Regional Democracy At Work

The member nations of the Organization of American States came together in a closed-door all-night emergency session today in Washington, D.C. that resulted in the Honduran government being given three days to restore Pres. Manuel Zelaya to his rightful position as Honduras’s democratically elected leader, or face the possibility of having the country’s membership in the OAS suspended:

Calling Mr. Zelaya’s overthrow an “old-fashioned coup,” the organization’s secretary general, Jose Miguel Insulza, said: “We need to show clearly that military coups will not be accepted. We thought we were in an era when military coups were no longer possible in this hemisphere.”

Diplomats said they had rarely seen the O.A.S. unite so solidly behind a common cause, and that it was the first time the group had invoked its so-called Democratic Charter since it was adopted in 2001 as a clean break with the region’s history of authoritarian rule.

The charter calls on the organization to take emergency diplomatic efforts aimed at restoring a legitimately elected government and provides for a nation to be suspended if those efforts fail.

The United States, unlike the other members of the OAS, has not recalled its ambassador in Honduras, and is resisting calls from other member nations for economic sanctions, on the grounds that they would cause further suffering and harm to the Honduran people. However, “A spokesman for the United States Southern Command said that the American military had suspended joint operations with Honduras, a country with which it has long had strong military ties.”

Roberto Micheletti, the Honduran Congress’s interim replacement for Pres. Zelaya, responded defiantly to the OAS meeting and the outrage that’s been expressed by countries around the world at the military coup:

Mr. Zelaya “has already committed crimes against the Constitution and the law,” Mr. Micheletti told The Associated Press in an interview late Tuesday. “He can no longer return to the presidency of the republic unless a president from another Latin American country comes and imposes him using guns.”

Quite an ironic choice of words, I’d say.

Even the Wall Street Journal, which has taken a strongly sympathetic stance toward the point of view of Zelaya’s political opponents, acknowledges that using the military to force him, at gunpoint, out of bed, into a waiting car, and onto a plane to be exiled from the country — in a region filled with nightmarish memories of violent military coups and subsequent reigns of terror — was a massive overreaction and, to say the very least, not helpful (bolds and bracketed itals are mine):

The situation is messy, and we think the Hondurans would have been smarter — and better off — not sending Mr. Zelaya into exile at dawn. Mr. Zelaya was pressing ahead with a nonbinding referendum to demand a constitutional rewrite to let him seek a second four-year term [which, as several online commentators have pointed out, he would not have been able to accomplish, given the question the referendum was asking Hondurans to say yes or no to, and the time he had remaining in office]. The attorney general and Honduran courts declared the vote illegal and warned he’d be prosecuted if he followed through. Mr. Zelaya persisted, even leading a violent mob [the WSJ has not provided any support for the "violent mob" characterization, and other news sources, to my knowledge, do not support it] last week to seize and distribute ballots imported from Venezuela. However, the proper constitutional route was to impeach Mr. Zelaya and then arrest him for violating the law.

It’s not at all clear that Zelaya did violate the law, since all he attempted to do was ask Honduran voters if they wanted, or did not want, to convene a constitutional assembly for the purpose of possibly changing the provision in the Constitution that barred re-election. The voters were not even being asked to say whether they wanted the term limits provision to be changed — only whether they wanted to see a constitutional assembly examine the possibility of changing that provision.

However, the editorial certainly hits the mark when it says, or suggests, that the actions taken by Honduras’s military with regard to Pres. Zelaya did not follow legitimate constitutional procedures.