I prefer to look things up for myself to be sure that the people reporting aren’t spinning things. The situation in Honduras revolves around their constitution, so I decided to find out for myself who was telling the truth.

I located a synopsis in English, as my Spanish is not geared toward the legal language of a constitution and found most of my questions answered.

The current Honduran constitution is its sixteenth. They have had long periods where they were ruled by dictators, both military and civilian, and the current constitution, which took force January 20, 1982, reflects the desire to avoid any future dictators.

Created in an era of typewriters, copy machines, and high speed printing presses, it is much longer, and more detailed than the US Constitution.

Title IV addresses the constitutional review of laws by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of Honduras, like the Supreme Court of the US rules whether or not things are in accordance with their constitution.

The next point is one that bothered me because it is a difference between the US and Honduran systems:

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I do have some interest in Honduras. I donated several hundred dollars to their ecosystem when friends of my older brother flipped the Jeep they were driving in a river in Honduras and didn’t bother to go after the borrowed equipment. I didn’t even get a T-shirt, just a terse statement of fact.

CNN has an updated story. Heavy military presence in Honduras after coup, but hard news is not easy to come by because the major sources are aligned with various centers of power, so they are all lying to one degree or another.

This is what I have been able to glean:

• The government in Honduras has a very similar structure to the US government, i.e. three branches, checks and balance, constitution, representative democracy, etc.
• Zelaya was not simply trying to amend the constitution to give himself another term, he wanted to have a constitutional convention and rewrite the entire document.
• He won election by a very narrow margin in 2005 with a plurality of the vote, not a majority, and didn’t like working with the established government systems.

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