José Cruz/Agência Brasil
Deposed Honduran president José Manuel Zelaya speaks to the press after a visit to Brazil’s Congress in August 2009.
Three months after Honduran President José Manuel Zelaya was forced from power by his own military, the country’s political situation has not improved at all.
The international community was quick to condemn the ouster — the military’s involvement clearly brought back painful memories of a recent past where force prevailed over democracy.
However, according to Honduran legal experts, Zelaya is no longer president because he violated the constitution by ignoring the Supreme Court’s orders to drop plans for a referendum on presidential term limits. They point out that the Honduran Constitution clearly states that if the country’s president violates any constitutional provision, he will be immediately removed from his post. At that point, the armed forces are no longer under his command and the president of Congress becomes the interim head of state.
Today, in spite of international pressure to return Zelaya to power, of economic sanctions against Honduras, and of suspensions of civil liberties by the country’s interim leaders, many Hondurans believe that Zelaya’s removal was constitutional — poorly handled during the circus of taking him out of the country in pajamas and at gun point, but constitutional. Zelaya’s ouster was legal but taking him out of the country was not.
Zelaya snuck back into Honduras on September 21 and is currently residing in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The Organization of American States, the majority of the United Nations countries, the mediator of this crisis — Costa Rican president Oscar Arias — and many others have called for an end to the situation by returning Zelaya to office. But if the Honduran legal experts are right, the international community is asking Hondurans to go against their own constitution.
In Honduras, all democratic branches of government except for the executive branch are still stable and functioning. With the Electoral Tribunal, as well as other government agencies, operating as usual, the country’s November 29 presidential elections are on track — just as they were before this political fiasco began. Presidential candidates are still campaigning; de facto president Roberto Micheletti, already quite unpopular in Honduras before the ouster, has always been willing to step down as soon as the new president is elected. A system for democratically electing a president was in place before Zelaya was ousted on June 28 and is still in place today.
Is it time for the international community to step back from its demand of reinstating Zelaya and recognize the November elections?
If the Honduran crisis does not end soon, it will have serious economic — and social — repercussions not only for Honduras, but also for most Central American countries. And we all know the next chapter in the story of economic hardship in an already impoverished region.
Erika de la Garza is the program director of the Latin American Initiative at the Baker Institute. Her chief areas of interest include U.S.-Latin American relations; emerging leadership; coalition building between public, private and civil society actors; and trade and business development in Latin America.