When I was in high school our foreign exchange student was from Guatemala and my older brother had a lot of friends from South America in college. He was in the Peace Corps in Colombia, after college, so I have always been aware of the area.

Most Americans eat their bananas and drink their coffee without even being aware of their existence.

I’m not comfortable with changing constitutions without good cause, and I didn’t hear any good cause coming from Zelaya.

No kidding! It’s not as if Central American countries are “exotic.” My housemate has been to more than one. All my coworkers at the branch of U.T. for which I wrote s/w in the 1980’s had been to several; my particular project was about Mexico and corresponding border towns in the U.S., but Guatemala, Honduras, etc. were most certainly on the list of countries in which these people… basically public health researchers… had lived, worked and done research. These places are simply not “odd,” and U.S. citizens ought to know at least a minimal amount about them. Good grief; how provincial we all are.
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I suspect most Americans are as hesitant about changing the U.S. Constitution as I am. If only those same Americans weren’t such American exceptionalists…

The Honduran Congress has replaced Zelaya with the president of Congress as stated in the Constitution. Roberto Micheletti is from Zelaya’s party, so it wasn’t political. Zelaya just couldn’t convince anyone to support his plan, even though his party controlled Congress.

You can’t amend the US Constitution via a referendum, so I don’t see why people should complain that you can’t use that route to change the Honduran constitution.

OT: It would be nice if CNN included maps, like the BBC, so Americans could figure out where these countries are.

If their system is set up like the US there are three separate branches that are nominally equal, but only the Executive has the power to enforce a ruling.

In Britain the Parliament is the center of power and a Prime Minister is subject to instant removal when s/he oversteps their authority.

There is no good way of handling a situation like this, but there don’t seem to be riots in the street yet.

If Zelaya had a program he should have been pursuing it, not pursuing a way to extend his hold on power. If he couldn’t get his program through in the first four years, why would he think he could pass it in another four?

It is the experience of “president for life” that leads American republics to have restrictions on the terms of president. Presidents are term-limited in the US. There are ways of amending the Honduran constitution, but his way was apparently not one of them.