Showdown in Honduras: Lessons from the Other Banana Republic

It was -- it must be said -- an almost surreal political moment. The heretofore obscure Honduran president, Mel Zelaya, whisked off in his pajamas ... exiled to Costa Rica .... and then resurfacing -- noble cowboy hat in place -- and vowing to return, John Wayne style, to defend the rule of law in his country.
Don't get me wrong. I was as eager as the next guy to take the spotlight off of Mark and Jenny for awhile (though they do seem to want to keep it there).

But I must admit that I've found some of the press coverage of the Showdown in Honduras a bit one-sided.

Take The New York Times. There's no question that it's reassuring to see all of the Americas speaking with one voice and lining up squarely in favor of a diplomatic solution to this crisis. And kudos to President Obama for disavowing any U.S. involvement in or support for the coup -- despite Hugo Chávez' best efforts to suggest otherwise.

I'm all for more democracy, multilateralism and fewer coup d'états in Latin America. And let's face it: our country doesn't have such a great track record where Latin American coups are concerned.

Having said that, it's also the case that -- as the Wall Street Journal op-ed page contends -- Honduras under President Zelaya was not exactly a bastion of democracy. The whole reason Zelaya was thrown out of power was that he was trying -- against the will of his country's electoral tribunal, attorney general, and supreme court -- to modify the constitution so as to stay in power longer. In that sense, Peruvian novelist and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa has a point when he says that Zelaya himself was largely to blame for the coup.

But let's put things in some perspective here. Altering a constitution to extend term limits doesn't necessarily amount to democratic treason. Plenty of Latin American governments have done it in the past two decades -- Cardozo in Brazil, Uribe in Ecuador, Menem in Argentina, to name a few -- albeit with differing degrees of legitimacy and popular support. In Zelaya's case, he was, at this point, only planning to hold a non-binding public consultation on June 28 to ask people whether they supported a constitutional change to term limits.

Sure, he was acting in open defiance of the judiciary and legislative branches of his country. But is that the stuff of coups? Probably not. Or at least it shouldn't be. Not in a region with such a recent -- and troubled -- history of military intervention in civilian politics.

What's really sad about all of this is that most Americans probably couldn't find Honduras on a map and would be hard-pressed to name Tegucigalpa as its capital. Our attention to Central America has always vacillated between what one scholar labeled "cycles of concern and neglect." We tend only to notice the tiny Central American countries when there's an issue which directly affects our national security. Indeed, the last time any of us probably even thought about Honduras was during the whole Iran-Contra scandal, when the U.S. government used Honduras as a training base for Contra soldiers to fight against the Sandanistas in Nicaragua. Remember those days?

So the real tragedy here isn't that Honduras is enduring a major political crisis. It's that Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the world with gross inequalities of income, inequalities that feed directly into its current political problems. I only hope it's not another 20 years before we start paying attention to that.