Word: zelaya
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Those forces have now turned Zelaya, an otherwise middling President, into the same sort of political martyr Chávez became seven years ago. Their dispute with Zelaya, in fact, arose from their fear that he was making a bid to 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...
...Inter-American Democratic Charter," insisting that the crisis "must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference." It was a good start - as was the announcement by Obama's ambassador in Honduras later in the day that the U.S. will not 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...
...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 as the Supreme Court, which reportedly ordered Zelaya's arrest this morning - thought it had for the uprising...
...Zelaya vowed to hold the referendum anyway, insisting that Honduras' grinding poverty stemmed from a constitution - written in 1982 at the height of that country's brutal repression of leftists - that rigs the game for the most powerful families and interests. When his military chief, citing the Supreme Court ruling, said last week that the armed forces opposed the vote, Zelaya had him fired. The Congress then began deliberations over whether Zelaya was still mentally fit to govern...
...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...