"It was a coup": Porfirio Lobo Sosa

Courtesy of Vos el Soberano, readers today can watch clips from a televised interview with Porfirio Lobo Sosa on CNN from his current Spanish tour.

The post there, drawing on reporting on the alternative Honduran news site La Vanguardia, also provides quotations from the interview (the full video is available on CNN México). The key exchange:

José Levy of CNN: Was what happened in Honduras a coup d'Etat?

Lobo Sosa: "Of course, put it how you will but it was a coup."

Remarkably, this puts Lobo Sosa in the position of being more direct and honest-- more truthful, in fact-- than the head of the emasculated "Truth Commission" which has started its task by agreeing not to offend the retrograde forces in Honduras that carried out, supported, and continue to demand a whitewash of the events of June 28, 2009.

Which were, unequivocally, by all international standards, and under Honduran constitution and law, a coup d'Etat.

As the person now occupying the uncomfortable position of intending to lead Honduras with limited legitimacy and constrained authority recognizes.

And attempts to legitimate:

"Democracy did not have sufficient mechanisms to guarantee its maintenance."

Guarantee its maintenance against what? Lobo Sosa goes on to repeat his own previous assertion that he knows that President Zelaya intended to "stay on". This is how the pro-coup elite in Honduras has tried to justify the coup: by predicting that the Cuarta Urna public opinion poll would have passed, and that the existing Constitution would have been immediately suspended, and President Zelaya would have remained in power at the head of the government during the period leading up to the Constituyente, which they further argue could only have been intended to eliminate the presidential term limit.

This is, in the end, the most frightening thing about the 2009 coup and its supporters: they literally believe that disrupting constitutionality was a way to protect the democratic order. And they believe that making this argument justifies the coup. And every time the international community gives way on calling a spade a spade, this argument gains vigor.

Hence we now see Lobo Sosa-- who evaded the same question throughout his presidential campaign and the dictatorship of the Micheletti de facto regime-- happy to admit it was a coup. But not that bad old kind of coup: the good kind. Too bad about the deaths and human rights violations but in order to save the village, we had to destroy it.