Hunh? Kathy, you spend 4 paragraphs responding, and then say you don't understand my argument or why I'm making it?

Allow me to be frank in return: What I really wanted to respond to was your ridiculous assertion that the word “coup” is only used if the ousted individual is on the political right. I didn't do so, primarily because I find partisan worldviews to be generally incomprehensible and intellectually stultifying.

The thread itself went a different direction, and so I went with the flow. Otherwise, I'd have found myself unable to respond at all, because I also “find myself unable to understand your argument, or why you are making it”.

I find narrow “left v. right” posts very frustrating.

Communism is in actuality an economic system which without a doubt Honduras is not. As far as it being a “right wing fascist government” you are aware that the leader of congress the man sworn in as interim president is of the same party as Zelaya. They are actually considered on the left. There was not a suspension of all civil rights just on assemblies at night (curfew), warrantless arrests for up to 24 hrs, and warrantless searches. The kind of thing that would happen anywhere in a state of emergency.

“These are the capitalist communist who have stragled the poor don't to do so!!!!”
I don't even know what that meant.

“He was trying to prevent the military from discarding thousands of electoral ballots which were to be used for a legal nonbinding referendum”

You mean he was trying to prevent the military from complying with the actual legal authority involved right, the supreme court, who ordered the military, as part of their regular job oversee voting, to take and destroy the ballots. Sounds like old Prez was using undemocratic, dictatorial means to express disagreement. As you stated that just shouldn't happen right? Hell you keep using the “Military” as a stick to hit people with but have failed to show where they ever acted on their own. Every time they acted it was in response to legal authority. They were given a warrant before the arrest. No one but you has indicated the military has made any unilateral actions. But maybe the view from the soapbox isn't good enough see the big picture.

Well, that is an interesting perspective, Ellis. I must admit I never considered the possibility that by breaking into the presidential residence at 3 am, armed to the gills, forcing the elected leader of Honduras at gunpoint into a car and then onto an airplane to be flown out of the country, the military was trying to avoid resistance and violence. Although when you think about it, I suppose they were, since I don't imagine they particularly wanted resistance or violence. They just wanted to overthrow the elected president and force him to leave the country.

I've never considered such a scenario in the light of an “arrest,” either — since an “arrest” usually involves being taken to some sort of law enforcement facility, to be held until released on bond, or until a trial can be scheduled. When I think about ousting someone from office at gunpoint and ejecting him from the country, “arrest” is not the first word that comes to mind. Nor the second. “Coup” is actually the word that comes to mind.

AP article:

Government supporters began distributing ballots at 15,000 voting stations across the country, defying a Supreme Court ruling declaring Sunday's referendum illegal and ordering all election material confiscated. President Manuel Zelaya had led thousands of supporters to recover the material from an air force warehouse before it could be confiscated.

Under Honduran law, soldiers are normally responsible for distributing ballots ahead of elections, but the military leadership has opposed the vote. Zelaya has fired the military chief for refusing to support the referendum and vows to ignore a Supreme Court ruling ordering him reinstated.

“Leading thousands of supporters” is rather different from “he led a mob that broke into the military installation,” which is how the WSJ editorial put it.

It sounds to me like the military was trying to prevent Zelaya — who is, after all, the elected president of Honduras — from going directly to the people via a nonbinding ballot initiative to find out if there was popular support for amending Honduras's constitution to allow Zelaya (and others after him, of course) to run for reelection. He was not taking the law into his own hands. He was trying to prevent the military from discarding thousands of electoral ballots which were to be used for a legal nonbinding referendum, and which the military had illegally confiscated to prevent the Honduran people from having the opportunity to express their will.

Zelaya was using a democratic process to see if Hondurans wanted a constitutional amendment permitting second terms.The military, obviously, did not want him to do that because second terms in office for democratically elected leaders posed a threat to their power. So they and their right-wing supporters in Congress and the court system colluded to stop him — to prevent him from taking any steps to try to change the provision in the Constitution that did not allow for second terms.

Zelaya was not attempting to foment a revolution and he was not violating any constitutional provisions, because there is no democratic constitution anywhere in the world that forbids the citizens of a country from voting their desire to amend the constitution..A constitution that could not be amended, and that the citizens could not even say they wanted to be amended would not be a democratic constitution; it's a tyrant's manifesto.

And HondurasContracho, you don't “save” democracy by using undemocratic, dictatorial means to express disagreement. Democracy is democracy. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a democracy that employs tyranny and extralegal actions to handle policy or run the government. Indeed, countries that use their militaries, or allow their militaries, to conduct affairs of state are historically not democracies at all. How could it be otherwise? The military ethos is not a democratic ethos. It's an entirely different way of doing things.

And you think people should only be arrested durring office hours? That they should of timed it so there was the greatest possibility for resistance and violence?

I'm glad that not only justice prevailed, but a show of force was made, which is a lesson not only to the bad element(s) within Honduras but outside it, first and foremost Baby Huey.

Tell me how he was operating outside the law. He was trying to present a nonbinding referendum before the Honduran people which asked the latter to vote yes or no on the question of whether they wanted to amend the country's constitution to allow for an amendment that would allow Honduras's president to serve for more than one four-year term. How does that justify forcibly removing him from office in the middle of the night and ejecting him from the country, in the context of traditionally recognized-as-legitimate legal process? The other stuff that's been written about this — for example, that Velaya led a mob to break into a warehouse where illegal ballots were stored — has been presented without any sourcing that I have seen, and has not been confirmed in any kind of reliable way, again that I have seen.

You can tell me that the congress ordered his removal and the Supreme Court went along with it till the cows come home, and you still won't be telling me how that constitutes a legal process, if those bodies are not acting in accordance with democratic and written legal processes for how, when, where, and whether such actions can be taken. And quite frankly, I am not aware of ANY legitimate legal process anywhere on the planet that allows for the president or prime minister or leader of a country to have his residence broken into by the country's military, rousted out of bed and forced into a car and onto a plane — not even having been allowed to get dressed — and flown out of the country.

If you want to say that the Honduran military had the right to do this because it's their country and they can run it however they want to and it's none of our business, that's one thing. I would disagree that we have no business condemning it and trying to peacefully and non-coercively change it, but it is a defensible position.

But to say that Velaya's forcible removal from office and forced exile from his country was a legitimate, constitutional, democratic transfer of power and NOT a coup enforced by the threat of violence (bloodless coup) is something else entirely.

And quite frankly, Polimom, I find myself unable to understand your argument, or why you are making it.

An arrest warrant? Velaya was surrounded by heavily armed military at 3 o'clock in the morning. They disarmed his security guards, rousted him out of bed, forced him into a vehicle which took him to the airport where he was forced into a plane and flown to Costa Rica, the government of which country had agreed to suspend landing regulations to allow for Velaya's arrival.

That doesn't sound like any legal process I am familiar with. It sounds like a bloodless coup. The fact that said bloodless coup was “authorized” by Honduras's judicial and legislative branches (the latter after the fact) does not make it not a coup. In fact, that is pretty much the definition of a bloodless coup (as Larisa Alexandrovna pointed out).