You write that Honduras was an “old-fashioned coup,” a once-common occurrence in Central and South America. What has changed?
In Latin America, where military coups were once, as you say, too-regular occurrences, there have been almost no successful coups since the Berlin Wall fell. Elections and peaceful, democratic transfers of power have become the regional norm. So the June 28th coup in Honduras was alarmingly regressive. Soldiers shot their way into the presidential palace at dawn, handcuffed President Manuel Zelaya, abused him, and put him on a plane, still in his pajamas, to Costa Rica. The coup plotters argue that it was actually a legal succession. But it didn’t look that way to me, nor to many other observers—let alone to most Hondurans—and the harsh repression that has followed reeks of impunity and military rule.
It is true, however, that a civilian was installed in the de facto presidency, and that the legislature, which authorized the coup after the fact, was not dissolved—giving coup supporters some basis to argue that representative government, not military rule, is in place in Honduras. There are, moreover, elections scheduled for November 29th, which the de facto regime is hoping will wipe the slate clean—if not in Honduras, where the political polarization is intense, and where those opposed to the coup will most likely not participate nor be mollified, then at least internationally. Honduras was suspended from the O.A.U. and condemned by the U.N. after the coup. The United States suspended all non-humanitarian aid, as did the European Union. Whether a new, elected government will be internationally recognized is an open question. The Obama Administration made it clear that the U.S.—Honduras’ largest trading partner by far, its traditional patron, and primary military ally—would not regard such a government as legitimate. But then the U.S. position changed, catching a lot of people by surprise, in early November. Now it seems we will recognize the next Honduran government. Most other countries are holding firm to the principle that coups are simply not acceptable, and that they cannot be whitewashed by a subsequent election—an election held under conditions that are not free and fair. But, with respect to the U.S., it looks like the coup plotters may get away with it.
Many Hondurans, regardless of their political affiliation, seem to believe that the U.S. has great power to determine and influence events on the ground. Is that true? Why do people believe that?
People believe it because the U.S. has enjoyed, and exercised, enormous influence in Honduras for generations—certainly since the early twentieth century, when the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) dominated the national economy, and therefore local politics. (The C.E.O. of United Fruit once observed, “In Honduras, a mule costs more than a member of parliament.”) In more recent years, a close military alliance between the U.S. and Honduras has made it seem, to many people, as if the Honduran armed forces must take their orders, ultimately, from their mentors and benefactors in Washington.
I really don’t know how true that is. Certainly, the Honduran military’s participation in the recent coup did not appear to please any faction in the U.S. State Department. Whether the Pentagon, or factions within it, took a different view is a subject of much debate in Honduras—and I did hear plenty of people say that the U.S. military could order the Honduran military back to its barracks, reversing the coup, any time it choses. I myself doubt it would be that easy.
Your piece ends at the beginning of November, when it looked like a deal to reinstate ousted President Zelaya was falling apart. What’s the current state of play?
The deal brokered by the U.S. at the end of October between the deposed president and the coup regime continues to fall apart. The two sides were supposed to form a unity government. That didn’t happen. The Honduran congress was supposed to vote on whether to restore Zelaya to the presidency. That didn’t happen. The leaders of the congress now say they will vote on December 2nd, which is after national elections take place, and Zelaya has said that that’s too late. His remaining term only runs until January 27th. He has called on his supporters to boycott the elections. The regime, meanwhile, is threatening to charge anyone who disrupts the election campaign or the voting with terrorism and sedition. The regime’s leaders really, really want these elections to happen, and the results to be recognized internationally.
The de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, just announced that he may cede power—to his own cabinet—for a week while the elections take place, and then take it back. A symbolic gesture, one might say. “It shows he’s conscious that he contaminates democracy,” Zelaya says. But Zelaya rejects it otherwise as a “crude maneuver.” Our State Department, on the other hand, praised Micheletti for seeking to lower tensions around the elections.
Zelaya, by the way, is living inside the Brazilian Embassy in Honduras, which is surrounded by Micheletti’s troops. Zelaya sneaked back into the country in September, and the Brazilians gave him refuge. But if he steps outside the embassy, he will be arrested, Micheletti says, and charged with treason.
Supporters of the coup—especially among conservatives here in America—have compared Zelaya to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Is that a fair comparison?
Zelaya’s opponents, both inside and outside Honduras, constantly link him to Chavez. The wealthy, conservative supporters of the June 28th coup own most of the TV and radio stations and newspapers in Honduras, so local mass media have, for years now, been putting Zelaya and Chavez together in ominous stories meant to scare the public with the idea that a foreign-backed, left-wing dictatorship was coming. It’s true that Zelaya turned toward Chavez in recent years, making an excellent deal for Venezuelan oil and, in 2008, joining a Chavez-led regional trade group—along with Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba—rather than the U.S.-led Free Trade of the Americas group. He also got interested in the idea of a “constituent assembly,” which would revise the Honduran constitution, ostensibly to increase popular political participation—this is an idea that’s popular with much of the Latin American left, and is often associated with Chavez. Zelaya got nowhere with it, but he violently alarmed the Honduran oligarchy simply by talking about it. More generally, he became a flamboyant populist in office, a la Chavez, lowering school fees and raising the minimum wage and antagonizing the local business class. But Zelaya, unlike Chavez, comes from that class himself. He’s from an old landowning family; he ran big timber and cattle operations, and was always a member in good standing of the national business elite. So he was never a very convincing leftist, let alone a revolutionary. He was also not anti-American. He didn’t target U.S. corporations. He collaborated closely with U.S. drug-interdiction efforts. His political base, his ambitions, his caudillismo, and the resources at his disposal never, in short, compared with Chavez’s. (Honduras has no oil, for a start.) But the coup did increase sharply Zelaya’s popularity in Honduras with the left, and with the country’s poor majority, who had not particularly trusted him before. Since June, the labor unions, the peasants’ organizations, and student groups have been staging mass demonstrations, united around the goal of reversing the coup.
As for conservatives here in America—there is an influential group, based mainly in Washington and South Florida, who still look at Latin America through a neo-Cold War lens, and, as far as they’re concerned, Zelaya was joining Chavez and the Castro brothers and about to turn Honduras Communist. They supported the coup and have been very successful in getting their perspective heard, even inside the Obama Administration. (It doesn’t hurt that the coup regime and its allies have spent more than $600,000 on Washington lobbyists.) The Administration’s recent sudden reversal of its position on Zelaya’s restoration and the legitimacy of the upcoming elections in Honduras can even be read as a collapse under conservative Republican pressure.
In Honduras, the small and well-off Jewish and Palestinian Christian communities live in harmony. Could you talk a little bit about that? Do their political views differ from those of the rest of the business elite, which was generally pro-coup?
Yes, it’s strange but true that the Honduran social and business elite is largely composed of Palestinian Christians and Jews, who seem to get along swimmingly. “This is not the Middle East,” a local tycoon told me. I wouldn’t say that their political views differ from those of other members of the elite, though. Most are solidly pro-coup. I did interview a few exceptions, including Yani Rosenthal, who’s the scion of a leading local business family. He owns, among other things, a TV station and a newspaper, neither of which are pro-coup. He told me that he tries to get the paper to balance its Op-Eds—three pro-coup columns for every three anti-coup—but the editors are anti-coup and stubborn. Other opposition TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers—outlets not owned by an influential figure like Rosenthal—have been, it’s important to note, shut down, censored, physically attacked, and comprehensively hounded by the coup regime.
