled him from the country. So the military participated in a coup,” said a senior U.S. official.        “However, the transfer of leadership was not a military action. The transfer of leadership was done by the Honduran Congress and therefore the coup, while it had a military component … is a larger event,” he added.    Zelaya was unpopular with many in Honduras, particularly the country’s wealthier conservative elite, for his alliance with Chavez. His popularity was down to 30 percent.    Many Hondurans struggle to understand why foreign leaders, from Obama to most of Latin America’s presidents, have backed Zelaya.    “They have only listened to (Zelaya) abroad, they haven’t listened to the population. But that doesn’t matter. We will continue alone,” said Adela Guevara, a hotel worker.     Tell us what you think. When is a coup not a coup?

(Pictures in Honduras by REUTERS/Edgard Garrido. Pictures show: Soldiers crawling through a hole in the fence to enter the presidential residency; members of Congress praying before Roberto Micheletti is sworn in as interim president; Zelaya (L) being welcomed by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez (R) and Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega (C) after his arrival in Nicaragua June 29, 2009. )

Cheers for Africa’s new military ruler. For now.

Fifteen years ago this month, Guinea’s late ruler Lansana Conte made clear what form democracy would take under his rule.

We answered a summons to a late night news conference to hear the result of his first multiparty election, speeding through silent streets where armoured vehicles waited in the shadows. The interior minister announced that ballots from the east, the opposition’s stronghold, had been cancelled because of irregularities. Conte had therefore won 50.93 percent of the vote. There was no need for a run-off because he had an absolute majority.

The show was over.

We rushed off to file our stories at the press centre, set up helpfully by a government under pressure to show the world it was ready for fair elections. The press centre was gone, the lines cut. In the morning, fighter jets swept over Conakry in case the message had not been clear already.

There were more elections, there was occasional turmoil on the streets, sometimes bloodshed. At one point Conte was almost overthrown, but he managed to hold on until his death from illness on Monday.

In a matter of hours, the army – Conte’s real constituency – made clear he would be succeeded by one of his own instead of any of the civilian politicians who prospered under the system over which he kept such strong control.

Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, the head of the junta, was the first soldier to announce the coup on state radio. A Guinean website said the choice was made by drawing lots. Camara’s promises – heard many before times in Africa – are to fight corruption, to hold elections in a set period – in this case two years – and not to stand himself.

Drugs and guns in Guinea-Bissau

Members of Guinea-Bissau’s unruly armed forces have blotted the military’s record again with another attack against the country’s political institutions. Early on Sunday, Nov. 23, renegade soldiers, their faces hooded, sprayed the Bissau residence of President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira with machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire. The president survived unhurt this latest apparent attempt to topple him.

But The attack underlined the fragility of the small, cashew nut-exporting West African nation, one of the poorest in the world and a former Portuguese colony which has suffered a history of bloody coups, mutinies and uprisings since it won independence in 1974 after a bush war led by Amilcar Cabral. The assault followed parliamentary elections on Nov. 16 which donors were hoping would restore stability and put in place a new government capable of resisting the serious threat posed by powerful Latin American cocaine-trafficking cartels who use Guinea-Bissau as a staging post to smuggle drugs to Europe.

How can a little-known African country like Guinea-Bissau, prostrated by poverty, its government and military undermined by the corrupting influence of multi-million dollar drug-trafficking, dig itself out of underdevelopment?

How much damage will Mauritania’s coup do to Africa?

Soldiers took power in a coup in Mauritania on Wednesday after presidential guards deposed President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi when he tried to dismiss senior army officers. Abdallahi took over only last year after winning elections to replace a military junta that had ruled since it toppled the previous president in a bloodless coup in 2005. The largely desert nation, one of Africa’s newest oil producers, has suffered five coups since 1978 but Africa as a whole has transformed its reputation for violent government ousters in recent years after notching up around 80 successful coups and many more abortive attempts between the 1950s and 2004.

There have only been a handful of military seizures in the last five years compared to the heyday of military takeovers in the 1960s. In the mid-70s around half of African countries had military governments. Since then, democracy has gradually made ground and attempts to seize power are strongly frowned upon.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and once notorious for military government, suffered its last coup in 1993. 

The African Union condemned the Mauritania coup within hours on Wednesday, demanding that constitutional rule be restored. The AU was established in 2002 to replace the Organisation of African Unity which was discredited by its tendency to turn a blind eye to violence and tyrannical government in its member states. The AU has strongly condemned previous attempts to overthrow legitimate governments by force and threatened to “excommunicate” rebels who came close to overthrowing the Chadian government last February before being repulsed by forces loyal to President Idriss Deby. But despite the AU’s strong rhetoric, African diplomacy has generally had little success in reversing coups. 

Most African governments are now anxious to attract booming foreign investment on the continent and nervous that coups or crises like that in Zimbabwe, whose economy has collapsed, will frighten off overseas investors.

Turkey and the art of the coup

There can be few countries where the art of the coup is so finely honed as in Turkey, adapting as it does constantly to the spirit of the age, spawning over the decades its own enigmatic lexicon – the “Coup By Memorandum”, the “Post-Modern Coup”, the “Judicial Coup”, the ill-starred “e-Coup”.

Now newspapers (largely pro-government newspapers it should be said), gorge on tales of coup plots dubbed ‘Glove’, ‘Blonde Girl’ , ‘Moonlight’ and devote pages to a shadowy militant group code-named “Ergenekon”. Two retired military commanders, supposed members of the group, have been arrested at their homes on military compounds; a bold step by civilian authorities against an army that jealously guards its privileged status. Critics of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan call the arrests, also netting businessmen and journalists, a ‘revenge action’ for moves by the conservative judiciary to shut his AK party on charges of Islamist subversion.  Ertugrul Ozkok, editor of Hurriyet, a newspaper critical of the government ,  suggested authorities were riding roughshod over judicial processes. If  things are as they seem, he said, “none of us can feel comfortable any more. Any one of us can be taken from our homes and held in custody.”

Erdogan, facing a possible court ban from party politics, might also rest uneasily these sultry July nights.

Some coups have shaken Turkey to the core, others brought more subtle change. All have dealt a blow to democracy. A 1960 military putsch sent a prime minister and two other ministers to the gallows (as well as testing the unity of the forces themselves), four in the last 50 years have toppled governments. Turkish political folklore is rich with other conspiracies supposedly involving the “Deep State” – a nebulous fraternity of militant nationalists in the security services, military, judiciary and civil service.

Why such a rich “coup culture” in Turkey?

Perhaps it’s something to do with the way the rails of Turkish democracy snake along so narrow a ledge. To one side the abyss, the fear of division and chaos many Turks seem to carry within. To the other side the forbidding, towering heights of a powerful and distrusting Pashas, or generals. At every tight turn the train will scrape against the granite face of one or teeter precariously towards the edge of the other.