Crisis in Honduras

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.”