I’m still trying to figure out exactly what did happen and what should have happened in Honduras. What seems most plausible to me at the moment is that President Mel Zelaya attempted an unconstitutional power grab – and the military, the Supreme Court and the Congress then executed a coup d’etat, though perhaps a constitutional one. However, if the Hondoruran constitition allows such flexibility and military involvement, I tend to doubt it’s longetivity. This description of Honduras’s constitutionalism by the U.S. Department of the Army also does not bode well:
Honduran constitutions are generally held to have little bearing on Honduran political reality because they are considered aspirations or ideals rather than legal instruments of a working government.
The actions of the military – in suppressing the media, in denying the opposition the right to protest, in imposing curfews, in refusing the orders of their constitutional commander-in-chief, and then deposing him – bear all the hallmarks of a coup d’etat, even though the military was authorized to take the actions it did by the other branches of government. Much of the problem seems to stem from the fact that Honduras’ constitution does not include a provision for impeachment and removal of a president – a rather significant gap.
What is truly depressing though is the immediate, knee-jerk, factually-deficient incorporation of this crisis into the Culture War politics that apparently is all the right-wing nutjobs have left. I refer specifically to Mary Anastasia O’Grady – who misleadingly suggests that the only leaders to object to this coup d’etat are Hillary Clinton, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez. In reality, virtually every nation has – from Europe to Latin America and around the world. But O’Grady is sadly not alone in her idiocy.
If we are to have a foreign policy in which we support the right of a people to consent to or withdraw their consent from their government, then before we judge the situation by which side of the American political spectrum Zelaya would be on, we must evaluate whether or not the Rule of Law was respected – and by which side, if any. The foundation of a people’s consent is the just and even application of the Rule of Law – without which democracy is a mere sham. O’Grady and those other right-wingers bowdlerizing foreign policy into the Culture War have no patience for niceties, preferring idiotic outrage over informed indecision.
[Image by bdeboikot licensed under Creative Commons.]