Word: sundays
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rare to see Argentina's First Family convey political humility. But as President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her husband (and presidential predecessor) Néstor Kirchner absorbed their startling defeat in Sunday's midterm elections, they both offered unusual hints of contrition. "In a democracy, you win and you lose," said Fernández after her Peronist party's congressional majority had vanished, leaving her to deal with a potentially hostile parliament over the last 2½ years of her term. Kirchner, who resigned as the Peronists' leader after suffering a close but stunning loss...
...Fernández, like her husband and their left-wing ally President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, is a combative populist who critics say is too dismissive of the legislative and judicial branches, which are still weak institutions in Latin America. Her Sunday setback "indicates that Latin America's hyperpresidentialist project, which was fueled by the economic boom, faces walls and obstacles now," says Javier Corrales, a Latin America expert who teaches political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Another factor is the exit of U.S. President George W. Bush, whose own bid for excessive presidential power wasn...
...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 other things, more than one term for Presidents. But the Supreme Court last week ruled the Sunday vote illegal; the Congress, where Zelaya loyalists are a minority, and the attorney general rejected it as well. (See pictures...
...this latest emergency, Obama may well need to do more than keep his cool. The U.S. recently argued that Cuba should be reinstated in the Organization of American States (which convened an emergency meeting over Honduras on Sunday) only when it demonstrates a commitment to democratic norms. Zelaya's defiance of his Supreme Court may not have been the behavior of a leader who respects the rule of law; but when soldiers in Latin America haul a democratically elected President out of his palace and into exile, the U.S. has no choice in this day and age but to roundly...
...though, it was Zelaya's opponents who appear to have become unhinged. Technically - before Sunday, anyway - Honduras' Justices and generals could claim they held the legal 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...