Word: zelaya
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...they going Cuban in response to economic difficulties that could loosen their holds on power? The left hardly owns the market on intimidating the press in Latin America today, as evidenced by media-averse conservatives like Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the Honduran coup leaders who ousted President Manuel Zelaya this summer. But "President Chávez and his bloc of allies all want to consolidate power, neutralize any opposition and remain in office beyond their elected terms," says Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News and chair of the IAPA committee on freedom of expression, which held...
...Summit of the Americas earlier this year, it may be because he's found that conservatives can still give him headaches over Cuba and the Latin-American left. Republicans are currently holding up key diplomatic appointments in Congress, for example, to protest Obama's support of leftist Honduran Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a military coup over the summer. (That issue may become more complicated with the news Monday that Zelaya smuggled himself back into Honduras...
...Obama Administration has political reasons for eschewing the m-word. The most important is that calling an overthrow a military coup requires certification by Congress - where Obama and Clinton foresee a fight they'd rather avoid. Conservative Republicans are angry at Obama's support of Zelaya, who they insist was trying to remove presidential term limits in Honduras and usher in a socialist government like that of his oil-rich left-wing ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. As a result, they're blocking a number of the White House's State Department appointees, including Arturo Valenzuela, Obama's pick...
...Angeles Times op-ed last week, Democratic Representative Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that whatever Zelaya's alleged infractions, they should have been addressed legally, not militarily. "It's time to call this bird what it is," a military coup, and move on with whatever tougher sanctions that might mean in order to get the Micheletti regime to back down, Berman wrote. Obama and Clinton still feel a negotiated settlement in Honduras can be reached. But the Micheletti regime, which human rights groups say has cracked down violently on many Zelaya supporters (a charge...
...negotiated settlement is indeed the preferred solution. But the problem is that the U.S. loses leverage in that process when, by not calling Zelaya's ouster a military coup, it gives coup leaders the impression that what they did was merely second- or third-degree coup-mongering instead of the first-degree military kind. When the military hauls away a democratically elected president, it's a military coup, period, regardless of who takes power afterward. It's a rule that needs to apply not just in Honduras, but whenever the U.S. has to take on coupsters...