Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, though not to office.Unfortunately, press accounts still manage to mangle the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain what happened. In today’s New York Times (9/22/09):
At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his opponents said would have been the first step toward allowing him to run for another term in office, which is forbidden under the Honduran constitution. Mr. Zelaya has denied any attempt to run for re-election.
An Associated Press report appearing in today’s USA Today (9/22/09) was much worse:
The legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and tried to alter the nation’s constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran Constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office.
This is inaccurate, not to mention strange (ousted for a Chavez “alliance”?). As economist Mark Weisbrot put it shortly after the coup (7/8/09), these pro-coup arguments makes no sense–and the media should say so. By the way, the example he cites is also from the New York Times….
Unfortunately much of the major media’s reporting has aided this effort by reporting such statements as “Critics feared he intended to extend his rule past January, when he would have been required to step down.”
In fact, there was no way for Zelaya to “extend his rule” even if the referendum had been held and passed, and even if he had then gone on to win a binding referendum on the November ballot. The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country’s constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis — although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.
Imagine the media reporting both sides. “His opponents said…”, seems to me to at least trying to tell the other side of the story. For the most part though, most of the media is biased the other way by constantly reporting he was removed in a military coup. This doesn’t make any sense, as he was removed by the supreme court enforcing the Honduran constitution. The current interim President was the next in line to the Presidency, as the Vice president had resigned to run for President. The “non-binding” referendum was illegal. It would be like a governor trying to hold a referendum in a state where no law exists to provide for such an election.
An alliance with Chavez was exactly what he was promoting. This would have been inconsequential, however, except for the illegal referendum.
It really doesn’t matter when his term was up. If he had the gall to hold an illegal referendum, he would have the gall to attempt to remain in office past his term. Zelaya is bad news for Honduras and democracy.
One can surmise from Rick’s comment that he considers a military coup better for democracy than the elected President of Honduras remaining in power and allowing his referendum to go to the voting public. Odd reasoning to be sure not to mention the hiring of Colombian para-miltaries by the Michiletti regime to help quell the manifest public unrest since the coup. I guess some of us have differing ideas of what constitutes democracy.
I suspect Rick is working for Lanny Davis.
Ian is right. Rick obviously is working for Lanny Davis and the other neo-liberals in control of the US government. What Rick means is that Zelaya is bad news for US exploitation and capitalism. You can’t raise the minimum wage and attempt to bring democracy to the media and be allowed to get away with it.
Rick wrote: “It would be like a governor trying to hold a referendum in a state where no law exists to provide for such an election.”
No, this is wrong. You would be correct if you wrote “It would be like a governor commissioning a poll in a state where no law exists to provide for a referendum.” The two are completely unrelated, and there was noting illegal about what Zelaya did.
As far as your statement that a person who holds an illegal referendum will clearly stay in office past his term, aside from the fact that nothing illegal was done, your logic is on par with a third grader’s, no offense to third grade students. Perhaps you believe we should lock up people who don’t pay the parking meters because clearly they will soon become murderers.
I don’t know how many of you were in Honduras in the few weeks prior to the “coup” (which by the way was not as bad as it sounded) watching the news (which took over every channel) or how many of you were there the morning of his exile, or how many of you care about the people of Honduras, but I was, and I watched this unfold, and I can tell you based on watching the Presidential Channel and the mainstream Honduran news and talking to Hondurans, and watching the concern in the eyes of my family that live in Honduras, that Zelaya has the support of Nicaragua and Hugo Chavez. He stole polling forms (yes it was merely a poll but he was not authorized to steal those forms, stealing is illegal in most countries) and had every intention of being in power for more terms than he was legally allowed to at the time. The part of the constitution which he wanted to change was illegal for anyone to change. Would you trust Chavez’ pals? Would you trust a man who buys his support in his popularity polls by handing money out to the poor and uneducated and jobless in front of the presidential palace? Would you trust a man encouraging his supporters to riot in the street?
I asked Mark Cook, who wrote a piece in the September 2009 Extra! about the Honduras coup, to weigh in on this discussion. Here’s his response:
This is not the media reporting “the other side of the story.” It is a pack of lies, and not even a new pack of lies. They have pulled out of the files and dusted off the same phony justification, virtually word-for-word in some “news” reports, that was used for the coup d’état against the democratic government of Brazilian President João Goulart in 1964.
No wonder the Brazilian government has granted sanctuary in its Tegucigalpa embassy to Honduras’ democratically elected President Mel Zelaya. Many of Brazil’s leaders were tortured and many more have relatives and friends who were “disappeared” altogether during the 21-year-long military dictatorship. They understandably fear the return of rightist coups that were unleashed against Latin America’s democratic governments in the 1960s and 1970s. (They are not alone: the current president of Chile was herself tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship, along with her mother. Her father, a Chilean air force general, died after being tortured every day for months.)
In 1964, readers of the US media were told the falsehood that Goulart was attempting to change the Brazilian constitution to allow him to run for a second term. As with Zelaya, the allegation was plainly contradicted by the facts. https://fair.org/index.php?page=3893
Many have wondered why overthrow a government, like Goulart’s and like Zelaya’s, that was six months from ending anyway. The coup plotters had their reasons. In both cases, the president was hated by big business for having dramatically increased the minimum wage. In 1964 the newly installed Brazilian dictatorship immediately undertook savage cuts in workers’ pay, much to the satisfaction of transnational corporations, as Time Magazine was delighted to report.
Honduras, the original “banana republic,” is now a sweatshop republic dominated by US big business. It reduced its minimum wage in a race to the bottom with neighboring Nicaragua in 2007 as part of the Washington-imposed “Central American Free Trade Agreement.” Zelaya’s decision to raise the minimum wage dramatically has provoked fury in big business circles.
The Brazilian coup was promoted by the US government and transnational banks and corporations that controlled US government policy in Latin America. It is not plausible that the Honduran military would have dared undertake a coup without clearing it at least with the Pentagon.
It is alarming that the current US authorities (i.e., the Obama administration) are now quietly setting themselves up in 7 military bases in Colombia and at least two more in Panama — after being expelled from their Panamanian bases as part of the Panama Canal Treaty. For years, US authorities have tried to rewrite that part of the Canal Treaty.
These are some of the reasons why the reaction against the coup has been so strong and absolutely unanimous throughout Latin America and the rest of the world. Not only do they know that the pretext is a bare-faced lie, they remember what followed last time.
Thanks, Jim, for posting Mark’s skinny on this. As if anyone needed any more intel to expose just who these bastards are, the crackdown on civil liberties instituted over the weekend should make it plain, shouldn’t it?
I don’t think Zelaya – or Chavez, Morales, Ortega, Correa et al – are Jesus on a stick, but that’s not the point, is it? What they’re castigated for – and in Zelaya’s case, couped out of office – has nothing to do with their failures from a progressive standpoint.
As Mark makes clear, it has to do with those actions that were indeed progressive. And for us Yanks, it’s imperative to see that there’s a continuity of policy on Latin America, regardless of the party of the president. Words mean nothing – that should be inscribed on Obama’s headstone, shouldn’t it?
Until we see the current admin for what it really is, we will have no chance to effectively fight against these obscene uses of our tax dollars for the benefit of the rich here and abroad.
As I seem to quote ad nauseum, Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.”
And we have to be fully cognizant of the nature of those we’re making a demand of, or we risk a monumental waste of time and energy – more so than we’ve already done over the last eight months.
The world just can’t goddamn afford that, can it?
Wow. You guys (Americans) continue to amaze me. You totally ignored the one person that is living through this(the Honduran). You keep babling about what “experts” are saying. Have you ever stepped foot out of here and been in those countries? Get the skinny from educated citizens of that country not “experts” from other countries. Mark Cook might be awesome to you. BUT he is not from Honduras. He probably doesn’t know what misery is. It’s easy as pie to sit in your comfy chair and type BS from your computer and play arm chair diplomat or international affairs officer. It’s another to live in that country day in and day out and understand who your leader is. I would never allow another person from another country to bad mouth Bush unless they lived here and understoond that he was an idiot! I apologize if I insulted anyone but please ask people from their countries what they think not people from your own.
Mark Cook lived in Central America for several years–his extensive knowledge of the region is first-hand.
More to the point, Hondurans were asked who they wanted to be their leader–and they elected Zelaya. This is why coups are generally seen as bad things.
Concerned citizen is “amazed” that non-Hondurans have anything to say about Honduras. There is a major confusion here. On the one hand, there is the idea of *including* the voices from the country covered. I have always supported this idea: include middle eastern voices in reporting about the middle east; likewise about China, Central America, etc. On the other hand, is a very strange notion to *exclude* non-natives.
That insane logic would mean that no one is allowed to report about China unless they lived in China, that no one is allowed to talk about Russia unless they lived in Russia, or the equally insane, “I would never allow another person from another country to bad mouth Bush unless they lived here” which is equally crazy, giving us a world in which most citizens cannot comment about most stories, and most reporters can only cover where they live locally — say goodbye to anyone covering glboal things like economics, environment, etc. A person from another country has EVERY RIGHT to criticize Bush (or Obama for that matter) based on information and analysis…they do not have to live in the US, what a crazy idea.
Equally crazy is the idea that the Coup was ok because the supreme court says he broke the law. The bias of these people is evident when they talk about Zelaya’s clear “intentions” to 1.have a referendum whether to 2. later have a vote whether to 3. later, based on the democratic outcome of 2., explore changing the constitution.
The evidence is that the Supreme Court’s “evidence” is probably very minimal, maybe zero. Otherwise, why not arrest him? Why not charge him? Why not bring the evidence to a court of law? They clear have NO hesitation against using troops with guns…that they did…clearly if they wanted to they could have brought charges, if they thought they have real, meaningful evidence. The constitution does not say, “if you are *accused* of breaking the law, then you get thrown out of the country by gunned armed men, without any trial”
This does not mean I agree with everything Zelay or Chavez does, did, says,or said. I do not. But it’s people prepared to support a Coup, all while claiming to “defend democracy”they attack democracy, implying you do not have to bring any charges in any court, implying you don’t need to show any facts in any court, and instead you just throw someone out with guns pointed at them instead of showing proof, instead of showing evidence, instead of pressing charges, instead of proving your case in court (as is done against Fujimori) they instead were cowards, anti-democratic, and threw the man out. The constitution might say X is illegal but does not say, “without any trial without any charges, without any proof in a Court of Law, just throw the person out without first Convicting them of a crime” these attitudes are much more frightening than anything Chavez has done, much less, anything Zelaya has ever done
RE: “More to the point, Hondurans were asked who they wanted to be their leaderâ┚¬“and they elected Zelaya.”
Mr. Zelaya was deposed legally following the constitution of Honduras. Do you think the guy would have left on his own accord? Each country has its own constitution – don’t just apply yours.
http://patdollard.com/2009/06/honduran-president-was-ousted-for-illegally-amending-the-constitution-to-extend-his-rule-just-as-supporter-chavez-did-and-supporter-obama-seeks-to/
Please read the comments by Rob, Ivan the Kafir and Mark.