Some Fact Checking
The Miami Herald reports on an interview with a Top Honduran military lawyer: We broke the law
In an interview with The Miami Herald and El Salvador’s elfaro.net, army attorney Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza acknowledged that top military brass made the call to forcibly remove Zelaya — and they circumvented laws when they did it.
…Inestroza described weeks of mounting pressure, in which a president who was viewed as allied with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez used soldiers as “political tools.” The attorney general’s office had ordered Zelaya’s arrest, and the Supreme Court, Inestroza said, ordered the armed forces to carry it out.
So when the powers of state united in demanding his ouster, the military put a pajama-clad Zelaya on a plane and sent him to Costa Rica. The rationale: Had Zelaya been jailed, throngs of loyal followers would have erupted into chaos and demanded his release with violence.
“What was more beneficial, remove this gentleman from Honduras or present him to prosecutors and have a mob assault and burn and destroy and for us to have to shoot?” he said. “If we had left him here, right now we would be burying a pile of people.”
…
U.S. State Department lawyers are studying whether the action is legally considered a military coup, even though the person who was constitutionally next in line took power.
While the headline implied something else, the “crime” was avoiding the bloodshed that might have resulted if Zelaya was imprisoned and tried for his violations of the constitution and laws of Honduras.
The US State Department is trying to figure out how to make following the constitution of Honduras a coup, and not succeeding, apparently.
BBC correspondent Stephen Gibbs describes his journey from El Salvador to Honduras to report on the situation in his report, An old-fashioned coup in Honduras?. Draw your own conclusions.
One of the conclusions I drew from Mr. Gibbs’s interaction with the Zelaya supporters is that the “coup” is being blamed on the US, because “everyone knows that the US is behind all of the coups in Latin America”. That was the entire point of Zelaya saying that the US wouldn’t authorize a coup earlier – to paint his opponents as pawns of the US. Linking the US and coup is a standard meme for leftists in Latin America, and for most of their history, that was a valid assumption.
The BBC reports on the OAS posturing, Honduran court defiant on Zelaya
The Supreme Court of Honduras has rejected a demand by the Organization of American States to reinstate the ousted President, Manuel Zelaya.
OAS chief Miguel Insulza was told that the court’s position was “irreversible” when he met its president for two hours in the capital Tegulcigalpa.
Mr Insulza, who arrived in Honduras on a mission to have Mr Zelaya reinstated, left the meeting without comment.
Troops forced President Zelaya out of the country on Sunday.
If Zelaya returns to Honduras he will be arrested and tried on multiple charges. The Congress of Honduras was elected by the same voters that elected Zelaya, and they have replaced him in accordance with the only law that matters in this case, the Honduran constitution. Unlike the US Congress, the congress of Honduras takes supporting and defending their constitution seriously.
I realize that Americans are totally ignorant of history, but how was using the military to enforce a court order in Honduras any different than doing it in the United States? In the Fall of 1957 troops of the 101st Airborne Division were sent to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce a Federal court order. No one called it a coup. Why is it alright for the US government to do it, but not for the Honduran?
