Word: america
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...vote illegitimate. Instead, the election will confirm that Honduras has slipped back into the political chicanery and military meddling that typified the 1970s and '80s. "You can't use an election to clean the slate after a coup," says Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director at the Council of the Americas in New York City. "It just threatens to roll back democratic norms in Central America by decades." (See pictures of violence in Honduras...
Honduras, in fact, is the latest example of how little progress Central America has made since the coups, civil wars and corruption of the past. The institutional rot that spawned those Cold War conflicts remains, not just in Honduras but in nearby countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama. In Nicaragua, for example, leftist President Daniel Ortega last month had Supreme Court justices loyal to him summarily lift a constitutional ban on presidential re-election so he can run again in 2011, even though most Nicaraguans oppose the change. In Panama, members of the powerful Arias family have...
...while it's been 20 years since Central America's last major civil-war battle, the isthmus is actually more dangerous today. Thanks in large part to exploding gang violence and useless justice systems, Central America has seen 79,000 murders in the past six years, more than the 75,000 people killed in El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war or the 50,000 killed in Nicaragua's 1980-1990 contra war. (See pictures of El Salvador's gangs...
...sure, Central America has shed some of its banana-republic baggage. Democratic elections have replaced right-wing death squads and Marxist guerrillas. This year, Salvadorans for the first time elected a President, Mauricio Funes, from the party of El Salvador's erstwhile leftist rebels. But life after elections remains as dysfunctional as the ubiquitous tangles of pirated electrical lines that hang above Tegucigalpa's streets. "The region has a greater understanding of the rule of law today," says Mark Rosenberg, president of Florida International University in Miami and an expert on Honduras and Central America. "But it's very incomplete...
...agree to let Honduras' Congress vote on Zelaya's restoration. But the legislature has refused to act before the Nov. 29 election, effectively kiboshing the accord. The U.S. has said it may endorse the election anyway - and risk looking as if it's condoning yet another coup in Latin America. Meanwhile, supporters of Zelaya, who is holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa after sneaking back into the country in September, have vowed to boycott the vote and may even try to block it. (Read: "A Deal Finally Ends Honduras' Coup Crisis...