Honduras's Coup Is President Zelaya's Fault

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa - Any time a bunch of soldiers break into a presidential palace, pick upthe president and put him on a flight to exile, as happened inHonduras last Sunday, you have a "coup." But, unlike most coup targetsin Latin America's tortuous republican history, Honduras's deposedpresident, Manuel Zelaya, bears the biggest responsibility for hisoverthrow. A member of the rancid oligarchy he now decries, Zelaya took office in2006 as the leader of one of the two center-right parties that havedominated Honduran politics for decades. His general platform, hissupport for the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the UnitedStates and his alliances with business organizations gave no inklingof the fact that halfway into his term he would become a politicalcross-dresser.Suddenly, in 2007, he declared himself a socialist and began toestablish close ties with Venezuela. In December of that year, heincorporated Honduras into Petrocaribe, a mechanism set up by HugoChávez for lavishing oil subsidies on Latin American and Caribbeancountries in exchange for political subservience. Then his governmentjoined the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean(ALBA), Venezuela's answer to the proposed Free Trade Area of theAmericas, ostensibly a commercial alliance but in practice a politicalconspiracy that seeks to expand populist dictatorship to the rest ofLatin America. Last year, following the script originally laid out by Chávez inVenezuela and adopted by Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa inEcuador, Zelaya announced that he would hold a referendum to set up aconstituent assembly that would change the constitution that barredhim from reelection. In the next few months, every legal body inHonduras -- the electoral tribunal, the Supreme Court, the attorneygeneral, the human rights ombudsman -- declared the referendumunconstitutional. According to the Honduran constitution (articles 5,373 and 374), presidential term limits cannot be changed under anycircumstance; only Congress can modify the constitution; and politicalinstitutions are not subject to referendums. Honduras's Congress,Zelaya's own Liberal Party and a majority of Hondurans (in variouspolls) expressed their horror at the prospect of having Zelayaperpetuate himself and bring Honduras into the Chávez fold. Indefiance of court orders, Zelaya persisted. Surrounded by a friendlymob, he broke into the military installations where the ballots werekept and ordered them distributed. The courts declared that Zelaya hadplaced himself outside the law, and Congress began an impeachmentprocedure.This is the context in which the military, in an ill-advised move thatturned a perfectly legal mechanism for stopping Zelaya into a coup,expelled the president. The fact that the constitutional procedure wassubsequently followed by having Congress appoint the head of thelegislative body, Roberto Micheletti, as interim president, and thatthe elections scheduled for November have not been canceled, is notenough to dissipate the cloud of illegitimacy that hangs over the newgovernment. This factor has disarmed Zelaya's critics in theinternational community in the face of a well-coordinated campaign ledby Chávez to reinstate him and denounce the coup as an oligarchicassault on democracy. That said, the international response, seeking to reinstate Zelayawithout any mention of his illegal acts, has been highly inadequate. The Organization of American States, led by its secretary general,José Miguel Insulza, has acted like Venezuela's poodle. At Chávez'srequest, Insulza went to Nicaragua, where a summit of theanti-democratic ALBA group became the hemisphere's political center ofgravity after the coup. Insulza and other populist presidents saidnothing about Zelaya's dictatorial conduct leading up to last Sunday'sevents and simply echoed Venezuela's self-serving stance. Efforts byother countries, including the United States and many South Americangovernments, to put some nuance into the public statements wereneutralized by the spectacle unfolding in Nicaragua, which was widelyreported across the Spanish-speaking world. It was sad to see Insulzasuddenly remember his organization' s Inter-American Democratic Charterin relation to Honduras -- the same rules of democratic conduct thatChávez, Morales, Correa and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega have violated onnumerous occasions while the OAS looked the other way.The crisis in Honduras should bring to people's attention this truthabout Latin America today: The gravest threat to liberty comes fromelected populists who are seeking to subject the institutions of thelaw to their megalomaniac whims. Given that scenario, the hemisphere'sresponse to Honduras's crisis has undermined those who are trying toprevent populism from taking the region back to the times when it wasforced to choose between left-wing revolution and militarydictatorships.