Crisis in Honduras

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.