Coyote Blog

… for taking one of the few governments in Latin America that actually is trying to respect its democratic Constitution and forcing them to disavow the protections in its Constitution against elected officials attempting to hold onto power and reinstate a strongman friend of Hugo Chavez.

From start to finish I have been unable to understand the Obama Administrations policy in Honduras.  I just refuse to believe he is actively working as an agent for totalitarianism, so the best explanation I can come up with is that he made an ignorant mistake in his early reactions to the Zelaya and has since doubled down on the mistake rather than admitting it and reversing himself. This theory is consistent with John Kerry’s attempts to hide the evidence of the administration’s mistake, not to mention Hillary Clinton’s personality at State.

In a foreign policy career that so far has been marked by a marked softness, it is amazing to me that the one place Obama has decided he is going to demonstrate his cojones internationally is in helping a wannabee dictator return to power in a democratic nation.

Earlier posts here and here.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo, via The Liberty Papers:

The Obama administration is threatening not to recognize the result of Honduras’ presidential election in late November unless Manuel Zelaya returns to the presidency beforehand.

The presidential poll was already scheduled prior to Zelaya’s (constitutional) removal from office last June. The candidates had already been selected by their parties through an open primary process. The current civilian interim president, Roberto Micheletti, is not running for office and plans to step down in January as stipulated by the Constitution. Both major presidential candidates supported the ouster of Zelaya. The political campaign is playing out in an orderly manner, and there’s a significant chance that the candidate from the opposition National Party will win the presidency. The independent Electoral Tribunal is overseeing the process.

And yet the U.S. Department of State is signaling that it won’t recognize the result of the poll in the name of defending Zelaya’s return to power.

I am still really, really scratching my head over this.  I suppose such efforts of the US to ignore due process in Latin America have occured in the past to support a pro-American regime, but Zelaya is if anything anti-American and explicitly aligned with Hugo Chavez.  This simply makes no sense.   As Quincy of the Liberty Papers writes

The Obama Administration has been going out of its way to be on the wrong side of both the law and morality when it comes to Honduras. Obama has his first chance to rebuke the shameful history of the US being propping up dictators in Latin America and what does he do? He goes out of his way to prop up a would-be dictator who had neither the support of the people nor of the Honduran Constitution. He’s laid sanctions on the Honduran people. He refuses to recognize the legal, constitutional government of a country.

Agreed.  Shameful.  If Zelaya gets away with this, expect to see a rash of Latin American leaders attempting to overstay their terms as president.

I wish I had the exact quote in front of me, but one of the lines from the Honduran Constitution was that President was subject to extreme sanctions for even mentioning in public the possibility of extending his term beyond Constitutional limits.  This is one of the provisions that Manuel Zelaya was ousted for violating.

Now, such a provision sounds very odd to our ears.  Until one considers that any number of other “democratically” elected South American presidents have held suspect “elections” that waived the Constitution and gave them extra terms.  Hugo Chavez is but one example.  Seeing this around them, the authors of the Honduran Constitution  did everything they could think of to prevent such an occurrence.  They wanted real term limits and they did not want them to be waived by any process. They knew that democratically elected Presidents had a way of becoming dictators in Latin America.

Unfortunately, in what I hope was ignorance but others have argued is calculated, Hillary Clinton’s state department and Obama are backing Zelaya and arguing that, against any reasonable reading of the Constitution, he was wrongly ousted.

Now, in Nicaragua, we can again see exactly why the Honduran Constitution writers were so paranoid, and why it is so depressing the Administration has taken the position it has:

Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega announced Sunday, on the 30th anniversary of the leftist Sandinista revolution he led, that he would seek a referendum to change the constitution to allow him to seek reelection.

Following in the footsteps of elected regional allies, Ortega told thousands of supporters here that he would seek a referendum to let “the people say if they want to reward or punish” their leaders with reelection.

His close leftist allies who have had rules changed enabling them to remain in power include presidents Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

In the last month President Manuel Zelaya in neighboring Honduras was ousted in a coup by his own military after seeking similar action.

I am sure Jimmy Carter will be available to put his imprimatur on the election.

In my July 4 post, I wrote that many Americans make what I think of as a mistake in elevating voting and democracy as the primary wonders of the United States.  In that post, I argued that  — 1.  The Rule of Law  2.  Protection of Individual Rights and 3.  The Subordination of the Government to the Citizenry — were all more important than voting.

It seems this was a timely post, as Obama appears hell-bent on making the same mistake in Honduras:

Again and again Obama stresses the fact that Mel Zelaya was “democratically-elected”. But the same could be said about many of today’s dictators. Elections are only one part of the democratic process. The other, and the one that sustains the electoral process, is the rule of law. Focusing only on the fact that Zelaya was “democratically-elected” but ignoring the fact that he has attempted to subvert Honduran constitutional principles that ensure such democratic elections is bad enough.

However, continuing that line of criticism after being apprised of the constitutional arguments and the process which led to Zeyala’s ouster is completely unacceptable. Yes, we back the right of people to democratically elect their leaders. But we must also back their decision, driven by the rule of law, to remove a leader when he refuses to follow the law he is sworn to uphold. Why is it that Obama, the “Constitutional law professor, doesn’t appear to “get” that?

In Honduras, Obama is siding against the rule of law, against the legislative branch, and against the Supreme Court, but for Executive power and for an enemy of liberty.  Hmm, maybe he is consistent after all.