July 22, 2009

A little context on Honduras

By: Sonny Bunch

Chris Caldwell has an absolutely fantastic piece on Honduras this week in the pages of The Weekly Standard. In it, he provides a little background often missing from the discussions:

Zelaya’s planned referendum was unconstitutional. So he renamed it a “poll.” But that did not solve the constitutional problem. For a president to reopen constitutional questions this way is the Honduran equivalent of what in America would be called a high crime. This is perhaps the least understood part of the episode, and a bit of constitutional background is necessary.

Honduras has had 17 constitutions. The present one, written in 1982, has lasted longer than any of the others. Like the German Basic Law of 1949, it was written in the wake of a catastrophic episode of authoritarianism (in Honduras the episode was a series of military coups), and it contains a lot of inefficient-looking checks designed to make a repetition of that catastrophe impossible. One of these checks is term limits. Another is a clear placing of authority to alter the constitution with the legislative branch. And there are a handful of “articulos petreos”–articles of the constitution that are deemed written in stone. Even to propose altering them can be grounds for removal from office.

The supreme court twice declared the planned referendum or poll unconstitutional and illegal. Zelaya ordered television stations to continue to run public service announcements and ads for it anyway, assuring them that “he” (the government? Chávez?) would pay their fines. When the ballots, which were printed in Venezuela, arrived in the country, the court ordered them confiscated. They were held on a military base at the airport. Zelaya fired the commander in chief of the armed forces who had obeyed the court order. The court ruled this act unconstitutional, too. Zelaya gathered a mob of 300 people, led them into the base, loaded thousands of the ballots onto a truck, and drove them away. The supreme court ordered Zelaya arrested. The armed forces carried out the arrest on the morning the poll was to take place and flew Zelaya to Costa Rica. Then the legislature voted to oust him.

I just don’t understand how the Obama administration and the rest of the world could be so quick to condemn the Hondurans for getting rid of Zelaya. Does he think that will lessen Chavez’s antagonisms? Should we even really be worried about lessening the antagonisms of a tinpot goon like Chavez? I find this all very baffling.