Who Will Stand for Rule of Law in Honduras?

DEVELOPMENTS

Ever since the Honduran president Manuel  Zelaya was arrested in the middle of the night and flown out of his country by military officers less than a month ago, the small country of Honduras has received enormous international attention for been widely reported as the first Central American coup in almost two decades. There has been a strong stated desire by all the major outside players to this crisis not to allow for a repeat of Latin America’s plagued history of military coups being used to respond to constitutional crises. The international response has offered a rare opportunity for a united common front between the Obama administration, Latin American states across the political spectrum, and international institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS).

Undoubtedly, the speed, unity, and forcefulness that have defined the international response to Zelaya’s ouster has marked a significant milestone for democratic governance in the Americas. This is true especially when one considers that for much of the Twentieth Century, foreign policy in Latin America was largely guided by an emphasis on protecting internal sovereignty, ostensibly to preserve equality between states of unequal power but which in practice often permitted despotic regimes to abuse their citizens without being held accountable by their neighbors. For that matter, it also marks a departure from much of the history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, which often placed more importance on defending U.S. interests over that of supporting its Latin American neighbors’ democratic aspirations. It has been made abundantly clear by all parties involved that the idea of a coup is no longer an acceptable political option in the Americas today.

However, some important questions have been lost in the rush to condemn Zelaya’s ouster. First and foremost is whether or not Zelaya’s ouster  in fact constituted a classic textbook military coup perpetrated by a disgruntled oligarchy without any legal basis, as Zelaya and his supporters argue, or a legitimate product of the Honduran political process, as claimed by supporters of the current Honduran government led by interim president Roberto Micheletti . The answer most likely lies in neither of these views, but somewhere in between. Yet if the US wants to protect democracy and rule of law in Honduras in the long run, it must look beyond the ouster itself to examine the political and legal processes that gave rise to the conflict in the first place.

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