Coup in Honduras

Over the weekend, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a military coup, after "months of tensions over his efforts to lift presidential term limits":

In the first military coup in Central America since the end of the cold war, soldiers stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, early in the morning, disarming the presidential guard, waking Mr. Zelaya and putting him on a plane to Costa Rica.

Mr. Zelaya, a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, angrily denounced the coup as illegal. "I am the president of Honduras," he insisted at the airport in San José, Costa Rica, still wearing his pajamas.

Later Sunday the Honduran Congress voted him out of office, replacing him with the president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti.

The military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against "those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution's provisions."

So this is a rather interesting situation in that Zelaya was making part of his citizenry angry by attempting to change part their established democratic process (possibly illegally; in any case an overreach), so to stop him, the entire democratic process was subverted. A dubious victory, to say the least.

Or would have been, if the issue was strictly about protecting Honduras' democracy, but that isn't the whole story: "[Zelaya] has the support of labor unions and the poor. But the middle class and the wealthy business community fear he wants to introduce Mr. Chávez's brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America's poorest."

Leaders across the hemisphere, however, denounced the coup, which American officials on Sunday said they had been working for several days to avert.

President Obama said he was deeply concerned and in a statement called on Honduran officials "to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic charter.

"Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference," he said.

...Obama administration officials said they were working with other members of the Organization of American States to ratchet up pressure on the Honduran military to end the coup and dismissed the prospect of outside military intervention in the matter.

"We think this can be resolved through dialogue," said the senior administration official. However, he admitted that the Honduran military was not responding to calls from the American government.

Discuss.