Getting Loose in the Goose*
As far as military coups go, the one in Honduras was pretty mild. President Zelaya was pushing on with a referendum, which although nonbinding, is explicitly not allowed by the constitution. When the military refused to distribute ballots, he fired the head general and the Court reinstalled him. Eventually, the court ordered the military to arrest him, so they put him on a plane to Costa Rica and now the constitutional next in line is in power. They are even saying that they will have regular elections.
On face, these is a plausible argument that all the parties in Honduras that supported the coup were at least trying to protect democracy from Zelaya’s extreme ambition, and just went too far. But that doesn’t explain how recalcitrant the new president and the new military has been since then. They were indigant when the OAS voted to remove them and impose sanctions. And now they’ve redirected President Zelaya’s plane to El Salvador — even though the President of the General Assembly and Cristina Kirchner were rolling with him.
But the WSJ article about the flight reports that the de facto government has “signaled a new willingness to negotiate a solution.” My best guess is that they want Zelaya to come back after they negotiate some sort of agreement, or at least that he doesn’t come back on his own terms.
Also, I think the US really has a big role to play here. The OAS and Honduras’ Latin American neighbors seem to be taking an uncritical pro-Zelaya line, while the US seems less concerned with uncritically defending Zelaya and more worried about maintaining democratic norms in the region. And since the current government — and most of Honduras’s poltical actors — appear to be more anti-Zelaya than anything else, I think they would be amenable to some sort of deal that ensures his leaving office in a timely fashion.
*From now on, all posts about Honduras will have this title.
