HONDURAS: 3 Open Letters to Rush Limbaugh

On 25 May 1993, the good Guatemalan President, Jorge Serrano Elias Serrano --in his fight against corruption-- suspended the constitution, dissolved Congress, sacked the Supreme Court, imposed censorship and restricted civil freedoms. Like Zelaya, Serrano's action met with strong protests by most elements in his country. Hence the army staged a ‘coup’ by executing the decisions of the Constitutional Court, which ruled against Serrano. Ombudsman Ramiro de León was eventually installed by the Congress (not a democratic popular election). So now the world (or at least leftest voices) are bemoaning another damnable military coup in Honduras – how horrible.

Now we recognize that Mr. Zelaya had not yet dissolved Congress nor the Supreme Court, yet that is exactly where the elected Honduran Congress and the Court feared he was heading.  Also this transpired in Latin America with its infamous propensity for ‘continuismo’ where heads of state often inevitably seek to indefinitely extend their rule. Prime examples include: Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay), Alvaro Uribe (Colombia), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador) and Manuel Zelaya (Honduras). Continuismo explains the strict/rash position taken by the Honduran constitution when it emphatically states, “No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.” Said determination was made by both the Congress and Court who instructed the military to fulfill their legal requirement to administer “alternation of the office of the presidency of the republic.” So the military never acted on it's own initiative nor was it ever in control of the government for even a minute. So the dastardly culprits here are the democratically elected Congress and Court (who -incidentally- are eager to take responsibility).

Now everyone form Hugo Chavez to Obama to Alan are clamoring about democratic process and that Honduras acted too hastily. OK fine, maybe good-old Mel should have been given a free hand. And stopping him after the fact may have been just as easy, effective and successful as it was with Mr. Hitler.

My main point is simply that Honduras worked within her Constitution, Court, and Congress to address issues regarding their President (who now faces some 18 charges for alleged criminal acts, including treason and failing to implement more than 80 laws approved by Congress since he took office in 2006). It is a strange ‘democracy’ when the executive branch person is held so much higher than all the elected congress and Supreme Court. And all of this would have been wholly nonviolent and no great problem if only the rest of the world merely attended to their own affairs. Things could likely have been done more kosher, but it was nevertheless a Honduran affair with no reason to suspect serious harmful internal repercussions. I'd been happy to see the fourth mandate of the main ALBA tenants abided by: Respect for the sovereignty of nations … and right to self-determination

Per Mr. Rush Limbaugh, I am personally not particularly opinionated regarding that personality (at least not as much as Dr. Alan). The ‘call’ to write to Rush was in this instance NOT mine, but was a strategic posture on the part of an associate here.  Moreover –unlike everything else that has appeared on this blog– several of the points proffered in my missives can be credited to same.

The single best on-going news coverage that I've found regarding all this is Wikipedia's “2009 Honduran coup 2009 Honduran coup d'état” (despite its presumptive title). While a good historic background on the disruptive years of Zelaya as president is “Nikolas Kozloff: Honduras -- What's Behind the Coup?” Mr. Kozloff has a Zelaya sympathetic site on blogspot.com called “SenorChichero” and authored “Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S.” Finally, the military's chief lawyer, Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, admits that, “In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. Because of the circumstances of the moment this crime occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.” see http://www.elfaro.net/secciones/Noticias/20090629/noticias16_20090629.asp and http://www.miamiherald.com/1506/story/1125872.html

In reviewing my comment from the 6th, it's bemusing to see that my links could be construed as more pro Zelaya than not. For good details and a truly supportive stance with the Honduran Constitution, Congress & Courts check-out: http://in-honduras.com/wordpress/

I find a number of issues revolving around this to be most perplexing. The way this Honduran affair took over the front pages of all the world's big newspapers on the day of the ‘coup’ was in itself simply amazing. Plus there is this ever prevalent yet unstated insistence that the executive function (mostly in the hands of one) is the only governmental branch that matters. So I fall back to this being a FEAR based reaction. The fact that Honduras has a demonstrated history of being the most orderly and least violent prone people in Central America only makes their bold moves all the more dangerous in terms of others following suit and dismantling (or at least checking) unseemly large executive powers world wide.