In a Coup in Honduras, Ghosts of Past U.S. Policies

This article can be found here.

October 30, 2009

On Sunday morning, June 28, 2009, President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras awakened to the sound of cocked guns. After a twenty minute gunfight between his guards and the Honduran army, the soldiers escorted Zelaya to the airport to be exiled in Costa Rica. All of this took place the day after the president made a spontaneous move to hold a public vote that would give the option to allow for his eligibility in the upcoming presidential election. Doing so would lengthen his 4 year term limit and question the legitimacy of the Honduran Constitution. Earlier in the week, the president had also made drastic moves to remove the leader of the armed forces and the Supreme Court had ruled Zelaya’s intention to altering the constitution as unlawful. Zelaya had been leading an effort to change the Central American nation's constitution for quite a while before he was finally ousted, and there had always been a suspicion that there would be an attempt to arrest the president. No one expected something as drastic as a violent coup d’état.

The day following the coup, President Barack Obama held a press conference condemning the act as setting a "terrible precedent" for the region. Many believe that his adament rejection of the overthrow was meant to defy the assumption of outside peoples that America may have had a hand in the aggressive maneuver. It goes back to the Cold War, a time when it was not uncommon for the United States to interfere with Latin American governments under the influence of communist governments. In Guatemala, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and many other nations, America asserted its democratic ideology by backing the party in opposition to Communism, either monetarily or with weapons. For example, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela said that the C.I.A. may have had a hand in the president’s removal. Of course, he may be drawing from his experience with the Bush administration, which in 2002 offered a rapid, tacit endorsement of a short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez.