Soldiers ringed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s modest home, spilled into the cul-de-sac and swarmed the neighborhood, blocking what little traffic there was in a posh corner of the Honduran capital so early on a Sunday morning.
Zelaya had been roused from bed by a shootout between a presidential security detail and his own armed forces, ordered to drop his mobile phone or be shot dead, bundled onto a military truck in his pajamas and whisked by plane into forced exile in Costa Rica.
About 60 soldiers still patrolled the Tres Caminos district of southwestern Tegucigalpa around his house, all with rifles aimed, when journalists arrived less than an hour later.
“Nothing’s happening here,” screamed one soldier, who looked barely 16.
“Don’t come any closer,” another bellowed, causing dogs in nearby yards to bark wildly.
The Honduran coup on June 28 was swift and bloodless, but the tension that culminated in Zelaya’s overthrow had been building for months as his politics and rhetoric moved left, and he aligned himself closer to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The military acted under orders from the Supreme Court and with the support of Congress, which is controlled by Zelaya’s Liberal Party — though nearly all members had turned against him.
Lawmakers unanimously installed congressional leader Roberto Micheletti, who failed to get his party’s presidential nomination last fall, as the new head of state the same day.
Honduras rebuffed the Organization of American States’ demands to reinstate Zelaya and pulled out of the group before member states held an emergency meeting on Saturday to suspend its membership. Even as the poor Central American country slid toward political chaos and international isolation, Micheletti’s interim government blamed Chavez for stoking the crisis.
“Little by little, we will regain the confidence of other nations, because we are a valiant people who have said ‘enough’ to Chavez,” said Micheletti’s assistant foreign minister, Martha Lorena Alvarado.
At issue was a referendum Zelaya had been planning to hold on the day of the coup, asking voters if they would support a subsequent vote to modify the Constitution. Critics feared he would use it to do away with term limits and run again — something Chavez and other Latin American leftist leaders have succeeded in doing. Supporters of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative US ally, have also proposed extending term limits to allow him to run again.
Meanwhile, Chavez and his allies have taken to ruling by plebiscite, or referendum, sidestepping congress and the courts that are designed to check executive powers and taking issues directly to voters. After Chavez lost one referendum to eliminate term limits, he held a second one little more than a year later and won. The Venezuelan Congress and courts are filled with Chavez’s supporters.
Zelaya denied that he was following that model, but he modified the ballot language at the last minute from a vote on whether to hold a separate referendum on revamping the Constitution to one asking if the public wanted to convoke “a national constitutional assembly.”
The Honduran Constitution has no provision for an assembly like the one suggested in the final version of Zelaya’s referendum question. Congress can modify nearly all the Honduran Constitution, but certain clauses — including those limiting presidents to one, four-year term — cannot be changed.
Since the coup, Zelaya has said he will drop the referendum and serve his remaining six months without seeking to run again.
The rift between Zelaya and his own party was months in the making.
Honduras, a country about the size of Virginia known for bananas, coffee and a stunning Caribbean coastline, was ruled by military dictators for much of the last century. A civilian government was formed in 1982 under a Constitution that limited presidents to one term to discourage the emergence of new dictators. The country boasted seven consecutive democratic elections, including Zelaya’s in 2005 — though he won by a margin so small, the country’s electoral court had to decide the race.
His move leftward caught his party and supporters by surprise for the son of a wealthy landowner and provincial army commander whose ranch was the site of a massacre of leftists in the 1970s.
Zelaya surrounded himself with some advisers who had been branded communists as student activists. A year ago, he joined a Chavez-led, regional trade bloc over objections by many in Congress, saying US apathy toward Honduran poverty forced the longtime Washington ally to turn to Chavez for help.
His relationship with Congress grew worse in October, when he first launched the idea of changing the Constitution.
Zelaya tried to delay presidential primary elections last fall and succeeded in pushing them back two weeks after heavy rains caused flooding in some parts of the country. That made many of his political opponents fear he would try to tinker with electoral law further.
Zelaya also tried to appoint sitting judges to the Supreme Court rather than choosing nominees from a list compiled by legal and civil experts as is traditionally done. He eventually backed down.
Then Chavez visited in January, publicly ridiculing lawmakers on all sides.
As recently as March, 75 percent of Hondurans supported some form of direct public vote to modify aspects of their government, but almost no one supported the idea of presidential re-election, even from the beginning.
CID-Gallup polls showed Zelaya’s job-approval rating dropping steadily since 2007 to just 38 percent in October, though a February poll showed it had rebounded to 53 percent. He continues to draw support from farm, labor and student groups. That same poll showed that only 9 percent of Hondurans wanted closer ties with Venezuela, while 57 percent wanted closer ties to the US.
Anti-Zelaya forces used Chavez’s name liberally to describe the dangers of allowing the president to carry forward with the referendum. Rumors swirled before the coup that ballots, which were printed in Venezuela, were arriving already marked and the referendum would be rigged.
The Honduran Congress cannot impeach the president. Still, many were at a loss to explain why the Congress and court didn’t fight Zelaya through the democratic process, including campaigning against the referendum.
“They miscalculated. I think they thought it would play as a constitutional change, as the Supreme Court and Congress were involved, but that’s not how it played,” said Harley Shaiken, director of the University of California’s Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.
He called the miscalculation a “combination of arrogance and isolation fueled by the traditional oligarchy in Honduras.”
Rather than simply arresting Zelaya, the new government insists it had no choice but to remove him from the country to prevent a violent uprising from his supporters. Micheletti says he will serve out Zelaya’s term and oversee November elections to choose a successor.
Those opposed to the Micheletti government have nonetheless taken to the streets every day since the coup, but their demonstrations have been largely peaceful. Thousands have also rallied in support of the new government.
The day before his ouster, Zelaya credited US officials with encouraging dialogue between his office, Congress and the armed forces that he said would allow his referendum to go forward, adding in an evening televised address that Honduras “was in the process of change, of transformation.”
“Peaceful, humane transition,” he said. “Not violence.”
In a matter of hours, he would be awakened by gunfire.
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