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Crisis in
Honduras: What was really behind the removal
of President Manuel Zelaya, and is he likely
to be reinstated?
By José de Cordoba
A year ago, President Manuel Zelaya
surprised Honduran notables who turned up
for the country’s traditional independence
day celebration when the sitting president
shouted “Long Live Independence! Long Live
the Republic!” It was supposed to be a
moment of national unity.
But instead of unity, the president dished
out division. Wearing his trademark white
Stetson hat, Zelaya berated his audience of
slack-jawed businessmen for 15 long minutes.
“The businessmen and corrupt oligarchy are
responsible for our country’s two centuries
of poverty because they support an unjust,
neoliberal economic model that exploits
humans and our natural resources,” Zelaya
declared.
Many in his audience began to jeer. “Fuera!
Fuera! Fuera!” they shouted, urging that
Zelaya be thrown out. As the situation
threatened to get out of hand, Zelaya,
surrounded by a large contingent of burly
bodyguards, fled in his presidential
motorcade.
On June 28, soldiers woke up the president
at dawn and put Zelaya, in pajamas, on a
plane out of the country, granting the
majority of Honduras’ establishment its
wish. Zelaya’s ouster—which has inspired
flashbacks of an era not so long ago when
soldiers seated and unseated Latin American
presidents at will—has caused the biggest
regional political crisis in years, and
continues to pose a foreign policy dilemma
for the Obama administration.
On September 21, after two failed attempts
to return to the Honduran capital of
Tegucigalpa, Zelaya finally made it,
appearing unannounced at the Brazilian
embassy. His arrival electrified his
supporters, about 2,000 of whom quickly
amassed around the embassy. And so began
another chapter in the political crisis that
has divided Honduras, one of the poorest
countries in the western hemisphere. “I’ve
traveled for 15 hours, overcoming many
obstacles, because there were a lot of
checkpoints, a lot of persecution,” Zelaya
said in an interview in CNN’s Spanish
language network. “Thanks to President Lula
we have protection at the embassy of
Brazil.”
To news interviewers, Zelaya said he was
there to find a negotiated and peaceful way
out of Honduras’ impasse. But to the
hundreds of followers who surrounded the
embassy he shouted, “Restitution, Fatherland
or Death!” Officials feared Zelaya meant to
lead a mob of his followers to the
presidential palace to dislodge the interim
government headed by Roberto Micheletti. A
curfew was declared and in a pre-dawn
operation the next day, hundreds of police
and soldiers cleared out the crowd in front
of the embassy.
The stage was set for what could be a
dangerous war of wills. Zelaya and dozens of
his supporters set up camp in the embassy,
whose water, telephone and electricity were
temporarily shut off. Brazilian President
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for
Zelaya’s immediate restitution as president.
But in Tegucigalpa, the Micheletti
government, surprised and embarrassed by
Zelaya’s daring return, stood firm. It
demanded Zelaya turn himself over to the
courts to face charges of treason and abuse
of power. If not, Micheletti said with a
shrug, Zelaya was welcome to stay at the
Brazilian embassy for “five to 10 years” if
he so wants.
For Zelaya, who since his ouster had become
an itinerant figure, jetting from one Latin
American capital to another in quest of
support, the prospect of being trapped in an
embassy must have appeared daunting. By the
end of the week, he was already complaining
that, surrounded by police and soldiers, he
felt as if he were in prison.
After Zelaya’s return, Honduras went into a
state of virtual lockdown as the government
imposed an extensive curfew throughout the
country. International airports were
temporarily closed, mostly to stop an
announced mission by José Miguel Insulza,
the Secretary General of the Organization of
American States who hoped to mediate the
dispute but is deeply distrusted by the
Micheletti government. Meanwhile, Zelaya’s
supporters defied the curfew to battle with
police and soldiers and sack supermarkets
and banks. At least one person has died in
the disturbances.
It’s hard to predict how the crisis will
end, given its soap opera, roller coaster
aspects. But as this article went to print,
there were some positive developments.
Zelaya had met with an emissary from the
Catholic Church as well as with the
country’s leading presidential candidates.
There was a new flurry of diplomatic
activity in the works, with the OAS’ Insulza
headed for Tegucigalpa for a new round of
talks.
Since his ouster, Zelaya’s quest to be
reinstated as president has been at times
dramatic and tragic, at other times clownish
and silly. He has veered between being an
unlikely symbol of democracy in peril to a
laughingstock, with the situation always
just a hair’s breath away from turning into
a disaster.
On July 5, as Zelaya made his first attempt
to return, at least one person died in
violent clashes between soldiers and
hundreds of demonstrators when Zelaya, on a
Venezuelan plane flown by a Venezuelan
pilot, urged his followers to take over the
Tegucigalpa airport so he could land.
Three weeks later, Zelaya, accompanied by
Venezuelan foreign minister Nicolás Maduro,
tried to enter Honduras again. At the Las
Manos border post, Zelaya was unwillingly
pushed towards the border by a crowd of
supporters and television reporters until he
had no choice but to hold up the rusty chain
that marks the border between the two
countries and wander a few feet into
Honduran territory. He remained in Honduras,
continuously talking on his cell phone, for
30 minutes before returning to Nicaragua.
“I’m not afraid, but I’m not crazy, either,”
Zelaya said in explaining his behavior to a
television reporter. That tepid entry
inspired a satirical rumba in Venezuela.
“Pasa la raya con Zelaya y brinca el muro
con Maduro,” say the lyrics of the rumba,
called El Zelayon.
For Honduras, Zelaya’s erratic journey has
been costly. Since his ouster, Honduras,
which was summarily suspended from the
Organization of American States, has become
an international pariah. No country
recognizes the interim government headed by
Micheletti, the former president of the
congress who was named to succeed Zelaya by
a congressional vote.
Until Zelaya’s return in September, life was
headed towards a certain odd normalcy. The
curfew that had marked the first days after
his ouster had been lifted. Life had resumed
a more or less normal rhythm, even though a
dwindling band of a few thousand protestors,
most of them members of unions and popular
organizations loyal to Zelaya, had continued
to block highways and briefly occupy
government buildings.
Campaigning had begun for the upcoming
presidential elections scheduled for
November 29. The government and most of the
country still hopes the new president that
emerges from the election will provide a
path out of the country’s present isolation,
but the future is far from clear. The U.S.,
Honduras’ largest trading partner, has
suggested it won’t recognize the new
government, as have other countries. That
would translate into continuing isolation
and perhaps new sanctions. Piling on more
pressure, at the end of September the United
Nations suspended its links to Honduras’
electoral authorities.
Honduras’ crisis has thrown a growing
regional problem into sharp relief: the
trend of democratically elected presidents
attempting to stay in power past their
designated time in order to carry out a
populist and leftist agenda. These leaders,
led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, have used
the region’s historic poverty and inequality
to gain support from the poor. On the way,
they have created deep divisions and
accentuated class hatreds while
concentrating power by increasing government
control over the economy and media.
Zelaya, a 57-year-old former rancher and
logger, is part of this group that includes
Chávez, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo
Morales in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in
Nicaragua. In July, Ortega announced plans
for a referendum to rewrite Nicaragua’s
constitution to allow him to be re-elected
indefinitely, something Chávez has already
achieved in oil-rich Venezuela.
A similar move by Zelaya is responsible for
the unrest in Honduras. For more than a
year, Zelaya led a drive to rewrite the
constitution to abolish term limits. On the
day soldiers rousted him out of bed, he was
planning a referendum to call a
constitutional assembly, even though the
vote had been declared illegal by the
country’s Supreme Court.
Fearing Zelaya’s ouster would set a terrible
precedent in a region where in the
not-too-distant past military coups were
common, the international community has
thrown its weight behind Zelaya, demanding
he be reinstated. The U.S., European Union
and lenders such as the World Bank have
suspended aid to the country. U.S.-backed
talks mediated by Costa Rica’s President
Oscar Arias appear to have come to a dead
end—with Zelaya demanding an unconditional
return to power, while the interim
government, backed by the country’s courts,
attorney general and congress, maintained
such a return would be illegal, and
therefore impossible.
The crisis put the Obama administration in a
difficult spot. Hoping to mark a new day in
its relations with the region and mindful of
its past U.S. support of coups in Latin
America, the U.S. has led efforts for a
negotiated solution. But Washington’s
insistence that Zelaya return to power has
angered many middle-class Hondurans, who
feel the U.S. has profoundly misread the
situation. They view Zelaya’s ouster not as
a coup but a legal and patriotic defense of
the country’s institutions from a Chávez-style
power grab.
“The terror of Chávez goes beyond the
rational, it’s a panic,” says Edmundo
Orellana, Zelaya’s former defense minister,
who blames the fear inspired by Chávez for
Zelaya’s ouster. Moises Starkman, who
advised Zelaya on special projects and now
works for the interim government, also
blames Chávez. “This is a showdown which
will determine if the Chávista model
triumphs or not,” he says.
Honduras’ refusal to buckle under pressure
has startled the U.S., which historically
has cast a long shadow over Honduras. It was
the original Banana Republic, where in the
19th and much of the 20th centuries, U.S.
companies like United Fruit made and unmade
presidents. In the 1980s, Honduras served as
a base for U.S.-backed Contra rebels
fighting the Sandinista government next door
in Nicaragua. This time, however, the U.S.
has been unable to work its will here. “We
have received all sort of pressures from
different people, which we will never accept
in any circumstance,” Micheletti said in
July following a phone call from Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton urging Zelaya’s
return.
Unexpectedly, the Honduras affair threatens
to embroil the Obama administration in an
unwelcome controversy as it labors to push
health reform and other crucial programs
through congress. Recently, 17 Republican
senators sent a letter to Clinton arguing
that the U.S. is on the wrong side of
history on Honduras. One irate Republican
senator has refused to proceed with
confirmation hearings for two important
Obama administration appointments, including
the State Department’s top Latin America
hand.
A closer look at Zelaya’s life sheds light
on how the son of a right-wing landowner
ended up in an ideological marriage of
convenience with Chávez. It also shows how
Zelaya’s plans for adopting the Chávez
recipe for getting and keeping power
alienated virtually the entire Honduran
establishment.
Nothing in Zelaya’s background suggested he
would become an international symbol of
imperiled democracy. Zelaya is a product of
Olancho, a violent, semi-feudal macho state
in central Honduras that is dominated by
pistol-packing landowners who run huge
estates. One of four children, Zelaya grew
up the son of rural privilege. His family,
involved in logging and ranching, has been a
dominant force in Olancho for decades.
In 1975, when he was 23 years old, his
father was jailed for helping army officers
torture and murder 14 rural activists,
including two priests. Zelaya dropped out of
college and went home to Olancho to take
care of the family businesses. He visited
his incarcerated father often, at times even
sleeping in the prison, says Victor Meza,
who served as Zelaya’s last interior
minister. “That shaped him,” says Meza.
Sentenced to 20 years, Zelaya’s father was
freed in 1980 in a general amnesty.
No one remembers Zelaya having strong
ideological leanings as a young man. He ran
his family’s logging operations and
eventually became a director of Honduras’
top business organization. He also worked
his way up the ranks of the Liberal Party,
the country’s oldest and most important
political party, serving first as a deputy
then as Honduras’ minister of investment.
Friends and colleagues say Zelaya is
disorganized and has little formal
education. But they credit him with acute
political instincts. “His background is
milking cows, and all of a sudden he’s
speaking before the United Nations,” says
Meza. Zelaya is a quick study, he adds.
After a failed 2001 run, Zelaya won the
presidency in 2005 by a sliver. At his
inauguration, he threw away his prepared
speech and improvised, making numerous
gaffes. “It would be a sign of the way he
would run his government,” says Miguel Calix,
a Honduran political scientist.
At first, Zelaya wasn’t very ideological and
spent a lot of time traveling. He was a big
spender. On one notable trip to Washington,
he took 40 people along, including his
infant granddaughter, whom he handed off to
a startled President George W. Bush at a
White House ceremony.
Two years into his term, Zelaya reshuffled
his government, bringing into his cabinet an
influential hard-line cadre of ministers
dominated by Patricia Rodas, his foreign
minister known as “los Patricios.” Rodas,
the daughter of a famous right-wing Liberal
party leader, has a reputation as a
doctrinaire Marxist from her university
days.
The world economy also pushed him leftwards.
In 2007, Honduras was hit hard by record
high oil prices. The country has no refining
capacity and imports all its fuel. As oil
prices climbed, Honduras, whose power plants
run on fuel, was forced to hike electricity
prices and ration power.
At first, Zelaya tried to lower the cost of
imports by buying oil products in bulk, but
the plan failed. So in 2007, he decreed a
cut in fuel prices by 52 U.S. cents per
gallon, with the companies and the
government splitting the cost. But this move
led to fuel shortages as the importers
complained about reduced revenues. By
mid-2008, the oil companies threatened to
stop new investments in Honduras.
Neighboring Nicaragua, which had been
getting cut rate fuel from Caracas since
2005 under a program called Petrocaribe, was
having no such problems. A Chávez
brainchild, Petrocaribe sells Venezuelan oil
at market prices but allows its 18
member-countries to finance a part of the
oil at low interest rates. As of 2007,
Petrocaribe has provided $1.2 billion in
financing—a similar amount to the
Inter-American Development Bank’s soft loans
in that period.
As Zelaya battled the oil companies, Chávez
offered cheap fuel. Few in Honduras opposed
the country’s entry into the Venezuelan oil
pact when the Congress approved it in March
2007. “I pushed hard for Petrocaribe,” says
Adolfo Facusse, head of Honduras’
industrialists’ chamber and now a Zelaya
opponent. Since then, Petrocaribe has
provided the government some $126 million in
savings.
Zelaya quickly entered the Venezuelan’s
embrace. “They get along very well and trade
jokes,” says Meza, the former interior
minister. In August, Zelaya joined the
ALBA—a nine-nation trade and political pact
that Chávez uses to counter U.S. influence
in the region. Other ALBA members include
Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.
At the ALBA ceremony in Tegucigalpa, Zelaya
joined Chávez and Nicaragua’s Ortega before
thousands of Hondurans, most of whom the
government had paid a few dollars to attend.
He copied Chávez’ incendiary rhetoric.
“Today we are taking a step towards becoming
a government of the center-left, and if
anyone dislikes this, we’ll just remove the
word ‘center’ and keep the left,” he said.
Chávez didn’t go down well in conservative
Honduras, but Zelaya blamed lack of help
from the U.S. and others for his left turn.
“I’ve been looking for projects from the
IADB and Europe, and found a modest
response. They don’t have emergency funds
and I’ve been obligated to attract new forms
of financing like ALBA,” he told Reuters in
an interview. Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez, who
taught Zelaya as a child, said the president
told him he was getting close to Chávez “for
the money.”
Zelaya, like Chávez, was soon battling most
the country’s institutions. Last year, he
refused to send Congress a budget by
September 15, as required by the
constitution. He blamed the world’s
financial crisis for making it impossible to
come up with numbers. But with no budget,
Honduras couldn’t get new loans from donors
like the International Monetary Fund. Julio
Raudales, Zelaya’s former deputy minister,
says the budgetary black hole cost the
country some $400 million over the past year
in lost funds.
Zelaya’s behavior greatly disappointed
Cardinal Rodríguez, a respected figure and a
top candidate to replace the late Pope John
Paul II at the time of the pontiff’s death.
Cardinal Rodríguez, who worked for nine
years to get the international community to
forgive $2.6 billion of Honduras’ foreign
debt, blames Zelaya for using public money
to promote his referendum instead of
spending it on the poor. “We were good
friends. But he changed drastically,” the
Cardinal says. “It was Chávez.”
Zelaya also tried to buy the army’s loyalty,
as Chávez has in part done in Venezuela. He
more than doubled the military’s budget to
$100 million in 2008 and offered the
military a multi-million dollar contract to
build an airport terminal. But the
U.S.-trained military refused the offer.
Others saw Zelaya developing a Chávez-like
megalomania. He often commandeered all of
the country’s television channels for long
speeches. Mirroring Chávez’s fascination
with Venezuelan independence hero Simón
Bolívar, who tried to unite much of Latin
America, Zelaya asked El Salvador’s
president if he could borrow the remains of
Central America’s 19th century hero, Gen.
Francisco Morazán, who is buried in El
Salvador, so he could tour Central America
with the bones to push regional integration.
There were other quirky moments. Zelaya took
much of his cabinet along when he went scuba
diving in a tourist development, wearing his
Stetson until the last moment before hitting
the water. Earlier this year, he skipped a
meeting with donor countries to attend a
private concert of Mexico’s Los Tigres del
Norte, famed for their ballads honoring drug
traffickers. Los Tigres serenaded Zelaya at
the presidential palace with one of their
hits Jefe de Jefes, or Boss of Bosses.
In December, Zelaya stunned the country’s
business community when he arbitrarily hiked
the country’s minimum wage by 60 percent to
$289 a month. While the move was popular, it
had a devastating impact on many small
businesses. “We had to let go six out of 25
employees,” says Karoly Molinari, who
manages her family’s auto rental business.
Since then, about 100,000 people—out of a
total of about 600,000 Hondurans registered
for social security benefits—lost their jobs
and were pushed out of Honduras’ formal
economy, says Raudales.
But what really set Zelaya on a collision
course with most of the establishment was
what many Hondurans believed was his drive
to perpetuate himself in power by rewriting
the constitution to permit re-election—which
is forbidden by Honduras’s charter. “He told
me: Why can’t I get re-elected? Everybody’s
doing it. Why can’t I do it?” says Facusse,
the businessman, a former friend.
In the weeks before the referendum, the
Supreme Court had ruled the vote illegal:
First, only Honduras’ election agency, not
the president, can call a referendum.
Second, the article in Honduras’
constitution that bars re-election is
unchangeable—so much so that even attempting
to change it leads to automatic dismissal
from public office.
When the military, following court rulings,
refused to help distribute the ballots days
before the referendum, the president fired
the military’s chief of staff, Gen. Romeo
Vásquez, and accepted the resignations of
the heads of the army, navy and air force
and defense minister. “I told the president
we could not act against a court order. If
we did so, we would be committing a crime,”
says Orellana, the former defense minister,
a close friend of Zelaya.
Two days later, tensions spiked when Zelaya,
defying the courts, led a mob to seize the
disputed ballots at an air force base. “That
was traumatic for the armed forces,” says
Orellana. “At that moment everyone said ‘The
man is crazy. We have to get him out.’”
The Supreme Court responded by ordering
Zelaya stripped of his office and arrested.
The military carried out the order, but
feared his arrest would spark violence. So
the army sent Zelaya packing, breaking a
constitutional article that states a citizen
can’t be forcibly exiled. It also led to an
image—a president in his pajamas forced out
at gunpoint—that promoted the perception of
the ouster as a coup.
Orellana, who had resigned days earlier
because he believed Zelaya was breaking the
law, also believes the soldiers’ action
constituted a coup. “It’s the worse thing
that could have happened,” he says.
Many others have found a new pride in the
country’s refusal to buckle. “Let the world
cancel its aid,” says Ramon Custodio, the
interim government’s human rights ombudsman.
“We will be austere and poor, but with our
dignity and on our feet.” |
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