Summary
The military coup d'etat in Honduras - which deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya and his government and installed Roberto Micheletti as the country's new ruler - ended our neighbor's fledgling attempt at democracy, if that's what we can call the nearly three decades during which Honduras was spared direct and visible military intervention in politics. MISERY, in capital letters, a condition that is ubiquitous in a land ruled by megalomaniacal millionaires, mezquino (brutal) military men, messianic manipulators, marrulleros (fraudsters) and miscreants, murderers of people and laws, mastiffs of unworthy interests . . . these are the people who dominate our suffering societies, doing with them as they wish. Is it because of their decisive and intransigent defense of democratic institutions, their decision to side with Zelaya, or their simply being poor Hondurans trapped in the context of a putschist government's out-of-control crackdown? I WAS PART OF AN INTERNATIONAL MISSION OF HUMAN rights observers that visited Honduras from July 18 to 22, and I returned August 19 to attend hearings conducted by the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights during its visit to the country.
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Extract
The Honduran Coup: The View From El Salvador
WHAT TOOK PLACE IN THE WEE HOURS of June 28 thrust Central America into a nightmare. The military coup d'etat in Honduras - which deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya and his government and installed Roberto Micheletti as the country's new ruler - ended our neighbor's fledgling attempt at democracy, if that's what we can call the nearly three decades during which Honduras was spared direct and visible military intervention in politics. Forces that we imagined had been relegated to the past rose up to re-establish what they called a "broken institutional order." Left behind were the much-vaunted Esquipulas II Peace Accords of 1987, which began the process of building peace and democracy in our war-ravaged region, and the Inter-American Democratic Charter of 2001, meant to strengthen and maintain democratic institutions in the hemisphere. Neither of these prevented the despicable coup, which has affected virtually all of Central America with varying consequences. Those consequences are the principal focus of this article, but first some reflections are in order concerning what the Hondurans are suffering through.
Anything and everything has been said about Honduras since the fateful day of the coup. Commentary has ranged from the laughable to the pathetic, and only occasionally has it been serious and objective. Concepts and terms have been abused in an effort to dismiss alternative views and to advance one interpretation or another: It was a coup or i...See the full content of this document
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