Guardian UK
Protesters in Honduras yesterday put up roadblocks in the capital, Tegucigalpa, as they demanded the return of the president, Manuel Zelaya, hours after he was ousted in a military coup.

Hundreds of people, some wearing masks and armed with sticks, put up barricades near the presidential palace as governments across the region condemned the first military overthrow in central America since the end of the cold war.

What has so far been a bloodless coup could yet turn lethal.

Shots were fired near the presidential palace last night,but it was unclear who was shooting or whether there were any casualties.

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Al Giordano, NarcoNews

Honduras' dictator-for-a-day Roberto Micheletti is already losing it in the face of unanimous international condemnation of his coup d'etat. This from the daily El Heraldo - one of the commercial media outlets still allowed to publish in Honduras, because it backs the coup - in Tegucigalpa:

"The new president of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, said he's not afraid of international isolation after different countries and international organisms demonstrated their discontent with the expulsion of Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

"Micheletti, who a few hours ago was the Speaker of the House, said that neither US President Barack Obama nor Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez would decide what should be done in Honduras..."

It takes a special kind of moron to unite Obama and Chávez against him in the very week that the US and Venezuela reestablished diplomatic relations and active ambassadors.

In the same statement, demonstrating his grand commitment to democracy, justice and freedom, Dictator-for-a-Day Micheletti declared martial law ("toque de queda," ordering all Hondurans to remain in their homes and off the streets from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. tonight and tomorrow night).

Honduran president overthrown, new leader voted in

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"I will never give up since I was elected the president by the people," Zelaya said from San Jose, accusing Honduran troops of kidnapping him and denouncing what he called a "political conspiracy."

But Congress said it voted unanimously to remove him from office for his "apparent misconduct" and for "repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions."

In his place they appointed speaker Roberto Micheletti as the new leader to serve out the rest of the term, which ends in January. New general elections are planned for November 29.

Zelaya, elected to a non-renewal four-year term in 2005, had planned a vote Sunday asking Hondurans to sanction a future referendum to allow him to run for reelection in the November polls.

The planned referendum had been ruled illegal by the country's top court and was opposed by the military, but the president said he planned to press ahead with it anyway and ballot boxes had already been distributed.

The Supreme Court said Sunday that it had ordered the president's ouster in order to protect law and order in the nation of some seven million people.

"Today's events originate from a court order by a competent judge," the country's highest court said in a statement read by spokesman Danilo Izaguirre.

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Sunday's dramatic events were the culmination of a tense political standoff over the past several days.

Last week Zelaya sacked the country's top military chief, General Romeo Vasquez and also accepted the resignation of Defense Minister Edmundo Orellana, after military commanders refused to distribute ballot boxes for Sunday's vote.

The heads of the army, marines and air force also resigned.

The Honduran Supreme Court then unanimously voted Thursday to reinstate Vasquez and hundreds of troops massed late last week in the capital Tegucigalpa.

Zelaya, who was elected as a conservative, has shifted dramatically to the left during his presidency.

He is the latest in a long list of Latin American leaders, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, to seek constitutional changes to expand presidential powers and also ease term limits.

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also from wiki:

In 2009 Zelaya caused uproar with his call to have a referendum in June to decide about convening a Constitutional National Assembly to approve a new political constitution in order to allow the President to be re-elected, given that the current constitution only allows a president to serve for a single term.[6] The constitution explicitly bars changes to some of its clauses, including the term limit.

"Some interesting video from early this morning when military troops took the national palace and passersby in the street began to realize a coup was in progress." Narco News

During an extraordinary meeting of the Bolivarian Alliance of the
Honduran Foreign Minister Travels to Mexico

Peoples of The Americas in Managua, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega announced that the Rodas was on her way to Mexico, where she would be welcomed by the government of Felipe Calderon.

Ortega said that the Honduran diplomat would land in Toluca city and she would later travel to Managua in order to join the ALBA meeting and the struggle for the reestablishment of dignity in Honduras.

Patricia Rodas was seized by the Honduran military on Sunday, during the coup staged against President Manuel Zelaya and she had reportedly disappeared.

A Few Thoughts on the Coup in Honduras

It is impossible to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup was in the works. At minimum, the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down.

By Jeremy Scahill

There is a lot of great analysis circulating on the military coup against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. I do not see a need to re-invent the wheel. (See here here here and here). However, a few key things jump out at me. First, we know that the coup was led by Gen. Romeo Vasquez, a graduate of the US Army School of the Americas. As we know very well from history, these “graduates” maintain ties to the US military as they climb the military career ladders in their respective countries. That is a major reason why the US trains these individuals.

Secondly, the US has a fairly significant military presence in Honduras. Joint Task Force-Bravo is located at Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras. The base is home to some 550 US military personnel and more than 650 US and Honduran civilians:

    They work in six different areas including the Joint Staff, Air Force Forces (612th Air Base Squadron), Army Forces, Joint Security Forces and the Medical Element. 1st Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment, a US Army South asset, is a tenant unit also based at Soto Cano. The J-Staff provides command and control for JTF-B.

The New York Times reports that “The unit focuses on training Honduran military forces, counternarcotics operations, search and rescue, and disaster relief missions throughout Central America.”

Significantly, according to GlobalSecurity, “Soto Cano is a Honduran military installation and home of the Honduran Air Force.”

This connection to the Air Force is particularly significant given this report in NarcoNews:

    The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.

It is impossible to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup was in the works. In fact, this was basically confirmed by The New York Times in Monday’s paper:

    As the crisis escalated, American officials began in the last few days to talk with Honduran government and military officials in an effort to head off a possible coup. A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the military broke off those discussions on Sunday.

While the US has issued heavily-qualified statements critical of the coup—in the aftermath of the events in Honduras—the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down. The US ties to the Honduran military and political establishment run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some US political or military official(s).

Here are some facts to consider: the US is the top trading partner for Honduras. The coup plotters/supporters in the Honduran Congress are supporters of the “free trade agreements” Washington has imposed on the region. The coup leaders view their actions, in part, as a rejection of Hugo Chavez’s influence in Honduras and with Zelaya and an embrace of the United States and Washington’s “vision” for the region. Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls. For an interesting take on all of this, make sure to check out Nikolas Kozloff’s piece on Counterpunch, where he writes:

    In November, Zelaya hailed Obama’s election in the U.S. as “a hope for the world,” but just two months later tensions began to emerge. In an audacious letter sent personally to Obama, Zelaya accused the U.S. of “interventionism” and called on the new administration in Washington to respect the principle of non-interference in the political affairs of other nations.

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'The desire to be free is primal' -adrena

I'm reposting it here:

So Zelaya was attempting a progressive "left-wing" "pink" coup. Instead he got booted by an authoritarian "right-wing", well since here in the U.S. the colors have been switched and since you yourself say this is not a typical coup where a general takes over lets call it a "pink" coup.

Which fits your general theory nicely. Your theory being that Latin America is evolving in a more democratic direction generally. Chavez is not Castro and Micheletti is not Pinochet.

But here's the rub. The authoritarian "right-wing" can maintain their hold on power quite nicely with revolving "presidents" ala Mexico. Their power is situated within a corporate economic structure. Indeed they need to keep "governments" reigned in. Whereas the progressive "left-wing" can only hope to counter the authoritarian hold on economic power by using public governing structures. The ability to keep electing a good government is often needed especially where economic power is arrayed against you.

The signal point of a turn from democratic governance to dictatorial governance would better be placed within a transition from multi-party electoral system to a single party system rather than from the transition from term-limits to un-limited terms.

So far we have no examples of a progressive-coup turning into a dictatorship. Least-wise not since Zimbabwe which is probably "too unique" to use as an example of anything.

Your belief in the inherent goodness of constitutional democratic governance within the confines of barely fettered market economics is, imho, overly optimistic.

Left Coaster

With the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Obama Administration, and the European Union all condemning the coup in Honduras, it's worth drawing attention to a couple of serious issues of which all should be aware. The first important point is that while, as LithiumCola has pointed out, President Obama's condemnation of the Honduran coup represents a paradigmatic change in U.S. policy towards the overthrow of a left wing Latin American government, the U.S. does appear to bear responsibility for having trained the leader of the coup. According to School of The Americas Watch:

General Romeo Vasquez, the head of the armed forces who led the military coup against the democratically elected president Zelaya, is a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas (SOA).

What is the SOA?

As explained by this site, jointly operated by the Center for International Policy, the Latin American Working Group, and the Washington Office on Latin America:

The School of the Americas had been questioned for years, as it trained many military personnel before and during the years of the "national security doctrine" -- the dirty war years in the Southern Cone and the civil war years in Central America -- in which Latin American militaries ruled or had disproportionate government influence and committed serious human rights violations. Training manuals used at the SOA and elsewhere from the early 1980s through 1991 promoted techniques that violated human rights and democratic standards. SOA graduates continue to surface in news reports regarding both current human rights cases and new reports on past cases.

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The Honduran situation is analogous to Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mullen, telling the nation to ignore Obama's legislation and then arresting him out of pique. It's absurd.

The trend in Latin America is left and Democratic. Here's something right here on the July 5 Mexican congressional elections. Obrador is stil fighting and Calderon is soundling like a leftist. Very interesting. 11% for "non of them" - an organized process for abstaining to protest the party system and non responsive government.

A Matter of Trust - Mexico's July 5 Congressional Election

A Three Part Series Part 1

Andrew Sullivan

30 Jun 2009 11:13 am
Thinking About The Coup

A reader writes:

I have seen a couple of the links and emails you have posted about the coup in Honduras and I think one major aspect has not been underlined enough. What is truly tragic and worrisome about this is that both sides acted against the rule of law and with blatant disregard towards the established democratic institutions of the country.

Those making Zelaya out to be a political innocent, a martyr of the 'right wing oligarchy' are imposing their own sympathies (or perhaps their Cold War ideologies) on the situation. For the last few weeks it has been clear to those who believe in democracy and more specifically the importance of democratic institutions that Zelaya was doing everything both legally and not legally in his power to ignore the decisions of the Supreme Court, the Congress, his own political party and everyone who has a constitutional say in how the country is governed and when elections or constitutional referendums are called. Again to be clear: he wanted another term and was willing to do everything in his power to stay President despite a legal prohibition against it. When all his legal avenues were exhausted instead of accepting this he put together a mob and broke into an army base to 'free' the ballots for the referendum which he was going to run on his own. A restoration of Zelaya to the presidency should take place only if he agrees to obey the constitution, otherwise we are exchanging one set of unconstitutional players for another.

Those excusing the coup do so because they were rightly worried about Zelaya's own unconstitutional power grab, but the ends do *not* justify the means. Congress was legally moving to impeach Zelaya and should have stuck to that course when confronted with the likelihood of Zelaya breaking the law on Sunday. Instead they pulled a move out of the 1970s and 1980s book and called the army in to lend a helping hand. To oust Zelaya this way only lost them credibility and, sincerely for those in the region worried about the deeper issue of institutional stability and democracy, sent a signal that institutions are only useful to them when the results are to their liking.

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