I’m not going to pretend that the situation in Honduras isn’t a bit complicated. The president was ousted in a coup after he defied the Supreme Court and placed a measure on the ballot that would allow him to hold a referendum on whether or not he should be allowed to run for another term. So, what we have is a situation where the Constitution was violated by two parties: the president, and then the military that forced him into exile. Here in the States, Michael Bloomberg recently changed the New York City charter so that he could run for a third-term. That was controversial, but the state Supreme Court didn’t rule it illegal. Bloomberg isn’t a dictator, and no one called for him to be exiled to Canada for his treachery.
Right-wingers in our country, however, do not like President Manuel Zelaya because he is an ally of Hugo Chavez and his politics are leftist. They are upset that the State Department has withdrawn foreign aid to the military junta there.
The Obama administration and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) are squaring off in a foreign policy dispute that has stymied the nominations of two senior diplomatic officials.
Foreign policy experts see the standoff as a proxy fight between conservative Republicans and the Obama administration on how to deal with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s socialist president.
DeMint has blocked the nominations of Thomas Shannon, President Barack Obama’s pick to serve as ambassador to Brazil, and Arturo Valenzuela, the choice for the post of assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.
How does this relate to Honduras?
DeMint said in an interview that he does not want the standoff over the nominees to erupt into a major confrontation but felt he had to pressure the administration into restoring foreign aid to Honduras.
The right-wingers insist that the coup was a Constitutional response to unconstitutional behavior by the president. That’s not true. Both acts were in violation of the laws. A normal response to a rogue president would be to remove him through an impeachment process or to simply wait and vote them out of office.
The truth is that President Zelaya isn’t very popular in Washington DC. Corporatist Democrats don’t like the Bolivarian Revolution movement any more than Republicans. It’s bad for business. However, the Organization of American States (OAS) voted unanimously to kick Honduras out of the group after the coup. One of the purposes of the OAS is “to promote and consolidate representative democracy, with due respect for the principle of nonintervention.” The United States is not directly intervening. Lifting foreign aid, revoking visas for some the coup-makers, and trying to negotiate the return of representative democracy are all reasonable responses, considering the unified opposition to the coup of OAS.
If the U.S. were to endorse the coup, they’d lose a tremendous amount of credibility all throughout Latin America. This is all the more true considering our terrible historical record of backing right-wing juntas in the region. Balancing the desire to support representative democracy (even when we don’t really like the results) and the principle of non-intervention is difficult. Everyone thinks we should do more or less.
But Jim DeMint and the Wall Street Journal want you to believe that we’re trying to force the junta to violate their own Constitution and that we are unjustly interfering in their internal affairs. That’s a total distortion of the facts. What’s going on is that the right-wingers are trying to dictate U.S. foreign policy in favor of dictatorship, and against the Bolivarian Revolution movement.
