The Truth About Honduras
Brent Tantillo • July 1, 2009 • Uncategorized
The truth about what’s happening in Honduras goes far beyond the platitudes being offered by Hugo Chavez, the OAS, and the Obama Administration. The reality is a lot more complex, as Mary Anastasia O’Grady explains in her excellent column, in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal:
Hugo Chávez’s coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation’s constitution.
It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.
But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
The truth is that this was no military coup, it was Zelaya that was abusing his authority by failing to execute the orders of the Honduran Supreme Court:
That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.
But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.
The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.
Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.
The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.
It should have been a clue to the Obama Administration when Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez stood up for the “democratically elected” Mr. Zelaya, that there was something wrong with him. But rather Secretary Clinton stood on the side of the despots. This is in direct opposition to everyone else in Honduras:
Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya’s foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. “We won’t go backwards,” one sign said. “We want to live in peace, freedom and development.”
Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.
The irony with Obama is that it takes him so long to be on the right side of the fight against Ahmadinejad and the Iranians protesting the fraudulent election there, and here he takes no time to support the corrupt Mr. Zevala whose people are standing by their own written constitution and rule of law in direct opposition to his desire to turn Honduras into a dictatorship. It’s time for the Obama team to step it up in the foreign policy arena or be called out as an administration that supports despots in the name of realpolitik, especially when such leaders happen to lean Left.
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is the US envolved once more in the affairs of other countries!!??,mainly in central america… for so many years, how to know the truth??
thank you