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 Women’s fashions are out-of-date and guards nestling big rifles guard beauty salons and pharmacies as they have for decades.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:

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.

Sometimes admiration comes from unlikely places

Barack Obama’s American admirers are not the only ones who compare former U.S. President John F. Kennedy to the current U.S. leader. Leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a vociferous critic of the United States, also invokes the charismatic late president when he talks about Obama, who, like Kennedy 48 years earlier, was a young senator when he was elected to the White House.

Chavez brought up Kennedy again this week, as he railed against Washington over the coup in Honduras, which many observers have called an unwelcome reminder of the ousters of Latin American leftists during the Cold War — waged partly under Kennedy.

Obama must “stop dithering” and prove that he is not supporting the coup, Chavez thundered during “Alo Presidente,” his weekly television show.  ”I want to remember President Kennedy,” Chavez said, during the seven-hour broadcast.

“U.S. imperialism killed him, and I hope it does not kill   Obama, because Obama is in the same shirt of 11 rods, a shirt of 11 rods,” Chavez said, using a Spanish idiom referring to a situation too large for someone to handle.

 Chavez has been no fan of recent U.S. leaders. He repeatedly called George W. Bush “the devil.” And he has said he fears Obama has the “stench” of his predecessor, whom he accused of backing a brief coup against him in 2002.

But Kennedy is Chavez’s favorite U.S. president and the fiery ex-paratrooper has reminisced about his childhood admiration for the slain leader, despite his anti-Communism and backing of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which sought to oust Chavez’s mentor, Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

from Tales from the Trail:

Honduran coup tests Obama in Latin America

Deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya got his strongest endorsement yet from President Barack Obama on Tuesday as the exiled leftist leader returned to Washington to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.    The United States has joined Latin America in unanimously condemning the military coup in the banana-producing country that ran Zelaya out of town in his pajamas ten days ago.   But Washington has been reluctant to slap sanctions on Honduras and cut off U.S. aid. Instead it is cautiously looking for a negotiated and peaceful resolution to a crisis that looks like a win-win situation for the United States' main adversary in the hemisphere, Venezuela's leftist leader Hugo Chavez.   Zelaya, a wealthy rancher who turned left in office and signed on to Chavez's growing anti-U.S. coalition, is hardly the best poster boy for democracy. His moves to follow Chavez's example and extend presidential term limits in Honduras sparked the political crisis in which the Honduran Supreme Court, with the backing of Congress, ordered the army to oust the president.   After years of U.S. neglect of Latin America during the Bush administration, Obama is trying to improve relations with the region and cannot afford to be on the wrong side of a crisis that many Latin Americans see as a flashback to a dark era of military dictatorships supported by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Pentagon suspended military cooperation with Honduras last week, even though it maintains a U.S. base in the Central American country that served as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the 1980s when the United States was supplying the Contra war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas.   Experts on Latin America warn that the close relationship with the Honduran military could lead the United States to do what it had done for decades during the Cold War: side with the elites.   "The battle between Zelaya and his opponents pits a reformist president supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president," said Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.   Dan Erikson, of the Inter-American Dialogue, believes Chavez is well-positioned to benefit from any outcome.   "If Zelaya is restored, then another Chavez ally remains in power. If the coup is not reversed, then Chavez has a new issue with which to rally anti-American sentiments in the region. The bottom line is that Chavez is engaged in trying to exploit the Honduran coup to maximum advantage," Erikson said.      The hemisphere has still not figured out how to contain a new breed of power-grabbing populist leaders like Chavez who have risen through the ballot box, Erikson said.   But whatever their authoritarian tendencies might be, there is broad consensus today --unlike in decades past-- that military coups against democratically elected governments are totally unacceptable.

Reuters photos by Luis Galdamez (Zelaya at San Salvador airport on July 5); Daniel LeClair (soldiers stop a woman), and Henry Romero ( Zelaya supporter protesting after soldiers fire tear gas at Tegucigalpa airport, where troops blocked the runway on July 5 to prevent the ousted president from landing).

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. )