Manuel Zelaya

The Washington Post’s Conflicted Take on Honduras and the OAS

by Ivan Osorio on July 24, 2009

in International

That the Organization of American States has squandered whatever credibility it had should be obvious to all by now — and it’s not just right wingers saying so any more. The Washington Post gets its largely (though not entirely) right in an editorial today.

[I]t’s worth reporting on a meeting that took place Tuesday at the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington between OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza and three elected Venezuelan leaders who, like Mr. Zelaya, have been deprived of their powers and threatened with criminal prosecution.

The three are Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma and the governors of two states, Pablo Pérez of Zulia and César Pérez Vivas of Tachira. All three won election in November, along with several other opposition leaders. But since then, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has used decrees, a rubber-stamp parliament and a politically compromised legal system to strip the officials of control over key services and infrastructure.

Mr. Insulza, a Chilean socialist who has been flamboyant in his defense of Mr. Zelaya, listened to the Venezuelans’ account. But the OAS leader insisted that there was nothing he could do about Mr. Chávez’s actions, even under the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which was adopted by all 34 active OAS members in 2001. This month, Mr. Insulza helped spur the OAS to suspend Honduras on the grounds that it had violated the charter. But in the case of Mr. Chávez’s stripping power from the governors and mayors, Mr. Insulza said, “I can’t say whether it is bad or good.” His authority, he said, is limited to “trying to establish bridges between the parties.”

That is not how Mr. Insulza handled the case of Honduras, of course. Far from promoting dialogue, the secretary general refused to negotiate or even speak with the president elected by the Honduran National Congress to replace Mr. Zelaya. Instead he joined in a Venezuelan-orchestrated attempt to force Mr. Zelaya’s return that, predictably, led to violence.

But that’s not all. The OAS made a mockery of its own Democratic Charter before the Honduran crisis broke out by deciding to readmit Cuba, a disgraceful incident which the editorial doesn’t mention. I also found it strange that, while the subhead asks, “Why defend the rule of law in Honduras but not in Venezuela?” the editorial itself acknowledges that Zelaya, whose position Insulza and the OAS are backing, was “responsible for violating the constitutional order” in his country.

Finally, the Post’s editors apparent endorsement of “OAS intervention” in defense of democracy and “for the administration…to depend on organizations such as the OAS to advance its policies in Latin America” strikes me as utopian. A better approach would be to let individual countries sort out their own internal conflicts. Honduras would be a good place to start.

Corrupt, Bullying Nicaraguan Ruler Emboldened by Obama’s Demand That Honduras Accept Return of Would-Be Dictator

by Hans Bader on July 22, 2009 · 2 comments

in Odds & Ends

Nicaragua’s corrupt, authoritarian president Daniel Ortega is now pushing a change to his country’s constitution to extend his rule. Ortega is a former communist backed by Venezuela’s anti-American strongman Hugo Chavez. He uses vote fraud, arbitrary arrests, and intimidation to expand and perpetuate his power.

Ortega has been emboldened by the Obama Administration’s demand that neighboring Honduras permit the return of its corrupt, bullying ex-president Mel Zelaya, who was removed for similarly seeking to perpetuate his rule.

Honduras’s Zelaya was lawfully removed from office by soldiers acting on orders of his country’s Supreme Court (and replaced by the speaker of Honduras’s Congress) after he, too, sought to rewrite his country’s constitution to allow him to seek another term in office. (Honduras has had such a problem over the years of corrupt presidents using patronage, fraud, and intimidation to get reelected over and over again that Article 239 of its current Constitution immediately strips presidents of their office if they even propose ending term limits, and Article 272 of its Constitution authorizes the military to remove presidents who seek to evade term limits).

Zelaya used money from Venezuela’s dictator and blackmail to try to extend his rule, illegally cutting off funds to municipalities whose mayors who refused to back his referendum to rewrite Honduras’s Constitution to extend Zelaya’s tenure in office. Zelaya was planning vote fraud on a vast scale.

For Honduras to allow the return of Zelaya would violate Article 239 of its Constitution, which bans would-be term limit violators from holding office, but it may allow his return anyway if his power is reduced, since the Obama Administration is blackmailing Honduras with threats of trade sanctions (America buys most of Honduras’s exports) and aid cut-offs (Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and its budget is heavily dependent on foreign aid). Never mind that Honduras’s Congress, Supreme Court, church leaders, and other institutions overwhelmingly don’t want him back.

Even liberal legal scholars admit that Zelaya’s removal from office was technically legal, although, strangely, they don’t like it for ideological reasons (they root for Zelaya because he made left-wing speeches and allied himself with Venezuela’s socialist ruler Hugo Chavez; but they ignore the fact that Zelaya, a wealthy landowner, looted his country’s treasury and gave millions to his wealthy landowner cronies). But amazingly enough, they are now demonizing GOP Senators as ignorant hicks for citing the same facts about Honduran law that they did.

The liberal Daily Kos diarist Litho was one of the first people to note that the Honduran military’s removal of Zelaya from office was “legal” in a “technical sense” under Article 272 of the Honduran Constitution. But when 17 U.S. Senators later noted that the removal was seemingly legal (and asked the Obama Administration to stop trying to force Honduras to reinstate its constitution-shredding ex-president), Litho attacked this argument as being “evidence-free.” Apparently, a straightforward description of the law suddenly becomes reactionary nonsense the moment a GOP senator agrees with it. (Many others have explained why the removal was legal, including the prominent Honduran-American appellate lawyer Miguel Estrada, Honduran lawyer Octavio Paz, former assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, and me).

Litho now deceptively claims that the removal is now illegal even according to the Honduran military and Supreme Court. But as the stories Litho links to make clear (and Litho knows perfectly well), the military and Supreme Court were saying that the EXILE of Zelaya was illegal, not that his removal from OFFICE was illegal. (Zelaya’s removal from office was perfectly legal, but his subsequent exile may well have been illegal under Article 81 of the Honduras Constitution, much as President Lincoln’s exiling of the pro-slavery Congressman Clem Vallandigham during the Civil War was technically illegal). In short, as Miguel Estrada notes, while Zelaya may have an “immigration beef” with his country, he has no right to resume being president, and Obama has no right to force his return to office.

The real basis of Litho’s — and Obama’s — desire to reinstate Zelaya is the belief that Honduras’s Constitution is an outdated “artifact” and thus simply should not be followed when it conflicts with the latest ideological fads. Much as some liberal legal scholars argue that certain constitutional provisions should be ignored because they were drafted by dead white males, Litho argues that even though the Honduran “Congress, the courts, and the Armed Forces behaved in ways that are in fact constitutional,” the “Honduran constitution” should be ignored because it conflicts with “the norms of the international community.” The irony is that the same arguments could be made against the U.S. Constitution, which is almost 200 years older than the 1982 Honduran Constitution. The U.S. Constitution contains many provisions that are historical “artifacts,” such as its electoral college system for selecting presidents, which conflicts with the international norm of selecting political leaders purely by popular vote. Much of Britain’s system of government was fashioned by a Parliament that was once elected by a tiny percentage of its population (only wealthy male landowners and merchants could vote).

To justify meddling in Honduras, the Obama Administration has made radical arguments at odds with our own constitution, like claiming that a “universal principle” gives presidents the right to keep ruling even if they violate the Constitution (explain that to Richard Nixon), and that government officials have a right to extensive “judicial process” before removal (explain that to the many elected officials who can be recalled from office at any time, like California’s governor, or who can be impeached by Congress without judicial intervention, like the President).

At the same time, Obama has deliberately ignored violations of democracy and constitutional rights by left-wing dictators in Latin America, leading even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, to accuse Obama of showing a “willful disregard of political oppression” by left-wing dictators.

In response to Obama’s pressure on Honduras to put Zelaya back in power, Senator Jim DeMint has placed a temporary hold on the nomination of Arturo Valenzuela to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs. Valenzuela has a soft-spot for Anti-American dictators, reflecting his reputation as a loud defender of Venezuelan dictator Chavez’s terrible record on freedom of the press.

The wire services like CNN and Reuters (whose reporters have long romanticized left-wing dictators overseas) continually refer to Honduras’s removal of its president as a “coup,” even while noting that his removal was ordered by the country’s supreme court. But if it was constitutional, it was by definition not a coup. As Wikipedia notes, “A coup d’état . . . or coup for short, is the sudden, unconstitutional deposition of a legitimate government, by a small group of the State Establishment — usually the military — to replace the deposed government with another, either civil or military.”

Honduras’s president was constitutionally removed pursuant to Articles 239 and 272 of the Honduras Constitution. Moreover, he was removed not by a “small group,” but with the unanimous support of the Honduras Supreme Court, the almost-unanimous support of Honduras’s Congress, and “much of Honduran society. For each of these separate reasons, it was not a coup.

The fact that soldiers removed him on orders from the supreme court does not make it a “coup” anymore than the English Parliament’s use of soldiers to replace and exile King James II made that a coup. The use of soldiers to enforce court orders is not unknown even in the U.S., where troops were used to enforce a court’s desegregation order in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, against the state’s governor. In Honduras, troops perform many functions performed by civil police in the U.S., like safeguarding the polls. And Honduras does not have the kind of court police who might carry out court orders in the U.S., like U.S. Marshalls. (Even in the U.S., if a president were impeached and refused to leave office, the military would probably be needed to dislodge him. The more powerful the official, the more powerful the force needed to remove him, and it is absurd to expect a president’s removal to be enforced by a couple of pot-bellied U.S. marshalls).

Obama is repeating the foreign policy mistakes of the Carter Administration, which likewise meddled in the internal affairs of foreign countries to promote left-wing dictators and strongmen, like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Mugabe blocked international assistance to his malnourished subjects, who died in droves in a cholera epidemic that Mugabe concealed and claimed did not exist.

It was Jimmy Carter who paved the way for Mugabe’s blood-soaked dictatorship, which turned Zimbabwe, once a prosperous breadbasket, into one of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries. Dissidents’ wives and children are tortured and murdered, orphans are beaten, schools are turned into torture chambers, aid agencies that once fed thousands of starving people were kicked out of the country, and a cholera epidemic rages across the country, where life expectancy has plunged from around 60 years to less than 40.

When Zimbabwean voters overwhelmingly elected a racial-reconciliation government headed by the black bishop Abel Muzorewa in 1979, to replace the white-only regime that had governed the country, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to recommend an end to international sanctions against the new government, which was starved of funds and facing a bloody guerilla war led by Marxists like Mugabe, who was supported by North Korea. Carter ignored the vote, maintained sanctions against the new government, and supported Mugabe. His U.N. Ambassador, Andrew Young, effusively praised Mugabe, who had killed people simply for voting, saying that the only thing that bothered him about Mugabe was that he was “so damn incorruptible.”

Aided by U.S. sanctions, Mugabe soon took over the country, jailing Bishop Muzorewa. His North Korean-trained security forces then killed perhaps 25,000 members of the minority Ndebele tribe, forcing torture victims to sing praises to Mugabe even as they were savagely tortured, and forcing people to torture their own family members, sometimes to death. Guilty white liberals, who had lionized Mugabe as a saintly opponent of racism and representative of black Zimbabweans, did not know what to make of this, and either remained silent, or kept praising him. Mugabe’s government received billions of dollars in aid, which finally stopped after Mugabe destroyed his country’s economy by seizing the country’s white-owned commercial farms and giving them to his incompetent political cronies. More recently, Mugabe so mismanaged his country’s crumbling economy and infrastructure that an easily-preventable cholera epidemic broke out, killing thousands.

During his presidency, Carter was blind to Mugabe’s faults because he saw Mugabe through a prism of racial guilt, seeing a Third-World post-colonial conflict as a reenactment of the U.S. civil-rights movement.

Obama made a mistake of the same kind when he went to Kenya in 2006 to campaign for the unscrupulous left-wing demagogue Raila Odinga against the pro-Western, democratically-elected government of President Mwai Kibaki. Odinga, a Luo tribesman, fanned the flames of ethnic hatred by milking the resentment of many of Kenya’s tribes against President Kibaki’s relatively-prosperous Kikuyu tribe. (The tribes did have legitimate grievances over the corruption of the Kibaki government, which continued many of the corrupt practices of his precedessor).

(The subsequent election, which Kibaki was declared to have won after likely election fraud, led to a violent ethnic conflict, including ethnic cleansing by Odinga supporters, that ended only when Kibaki appointed Odinga Prime Minister and ceded to him much of his presidential powers. Today, Kibaki and Odinga are jointly looting the Kenyan treasury to enrich themselves and their supporters).

Obama apparently saw his meddling in the politics of another country as righting past racial wrongs, since Kibaki’s Kikuyu have historically fared better than Odinga’s economically-backward Luo tribe, which counted Obama’s father as a member. But Kenya is not America during the civil-rights movement, and it was foolhardy for Obama to meddle in African politics, just as it was foolhardy for Carter to do so three decades earlier in Zimbabawe. Fortunately, the man Obama supported in Kenya (Odinga) does not appear to be as evil as the man Carter supported (Mugabe).

Obama’s “Willful Disregard of Political Oppression” by Anti-American Dictators Is Admitted by Liberal Washington Post

by Hans Bader on July 13, 2009 · 1 comment

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Obama has demanded that Honduras allow its anti-American would-be dictator, Mel Zelaya, to return to power, arguing that President Zelaya’s removal by the Honduras Supreme Court, with the backing of his country’s Congress and military, was “undemocratic” because the now-unpopular Zelaya was once elected. He has ignored the many legal and foreign-affairs commentators who have pointed out that Zelaya’s removal was a legal response to Zelaya’s flouting of the constitution, and not a “coup,” such as attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, and the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.

But Obama has shown no interest at all in criticizing the human rights violations, violent repression, and anti-democratic behavior of Venezuela’s anti-American strongman, as even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, noted today in an editorial by Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl, “Double Standards on Latin America.”

The Washington Post‘s Diehl notes Obama’s “willful disregard of political oppression” by anti-American regimes in places like Venezuela, and the fact that his Administration “for months refused to publicly” criticize human-rights abuses in Venezuela.

Obama’s glaring double-standard in favor of despotic anti-American regimes is not new for him. In 1983, the left-wing populist ruler of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, Maurice Bishop, was overthrown and murdered by hardline Communist thugs backed by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Caribbean nations led by Dominican Prime Minister Eugenia Charles beseeched the U.S. to intervene to fight off Cuban imperialism and restore human rights and democracy, which the U.S. did, with the backing of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, producing a jubilant response among Grenada’s oppressed people. (Disgracefully, the UN General Assembly, representing mostly countries run by dictators, voted to condemn the U.S. for liberating Grenada).

How does Obama view this act of liberation from oppression, which has brought Grenada 25 years of peace and democracy? In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, he derides it as “the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada.” This is exactly how Cuban dictator Fidel Castro disparaged America’s liberation of Grenada. It’s also how it is disparaged by former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, the Obama associate who sat on charitable boards along with Obama and helped him disburse tens of millions of dollars for left-wing causes.

Why does Obama think it is OK to meddle in foreign countries’ internal affairs to force them to accept the return of a would-be dictator — but not to liberate them from tyranny and oppression?

Obama has argued that the mere fact that Honduras’s would-be dictator was once elected means he couldn’t be removed even if he violated the law — a ridiculous argument that would have left Richard Nixon in charge of the U.S. after Watergate.

His nominee for Assistant Secretary of State, Arturo Valenzuela has made the ridiculous, legally-unfounded argument that even though Honduras’s president was removed on orders from Honduras’s Supreme Court, it was still illegal because he should have received more “judicial process.” Valenzuela has a soft-spot for Anti-American dictators, reflecting his reputation as a loud defender of Venezuelan dictator Chavez’s terrible record on freedom of the press.

Obama’s claim that the removal of Honduras’s president was “undemocratic” is belied by the fact that the Honduran Congress overwhelmingly voted to ratify the president’s removal and replace him with the speaker of the Honduran Congress.

Honduras did not use a formal impeachment process to remove its president because its constitution does not have a well-developed impeachment mechanism, says Latin American scholar Juan Carlos Hidalgo at the Cato Institute. But its unwieldy constitution does have other, less elegant means of removing abusive presidents: Article 239 bans presidents from continuing to hold office if they seek to extend their tenure, or merely propose an end to presidential term-limits. And Article 272 gives the military the power to enforce those term-limit provisions, which it did by executing a warrant for Zelaya’s arrest issued by the Honduran Supreme Court.

(The military’s law enforcement role is not unique to Honduras: in the U.S., federal troops were used to enforce a court order desegregating the schools in Little Rock in 1957, when the court’s order was thwarted by the Arkansas Governor. When confronted with powerful officials who refuse to comply with the law, the courts cannot rely simply on a handful of U.S. marshalls, but rather must look to federal troops or the national guard).

Church leaders and U.S. Senators are now opposing Obama’s demand that Honduras be forced to return Zelaya to power.

Church Leaders, Senators Oppose Forcing Honduras to Reinstate Ousted President and Would-Be Dictator

by Hans Bader on July 10, 2009

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Trade

Honduran church leaders, and 17 U.S. Senators, are now opposing outside pressure on Honduras to reinstate the corrupt president that it ousted last Sunday for seeking to eliminate constitutional term limits and become a dictator. The Obama Administration has joined Cuban dictator Castro, the anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and the Organization of American States in demanding that Honduras put ex-president Mel Zelaya back in power.

“Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, and a Cardinal, strongly warned against Zelaya’s return to Honduras, which could lead to a ‘blood bath.’ Rodriguez, in a televised speech on July 4, asked the Organization of American States (OAS), which has demanded Zelaya’s restoration, to examine the ‘illegal deeds’ under Zelaya’s regime:’” “‘The Honduras people are also asking why the warlike threats against our country have not been condemned,’ he continued, by implication referring to invasion threats by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.”

Speaking on behalf of Honduras’s bishops, he criticized international sanctions and threatened trade blockades against Honduras: “‘We declare the right we have to define our own destiny without unilateral pressure of any sort, seeking solutions which promote the good of all,’ said Cardinal Rodriguez in his July 4 broadcast, reading from the bishops’ statement. ‘We reject threats of force or blockades of any sort which only make the poorest suffer.’”

“Implicitly defending Zelaya’s ouster by the Supreme Court and Congress, Cardinal Rodriguez said: ‘Each and every one of the documents which have come into our hands show that the institutions of the Honduran democratic state are valid and that what it has executed in juridical-legal matters has been rooted in law.’ Rodriguez noted that the Honduran constitution asserts that ‘whoever proposes’ to change the constitution’s prohibition against presidential reelection ‘immediately ceases to hold his post and remains disqualified for ten years for any public function.’ The Cardinal concluded: ‘Therefore, the person sought, when he was captured, no longer held the position of President of the Republic.’ The Supreme Court had authorized an arrest warrant for the President, he noted.” In short, the removal of Zelaya was valid under Article 239 of the Honduras Constitution, as the Honduran-American lawyer Miguel Estrada, the Honduran lawyer Octavio Sanchez, and a former assistant secretary of state, have noted.

Cardinal Rodriguez did, however, criticize the military for exiling Zelaya after removing him from office, taking him in his pajamas to the nearby country of Costa Rica, “when he observed that the constitution prohibits expatriation to a ‘foreign State,’” referring to Article 81 of the Honduran Constitution.

(The military’s role in removing Zelaya from office was valid under Article 272 of the Honduras Constitution. Moreover, it acted on orders of the Honduran Supreme Court, and the president was replaced by the Congressional speaker, Roberto Micheletti, who was duly selected by an almost unanimous vote of Honduras’s Congress. Given the country’s civilian leadership, the oft-repeated claim that Honduras had a “military coup” or is controlled by a “military junta” is simply false).

Obama and the State Department have argued that Zelaya’s removal from office was an “illegal” “coup,” but they have not explained how his removal could violate Honduran law if it was approved by the Honduran Supreme Court and carried out in accord with Articles 239 and 272 of the Constitution. That has puzzled many in the Senate.

On July 8, 17 senators sent Secretary of State Clinton a letter calling on the Administration to stop pressuring Honduras to accept the return of its would-be dictator, and asking the Administration to explain how it can possibly call the removal illegal when it was carried on orders of the Honduran courts and approved by the Honduran Congress. They noted that “the removal of Mr. Zelaya was legal and legitimate” pursuant to the Honduran Constitution’s “system of checks and balances.” Accusing the Administration of “disregarding Honduran law,” they argued that “U.S. assistance should not be interrupted to Honduras” based on the false assumption that it has experienced a military “coup d’etat.”

(To argue that Honduras acted illegally, the Obama Administration has made some pretty radical, and unfounded, legal claims, such as suggesting, contrary to the U.S. and Honduran Constitutions, that corrupt government officials can’t be removed from office without elaborate “judicial process,” and that there is a “universal principle” that allows elected presidents to stay in office, even, apparently, if they violate the law or constitutional checks and balances.).

The Episcopal Bishop of Honduras has also criticized ousted president Zelaya, noting that he had defied the Supreme Court and Congress when he “led a group of protesters to an air force installation and seized the ballot boxes, which the procurator’s office and the electoral tribunal had ordered confiscated.”

The democratically-elected president of Panama is now telling other American leaders not to meddle in Honduras’s affairs by forcing Zelaya’s return.

Obama: “Universal Principle” Gives Presidents the Right to Keep Ruling Even If They Violate the Law

by Hans Bader on July 7, 2009

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Honduras removed its would-be dictator, President Mel Zelaya, for violating his country’s constitution by seeking to extend his term in office, and replaced him with a leading Congressman. Zelaya’s removal was authorized by Articles 239 and 272 of the Honduran Constitution, and ordered by his country’s Supreme Court, after he used coercion and aid from Venezuela’s dictator to push an illegal referendum. But Obama has joined Cuban dictator Castro and Venezuelan dictator Chavez in demanding that Zelaya be reinstated.

Originally, Obama’s justification for this demand was his erroneous claim that Zelaya’s removal was “illegal.” But when Honduras’s new president, a veteran legislator, pointed to stacks of court rulings that Zelaya had violated, the fact that the Honduran Congress had voted 123-to-5 to replace Zelaya, and that the military had legally executed a warrant for Zelaya’s arrest, Obama changed his tune.

Now, Obama claims that Zelaya must be put back in power because of the “universal principle that people should choose their own leaders”. Never mind that even publications that criticized the manner of Zelaya’s removal, like the Economist, have candidly admitted that Zelaya was unpopular with Hondurans, who overwhelmingly back the removal of their president — and that Zelaya was a bullying crook with approval ratings below 30 percent. In the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other papers, Hondurans have overwhelmingly supported his removal.

Apparently, Obama is determined to saddle Hondurans with Zelaya whether they want him or not, just because they once elected him. (Even though he radically changed his policy positions after being elected). Under Obama’s reasoning, Richard Nixon, who was twice elected president, shouldn’t have been forced to resign over Watergate, because that violated the American people’s “universal” right to choose their ruler.

What Obama really means is that presidents, once elected, have a universal right to rule their subjects, and to flout the constitution, as Zelaya did, without being subject to removal. This sounds disturbingly like the “divine right” to rule (without following the law) claimed by medieval kings. (It’s certainly not what Obama and I were taught at Harvard Law School).

But the entire purpose of constitutional checks and balances, and the constitutional impeachment process, is that even elected presidents can lose their right to rule if they violate their country’s constitution or laws. In our constitution’s impeachment process, the Congress removes the president from office for wrongdoing, even if he was elected by a landslide. In Honduras, the Congress voted by 123-to-5 to replace Zelaya, including the vast majority of Zelaya’s own political party.

Honduras did not use a formal impeachment process because its constitution does not have a well-developed impeachment mechanism, says Latin American scholar Juan Carlos Hidalgo at the Cato Institute. But its unwieldy constitution does have other, less elegant means of removing abusive presidents: Article 239 bans presidents from continuing to hold office if they seek to extend their tenure, or merely propose an end to presidential term-limits. And Article 272 gives the military the power to enforce those term-limit provisions. (The military’s law enforcement role is not unique to Honduras: in the U.S., federal troops were used to enforce a court order desegregating the schools in Little Rock in 1957, when the court’s order was thwarted by the Arkansas Governor. When confronted with powerful executives with armed followers who refuse to comply with the law, the courts cannot rely simply on a handful of U.S. marshalls, but rather must look to federal troops or the national guard).

Journalists who romanticize foreign dictators have faulted Honduras for removing Zelaya and kicking him out of the country in his pajamas. But getting rid of tyrants is a messy and difficult process. You can’t get rid of a tyrant by asking him nicely to leave office.

Honduras was far gentler to its menacing ex-president than the U.S. was in the past to people who threatened its democracy or constitutional order. In the Civil War, the U.S. government jailed without trial thousands of suspected confederate sympathizers, some of them innocent, as William Safire has noted, and many of them died in jail. After the Civil War, Tennessee’s Governor “Bloody Bill” Brownloe had to hold racist legislators at gun-point to make them ratify the 14th Amendment paving the way for black suffrage and equality — something that was far less legal than what happened in Honduras.

Will Obama Blackmail Honduras Into Installing Would-Be Dictator?

by Hans Bader on July 5, 2009 · 3 comments

in Features, International, Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Last Sunday, Honduras removed its would-be dictator, Mel Zelaya, who flouted court rulings by using intimidation to try to get Hondurans to change their constitution to allow him to extend his tenure in office. The country’s Supreme Court issued a warrant for Zelaya’s arrest, which the military enforced by removing Zelaya from office. The country’s legislature then voted almost unanimously to replace him with a legislative speaker, in accord with the country’s constitution.

Now, Obama, who knows nothing about Honduran law, is ignorantly claiming that Zelaya’s removal was “illegal,” and demanding that Zelaya be reinstated as president. His demand is joined in by the Organization of American States, many of whose leaders, like Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, have either violated their own countries’ constitutions, or likewise seek to eliminate term limits contained in their own countries’ constitutions. (“A senior Obama administration official said the United States would probably move to suspend economic development and military assistance” to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere).

Obama is quite wrong to claim that the removal of Zelaya was “illegal.” The Honduran president forfeited his right to rule under Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution, which bans presidents from holding office if they even propose to alter the constitutional term limits for presidents. And the Honduran military, which acted on orders of the Honduran supreme court, expressly had the right to remove the president for seeking to alter the constitutional term limit, under Article 272 of the Honduran Constitution, as even left-leaning commentators have now admitted. The Honduran military’s role in enforcing the court order does not make it a “coup” anymore than federal troops’ role in enforcing the court-ordered integration of the Little Rock public schools in 1957 constituted a military occupation or takeover.

(Zelaya was a corrupt ruler who so mismanaged his country’s finances so badly that it recently failed to pay many of its bills. His violations of his country’s constitution were criticized by human rights groups and the Catholic Church as well as the legislature and judiciary).

What happened in Honduras was not illegal, much less a coup, agrees the Honduran lawyer and former Minister of Culture Octavio Sanchez in his July 2 column in the Christian Science Monitor. He notes that under Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution, the President automatically lost his right to remain in office by seeking to extend his term in office: “According to Article 239: ‘No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.’ Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says ‘immediately’ – as in ‘instant,’ as in ‘no trial required,’ as in ‘no impeachment needed.’ Continuismo – the tendency of heads of state to extend their rule indefinitely – has been the lifeblood of Latin America’s authoritarian tradition. The Constitution’s provision of instant sanction might sound draconian, but every Latin American democrat knows how much of a threat to our fragile democracies continuismo presents. In Latin America, chiefs of state have often been above the law. The instant sanction of the supreme law has successfully prevented the possibility of a new Honduran continuismo. The Supreme Court and the attorney general ordered Zelaya’s arrest for disobeying several court orders compelling him to obey the Constitution. He was detained and taken to Costa Rica. Why? Congress needed time to convene and remove him from office. With him inside the country that would have been impossible. This decision was taken by the 123 (of the 128) members of Congress present that day. Don’t believe the coup myth. The Honduran military acted entirely within the bounds of the Constitution. The military gained nothing but the respect of the nation by its actions.”

If Richard Nixon had been impeached and convicted for Watergate, and then refused to leave office, until being forced out by the military, would that have been a “military coup”? Of course not. But Obama and many in the press are taking essentially that position in demanding the reinstatement of Honduras’s would-be dictator.

The fact that the military carried out the Honduran Supreme Court’s orders in removing a would-be dictator, after he flouted the court’s rulings, does not make it a “military coup.” When court orders are defied by powerful government officials, troops are sometimes called out to enforce them, as happened in the U.S. in 1957 when federal troops forced Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to stop blocking the court-ordered integration of Little Rock’s public schools.

Indeed, Article 272 of the Honduran Constitution gives the military the power to remove a president even without a court order, if he seeks to violate the term limits prescribed in the Honduran Constitution. Even a legal commentator, Litho, at the leading liberal blog Daily Kos, which is run by a leftist Latin American immigrant, admits that the military’s action was “legal” in a “technical sense” under the Honduran Constitution.

Obama Backs Dictatorship in Honduras

by Hans Bader on June 30, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Honduras removed its bullying, autocratic President after he began behaving as a dictator, and its Congress replaced him with a less power-hungry member of his own political party. Now Obama is joining the Cuban dictator Castro and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in demanding the Honduran ruler’s return. This is simply outrageous.

As Investors Business Daily notes, Honduras had ample reason to remove its dangerous, out-of-control President, who had repeatedly violated his country’s constitution and laws:

“Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries. Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway. As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.” President Obama on Monday called the action ‘not legal,’ and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president. There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).”

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal call’s Zelaya’s ouster a “triumph” of the law:

“Many foreign observers are condemning the ouster of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, a supporter of Hugo Chavez, as a ‘military coup.’ But can it be a coup when the Honduran military acted on the orders of the nation’s Supreme Court, the step was backed by the nation’s attorney general, and the man replacing Mr. Zelaya and elected in emergency session by that nation’s Congress is a member of the former president’s own political party? Mr. Zelaya had sacked General Romeo Vasquez, head of the country’s armed forces, after he refused to use his troops to provide logistical support for a referendum designed to let Mr. Zelaya escape the country’s one-term limit on presidents. Both the referendum and the firing of the military chief have been declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Mr. Zelaya intended yesterday to use ballots printed in Venezuela to conduct the vote anyway. All this will be familiar to members of Honduras’ legislature, who vividly recall how Mr. Chavez in Venezuela adopted similar means to hijack his country’s democracy and economy. Elected a decade ago, Mr. Chavez held a Constituent Assembly and changed the constitution to enhance his power and subvert the country’s governing institutions. Mr. Zelaya made it clear that he wished to do the same in Honduras and that the referendum was the first step in installing a new constitution that would enhance his powers and allow him to run for re-election.”

The press coverage of the Honduran crisis, which refers to the ex-president’s removal as a “military coup,” is amazingly biased. As Tom Palmer, who has helped promote democracy abroad, notes, what really happened in Honduras is that “a President who seeks dictatorial powers in an illegal move” was “removed by the Congress and by the Supreme Court“:

“Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?”

If Richard Nixon had been impeached and convicted for Watergate, and then refused to leave office, until being forced out by the military, would that have been a “military coup”? Of course not. But Obama and many in the press are taking a similarly extreme position in demanding the reinstatement of Honduras’s would-be despot.

Even the Cato Institute, which espouses antiwar positions and a dovish, liberal foreign policy, approved of Honduras’s removal of its oppressive ruler. Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo notes that “the removal from office of Zelaya on Sunday by the armed forces is the result of his continuous attempts to promote a referendum that would allow for his reelection, a move that had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court and the Electoral Tribunal and condemned by the Honduran Congress and the attorney general. Unfortunately, the Honduran constitution does not provide an effective civilian mechanism for removing a president from office after repeated violations of the law, such as impeachment in the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless, the armed forces acted under the order of the country’s Supreme Court, and the presidency has been hastily bestowed on a civilian figure — the president of Congress — as specified by the constitution.”

While Obama is busy ignoring the Honduran President’s violation of his citizens’ constitutional rights, he is busy extending U.S. Constitutional rights to foreign terrorists overseas. The Obama Administration is needlessly making investigators give Miranda warnings to captured terrorists and enemy combatants in Afghanistan. It is doing that even though Miranda rights do not apply to aliens captured in Afghanistan, a foreign country, and neither Afghan law, nor human-rights treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, mandate such warnings.

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