Word: latinities
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...become another Chávez. Earlier this year, Chávez, a democratically elected President who has enfranchised Venezuela's poor but has been widely criticized for undermining the nation's other branches of government, won a referendum that lets him seek re-election indefinitely. (Other Latin Presidents, like Bolivia's Evo Morales, have also pushed through constitutional changes allowing them to seek additional terms.) Zelaya, whose term ends early next year (he's limited to one), had hoped to hold an informal, nonbinding plebiscite on Sunday to gauge whether Hondurans want to change their national charter and allow, among...
...would be tempting for Washington to dismiss Sunday morning's military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya as just a minor banana-republic convulsion. But the Obama Administration doesn't have that luxury. Zelaya is a member of the club of left-wing Latin American leaders - and its honcho, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, has already deemed this a hemispheric crisis that will challenge the new north-south bonhomie President Barack Obama established two months ago at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Less than an hour after Honduran military aircraft had whisked Zelaya into apparent forced exile...
...recognize any government installed to replace Zelaya. Chávez himself led an aborted military coup in 1992, before he was elected Venezuela's President in 1998. But Obama needs to remember how sorely the memory of a failed 2002 coup attempt against Chávez still lingers in Latin America - and how convinced the region remains (not without reason) that the Bush Administration backed it. As a result, Obama may find that while he'd like to be the voice of dialogue, Latin leaders of all political stripes are likely to exhort him to come down hard on what...
That clamor will be especially loud if reports are true that Honduran soldiers also rounded up the ambassadors of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and other leftist Latin governments, drove them to an air-force base and roughed them up before apparently releasing them. It would be a haunting reminder of the kind of benighted behavior that marked military takeovers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries - putsches that were too often aided by Washington - until democratic government became the norm after the Cold War. And it would all but nullify any justification that Honduras' epauletted brass - as well...
...high ground: Zelaya was, after all, blatantly defying a high-court ruling, as well as his legislature and attorney general. He was, they could argue, behaving like the populist caudillo his opponents warned he wanted to be. But their violent Sunday-morning response has made them look like the Latin oligarch lackeys of old - and has in fact lent credence to Zelaya's suggestion that they were indeed just defending a constitution fashioned exclusively for the haves of Honduras. In a move reminiscent of the 2002 Venezuela coup, congressional leaders claimed that Zelaya had signed a resignation letter before being...