Presidential Re-Election?!

Yesterday afternoon, the Honduran Supreme Court's Constitutional branch, consisting of 5 justices, reported that they had reached a unanimous decision invalidating part of Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.  Such a decision would effectively permit Presidential re-election.  This morning at 8:34 am, Justice Lizardo of that branch rescinded his signature and vote of approval for the decision.  That should make the ruling invalid, and because the decision is no longer unanimous, throw the case to the full 15 Justices for a decision.

The decision, announced yesterday and scheduled to be released today, was in a court case brought by former president Rafael Callejas and several National Party Congressmen, who sought to invalidate part of Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.  Longtime readers will remember that Article 239 was used, after the fact, to justify the coup against President Manuel Zelaya Rosales in 2009.  Roberto Micheletti Bain claimed that the Cuarta Urna vote was to enable Zelaya Rosales to run again for President.

This morning, in a letter addressed to the Secretary of the Constitutional branch of the Supreme Court, Carlos Almedaren, Justice José Elmer Lizardo Carranza rescinded his vote of approval:

"By this letter I make known to you that I rescind my signature on the accumulated case 1343-2014 and 243-2015....Because there's been no official notification of the plaintiff's lawyers by the secretary at this hour, 8:40 AM, this makes the decision not final"

So, while it was announced that Presidential re-election was about to be come legal through a Supreme Court decision, the future is a bit more murky now.  Stay tuned.

Honduras to Seek $1 Billion in Loans, Visit IMF.

Wilfredo Cerrato, Honduras's Finance Minister, told the assembled press on March 7 that Honduras will seek to place $1 billion in bonds in the international market in 2015, and that he would head a delegation traveling to Washington, DC later this month to learn what conditions must be met for Honduras to re-establish a borrowing agreement with the IMF, which he also hopes will be in place sometime in 2015.

The Honduran press only covered one part of this story.  Can you guess which?

The international press primarily reported on the bonds story, though some did lead with the IMF trip. Cerrato told them the bond placement was specifically to convert short term high interest internal debt issued by the Honduran banks to long term, lower interest, international bonds.  Two year high-interest bonds will be replaced by 10 year lower interest bonds.

This kind of short term debt was largely shunned until Roberto Micheletti Bain, head of the post-coup de facto government, was forced to make deals with Honduran banks in 2009 because no international placement of bonds was possible after the coup. 

That use of Honduran banks, that benefits the upper class of Honduras which owns them, continued under Porfirio Lobo Sosa. So government debt payments went from $65.8 million per year in 2008, to a yearly debt payment of $789.6 million when Lobo Sosa left office in January 2014.

The Hernandez government projects that the 2014 debt payment will reach $930 million (!) with the borrowing it must do this year to balance the budget.

But that story is not being publicized by the Honduran press.

Instead, they chose to report only on the visit to the IMF to learn about the necessary conditions for arranging a new loan agreement.  Cerrato told the press that he projected a new agreement could be signed this coming April.  One wonders what that optimism is based on, since Honduras has not formally spoken to the IMF yet, and the Hernandez government has not  yet begun to achieve the financial goals they set for themselves.

Honduras successfully placed $1 billion in bonds in two sales in 2013, and the proceeds from those bonds were used to pay down some of the more egregious short term loans and finance the Lobo Sosa government deficit spending for 2013. With debt service reaching nearly $1 billion by the end of this year, the Hernandez government will find itself trapped continuing to seek external financing, if it wants to avoid an austerity budget even harsher than what seems to be in the works.

The National Archive of Honduras and state irresponsibility

That's the headline on an editorial by historian Edgar Soriano Ortiz published in Sunday's edition of Honduras' Tiempo.

This documentary resource, urgently important for the history of the country, was moved in 2007 to the Antigua Casa Presidencial, a building turned into a national monument and at the time designated as the home of a new center for documentary research. It began the processes Soriano Ortiz notes are urgently needed:

A process of classification and advanced digitization that would permit investigators and people interested in the assignment of legal titles to land to have access with better facilities.

Soriano Ortiz reports particular neglect of the national archives during the current administration, saying that

in the present administration the situation of the National Archive has becoming increasingly chaotic to the extent that for the past half year, the colonial document collection, that has documents from 1605, fell on the floor after the old shelving on which they were supported collapsed and the authorities of the Secretariat of Culture, Arts and Sports are stalling the topic of buying new and strong shelves on which to place this valuable national patrimony. Without doubt, someone here is visibly irresponsible, it is necessary to demand responsibility of Tulio Mariano González (the Secretary of Culture) and the rest of the officials so that they don't continue to commit such barbarities.

This neglect, he argues, is not random. The National Archives can be threatening to people in power, and he says that Honduran intellectuals have noticed a pattern of "intentional neglect" of cultural institutions under the current administration:

the institutions that safeguard the cultural patrimony and the few artistic spaces have been condemned for a long time to intentional neglect. These spaces are vital to fortify civic participation and consequently are a threat to the political and economic elites that govern the country by force.

That may sound like an extreme claim, but there has been an incredible decay of management of cultural institutions under the appointees to the Secretary of Culture and Arts position, starting with the amazingly ignorant Myrna Castro, appointed during the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti.

The pattern has been pretty clear: withdrawn support from grass-roots initiatives that supported local historians; a renewed focus on Copan, valuable as a tourist attraction, to the exclusion of support of the development of other archaeological sites as spaces for public understanding of the broader history of the nation; the lack of funding for major historic museums; all of these are part of a pattern, within which the neglect of the National Archives is a consistent piece.

Is the issue that knowledge is power, so encouraging public development of historical knowledge is threatening?

Archival documents do offer a specific opportunity that may challenge power: land documents can be used to support legal claims when land has been alienated from communities or individuals marginalized in Honduran society, such as indigenous people or the Garifuna.

Documents from the recent past were recovered from the National Hemeroteca (the newspaper archive) during the de facto regime, showing that the architects of the coup were themselves part of an earlier attempt to change the constitution to allow re-election to the presidency.

So yes, a case can be made that the neglect is a deliberate response to a sense that history can threaten the powerful.

But equally, it may simply be that appointing unqualified people to positions dealing with cultural affairs introduces management that doesn't understand that a fragile piece of paper from 1605 has any value whatsoever.

Myrna Castro clearly had no time for the past, or even for conventional forms of culture: she famously said "Fashion, too, is culture" when called on using the ministry's resources for Tegucigalpa Fashion Week in 2009.

Bernard Martinez, her successor, revealed a bizarre understanding of the very word culture, not as a shared heritage of a people, but perhaps more in line with the nineteenth century idea of culture as "cultivation", an attribute of the cultured class.

Myrna Castro's hand-picked appointee to run the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, whose expertise is in management, has shown confusion about the role of the Institute (which is to protect the cultural heritage and share knowledge with the public), describing his goals as increasing tourist visitation to Copan, before completely falling into pseudo-science with his outrageous claims that "Ciudad Blanca" is a vast and unknown city lurking in the Honduran jungle.

Curiously, Soriano Ortiz describes the neglect of the National Archives as a constant feature of modern Honduran policy, missing the opportunity to underline another possible reason for the active policy of neglect that has afflicted the cultural sector of Honduras.

In fact, during the administration of Manuel Zelaya, the Minister of Culture, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, was a professional historian who supported all the programs that were abandoned or actively reversed by Myrna Castro and her successors.

He appointed as head of the Institute of Anthropology and History another Honduran historian, Darío Euraque, who moved the archives to its present home in the Antigua Casa Presidencial, and lost his position in part by publicly opposing the attempt to use that historic building for military reserve officers, a violation of the 1954 Convention of the Hague.

Euraque did more than just move the documents into this space. He created the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de Honduras (CDIHH), which (among other things) began the process of digitization Soriano Ortiz notes is critically needed.

Scholars and artists called attention to the disaster in Honduran culture, publishing memos in August 2010 from Bernard Martinez, saying his ministry needed office space, and asking the director of the National Art Gallery to provide space for the National Archives.

The tragedy of the National Archives is not just collapsing shelves and foot-dragging about replacing them. It is a continued outcome of the coup of 2009.

Whether current neglect is malice, crafty policy to prevent populist use of records, or just plain ignorance, it is not just Honduras' loss: the entire world is diminished when we lose the capacity for surprise about the past that primary documents can give us.

Three Years and Counting

Yesterday was the end of three years since Honduras' duly elected president was removed from office, mere months before he was slated to step down and cede power to the winner of an already scheduled election.

In the end, that election went forward, although not with the kind of aura of legitimacy that is normally expected: no impartial international observers were present; a state of emergency that reigned in the country throughout most of September and October (the legal months of campaigning) prevented the normal efforts of candidates, while suppression of public protest against the de facto regime involved such violence that even a presidential candidate was injured.

The successor government that emerged, headed by Porfirio Lobo Sosa, while eventually recognized by the governments that had refused to sanction the de facto regime, was in many ways powerless to confront what the coup and de facto regime had done to the country. Many of those appointed to high office continued under Lobo Sosa, and many still occupy positions of power today. The rhetoric of coup was used openly to threaten Lobo Sosa whenever he seemed to be acting in a way that powerful interests in the country did not like. The presidency as an institution clearly lost ground to Congress in the coup, and it has not gained it back.

The role of the US in the coup, the de facto regime, and the Lobo Sosa administration has come under intense scrutiny, and very little of what can be said about those roles is flattering. Within 48 hours the US President had denounced the events of June 28. From that point on, however, the US government either was ineffective in moving a pro-US regime to cede power, confusing about its understanding of events, or actively encouraged the regime to hold out.

With that last statement, I do not endorse the broader suspicions that many of my Honduran and US colleagues have shared, publicly and privately, that suggest the US actively encouraged the coup, and was never interested in solving the confrontation with the de facto regime. Read the Wikileaks cables yourself, and I think you will see why those suspicions exist: the US State Department had foreknowledge that the other branches of government were planning to remove President Zelaya, and by virtue of meeting with the principal civilian authors of the coup, gave them the understanding on which they acted, an understanding which explains why, in the first weeks after the coup, Micheletti and his group were so aggrieved not to have US support. They expected endorsement. In my reading, the US message in the weeks leading up to the coup was murky, and probably mixed.

But it isn't the run-up to the coup that I want to call out here: it is the incompetence the US showed after the coup. Earlier, and stronger, economic sanctions, including reduction or removal of military aid, was the one thing that might have clearly communicated to the de facto regime that the US disapproved of what had been done. By dithering for months and then failing to find the June 28 events legally a military coup, the US wasted the only clear message it had to send. The conclusion seems unavoidable that in US foreign policy, Honduras only matters as a piece in the campaign against drug trafficking from South America. We see the outcome of that in the current increased involvement of DEA agents, including as direct parties to violent deaths.

The lack of definition of a strong, sharp diplomatic response opened the door to extremists in the US Congress, who traveled to Honduras during the de facto regime, including during the elections, and somehow never noticed the violence being carried out against the people of Honduras. This allowed Hondurans supportive of the coup to claim that "the US government" was on their side. For us, this culminated in the deeply flawed report commissioned from the Law Library of Congress (not, we repeat, the Congressional Research Office) in which an under-qualified bureaucrat relying mainly on phone conversations with an apologist of the de facto regime found that the events of June 28 were constitutional-- while not citing the by-then published opinions of US, Spanish, and Latin American constitutional scholars, which showed quite the opposite.

The role of the US in the prolonged negotiations launched under the aegis of Oscar Arias, between the legally elected president of Honduras and a usurper, did not help. Even when, as a result of the added pressure brought to bear by President Zelaya's return to Honduras and dramatic asylum in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Micheletti regime agreed to a resolution, the US managed to undercut the terms of that resolution, in what clearly was an exchange for congressional approval of political appointments being held up.

So now where are we? Dozens of deaths later, the targeting of LBGT activists, journalists, and labor leaders has now been joined by the killing of LIBRE party activists, even though no one thinks the new party has a chance of winning the 2013 presidential election. The interests of business and the wealthy elite reign supreme: Honduras is not only "open for business", it is literally for sale-- sovereignty included. Environmental destruction in the name of profit is unchecked. Notably, none of this appears to have reduced either common crime or drug-related crime; the militarization of civilian policing has simply unleashed more violence against even the children of elites unfortunate enough to run into the police at the wrong time in the wrong place. And while cultural policy may seem like a less important arena, the distortion of the management of the historical sites held in trust for the people of Honduras reached new lows with the promotion of "2012" and spurious pan-Maya "heritage" tourism, the signing of a constitutionally unacceptable "agreement" with the town government of Copan that effectively privatizes public good, and culminated in the top official installed by the de facto regime to run the Institute of Anthropology and History announcing what he thinks is the greatest archaeological discovery of the 21st century-- with no expert opinion involved, and without his apparently even knowing who the experts to talk to would be.

This year brings primaries for next year's elections, in a political system in which the people of Honduras have little trust. Porfirio Lobo Sosa is at the point in his administration where Honduran presidents lose any chance to make policy, as even their own parties turn to the next candidate. The economic damage from the coup has not been healed. Gun violence continues unabated.

So on this third commemoration-- a word more appropriate, we think, than "anniversary", with its celebratory overtones-- we can only hope that the continued passion of those in resistance to the status quo, mobilized during the de facto regime, whether transformed into new political parties or invested in civil organizations, can find paths to advance the cause of the Honduran people. Thirty years after passing out of military dictatorship, they deserve more than their leaders, and the global community, have given them or are offering.

Honduras Was The Template

You probably haven't heard much on your nightly news about a coup in Paraguay. There's rarely any news about Paraguay in English.

What should interest readers of this blog, the "coup" in Paraguay on June 22 was patterned after the Honduran coup of 2009. Only this one was slightly less bumbling.

While regional governments sent diplomatic missions to Paraguay to try and avoid the constitutional showdown between the Paraguayan Senate and President Fernando Lugo, the US State Department just watched.

So what actually happened?

On June 22, the Paraguayan House and Senate each held a trial on 5 charges of misconduct against President Lugo, less than 24 hours after notifying him they intended to bring charges.  The charges were spelled out in a resolution (formulated by the Paraguayan House of Representatives) in which they accused him of doing his job badly, one of the three conditions under which the Paraguayan constitution states call for an impeachment hearing.

The charges?

(1)  Allowing a political youth gathering financed by the government in a military base in 2009.
(2)  Facilitating and supporting the invasion of private lands by landless peasants in Nacunday.
(3)  Dissatisfaction with the state of public security, linking Lugo to leftist kidnapping groups and accusing him of maintaining an incompetent Interior Minister responsible for 17 deaths.
(4)  Signing the Protocol de Ushuaia II in "an attempt against the sovereignty of Paraguay".  The document, in which the governments of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) agree to support democracy in their fellow countries, would allow regional governments (as part of a policy to return an errant state to democracy) to "cut off electric power" to Paraguay.
(5)  In the case of 17 deaths in Curuguaty (on June 15), he showed the "inoperativeness of his government, the negligence, ineptitude, and improvisation....which merits his charging by the House of Representatives with bad job performance."

There was no investigation of the charges by either the House or Senate in Paraguay.  Indeed, the House resolution, under the heading "Proof That Substantiates the Charges"  writes:

All of the above charges are of public notoriety, and because of this it is not necessary they be proven, according to the laws in effect.

The Spanish is "son de publica notoriedad (public notoriety)", similar to the Spanish colonial form of "publico y notorio (public and well known)" which was often used to make a claim of truthfulness for something that was not actually attested to by witnesses.  If it was "publico y notorio" that meant everyone knew it to be true, therefore they didn't need to have people swear it was true. It didn't actually mean something was undeniably true.  It was shorthand for "we take this as a given".

Take the story that Americans are all taught in grade school, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then owned up to it when asked.  That was invented by Washington biographer  Mason Locke Weems in 1800.  We all know it, it's of public notoriety, but its not true.

Indeed, InsightCrime actually debunked one of the charges, number 3, linking Lugo to the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP), a leftist group accused of kidnapping, four days before charges were levied against Lugo. Author Elyssa Pachico noted that linking farmers' movements to organized crime is a standard practice in Latin America for discrediting agrarian reformers, and specifically cited the Honduran case of attempts to discredit MUCA in the Bajo Aguan as similar.  The charge may well have been of "public notariety" but it wasn't true, according to InsightCrime.

On June 22, the Paraguayan Congress voted 76-1 in the House, and 39 - 4 in the Senate to uphold the charges and impeach Fernando Lugo after giving him just two hours to mount a defense.  It may have followed the letter of the constitution, if you ignore any requirements for due process. That was completely lacking.

As other regional governments tried to intervene diplomatically to avoid the impeachment hearing, and with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next door in Brazil, the US State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, in response to a question from the press said:

My understanding is that the Secretary took a shouted question, I think, down in Rio about an hour ago. I just got a brief message. And her response was that we are concerned and we’re watching the situation closely. Obviously, we want to see any resolution of this matter be consistent with democracy in Paraguay and the Paraguayan constitution.

Four of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) countries (Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina) have withdrawn their diplomatic representatives with Paraguay, perhaps in adherence to what they promised to do as part of the Ushuaia II protocol, UNASUR's equivalent of the OAS Democratic Charter.

Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic have also said they will not recognize the new government.  Mexico, Colombia, and Chile all said they regretted that Lugo had not been given adequate time to prepare a defense.  The Interamerican Commission on Human Rights said of Lugo's removal that it was "an attack on the legal foundations of the state."

Yet spokesperson Darla Jordan, from the State Department's Western Hemisphere Affairs division, simply said:

We urge all Paraguayans to act peacefully, with calm and responsibility, in the spirit of Paraguay's democratic principles.

Just as in the Honduran case, we have a coup government installed in Paraguay that all surrounding countries refuse to recognize as legitimate, but which the State Department has not condemned.  Like Honduras, this was a coup supported by the elite, against a President popular with the poor.  Like Honduran de facto regime head Micheletti, the de facto head of Paraguay, Federico Franco, has vowed to gain international recognition again for Paraguay by the time the next government takes over, about a year from now.

In Honduras 2009, a template was formed for how to stage a successful coup in the 21rst century.   Paraguayan elites followed the template.

This assessment was echoed by Fernando Anduray, presidential candidate for the Authentic Nationalist movement of the Nationalist Party in Honduras. He says that what happened in Paraguay is just like what happened in Honduras in 2009. In fact, he called for the Honduran Congress to use similar procedures to throw out unnamed government officials who abuse their positions; this despite the fact that the Honduran constitution does not allow for this procedure.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa disagrees with Anduray.  In an official release he rejected events in Paraguay and said:

We Hondurans defend the full respect of the democratic institution and rule of law, and for this reason we declare that the political judgement carried out did not attend to the right of legitimate defense of every citizen.

Would that be the same "right of defense" denied to Manuel Zelaya in 2009?

Debts of the Coup

Roberto Micheletti Bain contracted more debt with Honduran banks in his seven month takeover of the Honduran government than the previous three administrations did in twelve years.

At least, that's what Julio Raudales, the Vice Minister of Planning, told El Tiempo last Thursday, although the figures he cites are not quite as bad as that. Not quite-- but bad enough.

From the beginning of Carlos Flores Facussé's presidency to the date of the coup, the indebtedness of the Honduran government to Honduran banks went from 5000 million lempiras to 14,000 million lempiras.

But between June 28, 2009 and January 27, 2010, under the de facto regime headed by Micheletti, Honduran government debt rose from 14,000 million lempiras to 21,000 million lempiras.

Raudales added that the actual number may in fact be higher. Bills are still coming in from that period, and must be paid out of the current budget allocations, reducing services now.

This is another cost of the 2009 coup. As we reported at the time, the intransigence of the Micheletti regime in the face of universal international condemnation led him to draw down Honduran financial reserves dramatically.

And that is a debt that the Honduran people will pay.

On the Wrong Side of the Truth

Members of the US Congress are trying to reconfigure US policy toward the authors of the coup in Honduras, again.

Not only is this not timely-- it is something that the principal actor involved has been criticized for by no less an authority than the official, US supported "Truth Commission".

In a letter dated July 19th of this year, US Representative Connie Mack wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ask that the US restore the visas of Roberto Micheletti Bain and others, revoked as part of US pressure on Honduras after the coup in Honduras in 2009.

Mack invited Micheletti to testify before Congress. Micheletti had to decline because his visa was revoked, testifying by video conference instead. So now he wants to reach back and remove the taint over Micheletti. But he does more: he argues in his letter that Micheletti and others whose visas were removed are patriots whose actions should be treated positively.

The letter is signed by Mack, 11 other Republican Congressmen, and one Democrat. It calls on the US to "immediately cease the political punishment of the Honduran visas taken in 2009."

"We believe that the United States should not continue penalizing Honduran citizens based on their efforts to support the constitution and and the law of Honduras,"

the letter states.

Really?

Even the official Truth Commission appointed by the successor government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa found the people whose visas were lifted acted illegally, and that they had legal means open to them. They chose to ignore the law, and caused a breach of constitutional order that is still affecting Hondurans today.

The Truth Commission report singled out the visits to Honduras in 2009 by US Congress members, including Connie Mack, as having prolonged the crisis, and as having muddied the perception of US government response to the coup in 2009.

Rep. Mack has a lot to answer for. Continuing to ignore the reality on the ground, a reality recognized even by a Truth Commission viewed as compromised by the Honduran resistance, doesn't suggest he understands what he did. He should try reading that report and stop trying to replay US policy moves from 2009. He has already done enough damage.

"Constitutional Coup" Revisited

In 2009, shortly after the Honduran coup d'etat, we followed opinions rapidly posted all over the internet.

Most were uninformed; a majority in the early days were from apologists for the coup.

A repeated claim was made, that luckily disappeared as the opinions of constitutional scholars were published. This can be paraphrased simply:

"They aren't like us; they can't afford the kind of rule of law we have; they have to let the army have a stronger role."

Now, two years later, that line of argument has been resurrected, and expanded to cover much of the rest of Latin America.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that what it calls "extra-electoral means" of politics (aka military interventions) "may enjoy both legitimacy and constitutional mandate".

Here's all you really need to know about this "report":

• it cites no opinions of constitutional legal scholars.

• it cites almost nothing specifically about any of the countries involved

• in the one instance where it cites a recent research resource, the report it cites doesn't say what they claim it does.

The poster child for their argument is, not surprisingly, Honduras. The "facts" about Honduras that the CSIS authors present are inaccurate, and their analysis of the Honduran Constitution diverges from all those produced by actual constitutional law experts.

The authors say the 2009 coup in Honduras "exemplified" what they label a "dilemma":

while the United States and the OAS push the democracy agenda, the Honduran and other Latin American constitutions say something different. Because Americans strongly believe in civilian control over the military-- and that any armed forces meddling in the political order represents a usurpation-- it is hard to conceive that other norms, even constitutional ones, may prevail in other countries.

Or, to paraphrase:

"They aren't like us; they can't afford the kind of rule of law we have; they have to let the army have a stronger role."

The authors summarize their understanding of sections of the Honduran constitution concerning the role of the armed forces as if they were contradictory:

the armed forces are 'permanent, apolitical, essentially professional, obedient, and non-deliberative'. But then it says 'members of the military are not obliged to carry out illegal orders or those which involve committing a crime'.... The mission of the armed forces is the familiar one of defending the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the republic, but then the constitution adds, 'the order and respect of the Constitution, the principle of free vote, and the rotation of the Presidents of the Republic'...

By stringing those three quotes together, the CSIS authors make it sound like these sections of the Honduran Constitution are all specific to the Armed Forces.

But in fact, the middle clause-- about not following illegal orders-- is not specific to the military. Contained in Article 323, it reads in full

Officials are trustees of authority, responsible legally for their official conduct, subject to the law and never above it.

No official or public employee, civil or military, is obligated to carry out illegal orders or those that would require the commission of a crime.

The CSIS authors use this clause to support their argument that in many Latin American countries, including Honduras, the military has a specific constitutional mandate to intervene in government.

But in the Honduran constitution, this is not a part of the articles defining the role and functions of the military; it is part of a general exhortation for government employees to follow the law.

The authors argue that the cited language was

precisely the issue when President José Manuel Zelaya ordered the military to carry out an illegal referendum he had engineered to amend the constitution to provide for an unconstitutional second term for him.

Except that, as any reader of this blog knows, that is not what happened.

We are weary of reiterating the facts, but for the record: the public opinion poll scheduled on June 28, 2009 was on the narrow question of whether the populace did or did not want to see an item on the November ballot asking whether voters at that election were in favor of convening a constitutional assembly at some future point.

Neither the June poll nor the November vote, had either actually occurred, would have allowed or required a second presidential term.

We actually have some bases to know what the Zelaya administration saw as goals for a constitutional assembly, from published statements by the former minister of defense and minister of culture, sports and arts.

In addition, the Zelaya administration had prepared materials-- seized and publicized by the Armed Forces-- for the campaign for the November vote. These describe reforming the political system so the votes of the citizenry mattered; so that a wider range of civil rights enshrined in international treaties would be guaranteed in the constitution; and so that the rights of a variety of marginalized groups would be protected.

Leaving aside the errors of fact about what actually happened, what constitutional law scholars have the authors of the CSIS paper consulted in reaching their conclusion about the legitimacy of military intervention in Honduran government?

In a word: none.

They do reference a Congressional Research Service report they say supports the idea that the coup was constitutional under Honduran law.

The report they reference, though, says no such thing: instead, it does a good job of accurately reporting the facts, including those the CSIS could not get right (e.g. that the June 28 vote was a non-binding opinion poll).

Perhaps they intended to reference an earlier Congressional Research Service report by the same author, Peter J. Meyer, recapitulating the main events of the 2009 political crisis.

But that report, which does consider the constitutionality of the actions taken, says correctly that "most analysts" labeled the military's actions as unconstitutional.

It includes explicit citation of Honduran legal scholars who have produced some of the most authoritative legal opinions against the "constitutionality" argument, including distinguished legal scholar Edmundo Orellana-- the man who resigned rather than follow Zelaya's orders as defense secretary.

There are actually many more examples of such opinions written in Spanish, which perhaps the CSIS authors thought were inaccessible to their readers. But they might have included reference to a highly visible English language report by constitutional legal scholar Doug Cassel.

It seems most likely that CSIS actually intended to reference an amply critiqued report by the Congressional Law Library (not the well-regarded CRS), a report that got its opinions about Honduran constitutional law from personal communications from a Honduran lawyer, not a constitutional law expert, who came to Washington to advocate for the Roberto Micheletti regime in summer 2009.

The conclusions this CLL report reached were explicitly disclaimed by members of the Honduran Congress in late 2009; that is, they were repudiated by some of the very people whose authority and procedures it purported to describe accurately.

Following their protest, members of the US Congress also wrote to ask that this document be corrected.

Outrageously, with no citation of any constitutional legal publications, the CSIS publication concludes that everything done by the Honduran Armed Forces in June 2009 was fine, "except for the possibly unconstitutional act of expelling Zelaya from the country without a trial, and even that was arguable".

To our knowledge, no one has ever argued that the expatriation was legal.

The CSIS analysis can be looked at from another perspective: it actually overemphasizes the role of the military in the Honduran coup.

In their zeal to argue for an inherent constitutional right of the Honduran military to commit a coup, they missed the point that this coup was actually carried out by the civilian authorities: the Supreme Court and Congress.

The Honduran Armed Forces themselves were at some pains throughout 2009 to make clear that they had not, in fact, initiated anything, claiming that they acted under orders of the Supreme Court.

If they actually had the constitutional mandate that CSIS imagines, why did they distance themselves from it?

Because no such mandate existed.

Let's look at what the Honduran Constitution actually says about the role of the Armed Forces.

Article 272 defines the role of the Armed Forces. Here is is in its entirety, rather than in the shreds that CSIS chose to excerpt in support of their very odd argument:

The Armed Forces of Honduras is a National Institution of permanent character, essentially professional, apolitical, obedient and non deliberative. It is constituted to defend the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of the Republic, to maintain the peace, the public order, and the dominion of the Constitution, the principles of free suffrage and the alternation in the exercise of the Presidency of the Republic.

To cooperate with the National Police in the conservation of public order to the effect of guaranteeing the free exercise of suffrage, the custody, transport, and vigilance of the electoral materials and all the other aspects of the security of that process, the President of the Republic shall place the Armed Forces at the disposition of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, from one month before the elections, until the decision of the same.

Article 274 expands on other missions that the Armed Forces can have. Nothing in it includes or implies the kind of role that the CSIS authors propose. The closest is a paragraph that specifies that the Armed Forces will have a role in combating terrorism, drug trafficking, and organized crime, which ends with the phrase

as well as in the protection of the Powers of State [branches of government] and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, at their request, during their installation and functioning.

This would seem to mean that Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive branch, or the TSE can request security from the Armed Forces.

Nothing here seems to say that a branch of government could request the Armed Forces to attack another branch of government over a dispute-- that would violate the very fundamental requirement that the Armed Forces be apolitical and non-deliberative.

Far from having a constitutionally mandated role to intervene in government, members of the Armed Forces are subject to unique limitations in Article 37, on the rights of citizens, specifying that some members of the Armed Forces may not have the right to vote.

Article 240 specifies that members of the military, or those who were in the military in the previous 12 months, are ineligible for election as President or Vice President.

It seems remarkably clear, if one reads all the constitutional language pertinent to the military, that the Honduran constitution was intended to ward off the specter of military intervention in governance.

The failure by the CSIS authors to cite actual discussions by constitutional experts; the selective culling of fragments of language from the constitution, presenting them out of context; and their failure to meet the minimal criterion of describing what actually happened, makes this report a practice of ideological rhetoric, not-- as it purports to be-- an analysis of the facts.

Constitutional coups may be written into founding documents somewhere in Latin America. But not in Honduras, and no amount of wishful thinking will make it so.

Backdated Charges?

Was the paperwork that provided the flawed legal justification for the coup backdated?

A cable recently posted to Wikileaks provides hints supporting this conclusion, widely held by opponents of the coup.

This cable, send on June 28, 2009 from Ambassador Hugo Llorens to the State Department, announced the forced expatriation of Zelaya. It notes that the Honduran military told the US Defense Attaché that they had acted on instructions from the National Congress and Supreme Court to prevent President Manuel Zelaya Rosales from carrying out the Cuarta Urna poll scheduled for that day.

However, the very next paragraph of the cable notes that members of Congress and the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí, when contacted by the Embassy, said they had only ordered the military to confiscate the polling materials, and had not requested that Zelaya be arrested.

Roberto Micheletti, when contacted by the Embassy that day, repeated the claim that Zelaya had planned to convene a National Constituent Assembly right after the poll, and "that Congress had acted to preempt him."

The contradiction between what Micheletti, then head of Congress, and other members of congress told the US ambassador simply underlines what has long been clear: Micheletti and other agents of the coup deliberately ignored due process, denying many members of congress who opposed the coup the right to participate in the voting that attempted to legitimize the coup after the fact on Sunday morning.

But the reported comments of the public prosecutor, Luis Rubí, add something new to the mix.

Shortly after the coup, the Supreme Court posted online voluminous documents they claimed justified the actions legally. This included a long legal case, said to have been filed by Rubí under a request for secrecy, dated June 26, two days before the coup.

This date would have come just after Ambassador Llorens had a conversation with Chief Justice Jorge Rivera Aviles, in which Rivera Aviles said the only way a sitting president could be constitutionally removed from office was through the Public Prosecutor filing a criminal case with the Supreme Court, and being adjudicated guilty of a crime.

Yet on June 28, Luis Rubí denied to Llorens that he had requested the arrest of Zelaya; the military did not say they were acting for the Public Prosecutor; and Micheletti attributed the orders to "preempt Zelaya" to Congress, not the Supreme Court or the Public Prosecutor.

Either the Supreme Court paperwork was backdated to June 26, or everyone was lying to Ambassador Llorens on June 28.

A subsequent cable dated July 2, 2009 contains a timeline of events written by Ambassador Llorens to the State Department.

This timeline has no entry for charges filed by Public Prosecutor Luis Rubí on Friday, June 26, as claimed in the documents posted by the Supreme Court.

It only states that on June 30, e.g., two days after the coup d'etat, that Rubí filed 18 charges against Manuel Zelaya Rosales, in an ordinary criminal court, following a document issued by the Supreme Court that categorized Zelaya as a private citizen as a consequence of the congressional actions of June 28.

Llorens writes:

While there have been claims that the Supreme Court issued a warrant for Zelaya's arrest, the president of the Supreme Court has told us that this is not true. The only warrant we are aware of is one issued either late on June 25 or early on June 26 by a lower court ordering the seizure of polling material. It appears that the Attorney General, the military conspired with Micheletti and other leaders of Congress to remove Zelaya based on their fear that he planned to convene a Constituent Assembly immediately after the June 28 poll.

Either Rivera Aviles was lying to Ambassador Llorens, or there was no arrest warrant issued on Friday June 26, secret or otherwise, as stated in the Supreme Court documents.

These cables also go to the heart of the justification offered for the actual timing of the coup.

The crux of the justification is the allegation that Zelaya was going to call a National Constituent Assembly right after the Cuarta Urna poll. This was a rumor spread by the online newspaper Proceso Digital. On June 27, 2009, it falsely claimed that the proclamation establishing the Cuarta Urna published in the official Gaceta said this.

Llorens writes on July 2:

The online newspaper Proceso Digital prints an article alleging Zelaya's decree, published in the 25 June issue of the official paper La Gaceta, states that the 28 June poll will immediately convoke a constituent assembly. The newspaper reports that Zelaya has changed the rules at the last minute, and the poll will have consequences not previously reported.

This fits. It's the justification provided by Micheletti to Ambassador Llorens for the coup d'etat on the day of the coup. Llorens continues:

Micheletti's supporters say that publication calls for the convening of the Constituent Assembly. However, this is patently false, the publication simply states: "Are you in agreement that in the general elections of 2009, there be a fourth urn in which the people decide the convocation of a National Constituent Assembly."

What these cables are clarifying is precisely how much evidence there is for a conspiracy to sanitize the coup d'etat, a conspiracy that included producing documents purportedly from the Friday before the coup, documents that on the day of the coup, all involved disclaimed.

Hugo Llorens in the Run-up to the Coup d'Etat

Wikileaks has released another cable from Ambassador Hugo Llorens to the US State Department, this one dated June 26, 2009 and covering the events of the night of June 25, 2009, three days before the military carried out a coup d'etat.

A Spanish translation of the cable was published by Tiempo, although none of the other Honduran papers seem to be motivated to cover it.

In the summary paragraph, Llorens reports:

On the evening of June 25, the National Congress came close to bringing to the floor a vote on the removal of President Zelaya from office.

We already knew this. We were in Honduras watching events unfold on television, and we had been told to expect something like that.

Ambassador Llorens discusses how he and other senior US diplomats in the country worked to deter Congress from taking this step. He reports that they successfully deflected Congress into opening an inquiry into President Zelaya's possible legal violations. We believe this is the first confirmation of the rumored role of the Ambassador in ending the rush toward a vote by the Honduran Congress that night.

Immediately following the passage above, Llorens goes on to write

Supreme Court President Rivera told us that Congress does not have the power to impeach the President, since the repeal of such a law in 2005. Currently the only means to remove a sitting President is through the filing of a criminal case filed by the Public Ministry with the Supreme Court itself.

In other words, the Chief Justice of the Honduran Supreme Court told Ambassador Llorens on June 25, 2009, that Congress had no power to impeach a sitting President.

Notice that this cable is sent the same day, Friday May 26, that the filing by prosecutor Luis Rubí of criminal charges against Zelaya before the Supreme Court is dated as accepted by the court (Zelaya government members say this document was actually produced later and back-dated).

This is what later serves as the purported legal grounding for removing Zelaya from office, and replacing him with Roberto Micheletti.

The timing seems, at the very least, interesting.

Justice Rivera's analysis of how one can legally remove a sitting Honduran President matched our own arguments in the wake of the military kidnapping of Zelaya on Sunday, June 28.

In paragraph 4 of the cable, Llorens makes it clear when his conversation with Justice Rivera Aviles took place:

In a meeting on June 25, Honduran Supreme Court President Jorge Rivera Aviles told the Ambassador that he was extremely worried about the planned Congressional action against the President. Rivera said that congressional leaders had approached him about their plans to remove the President. Rivera said he advised against such action, which he described as illegal. Rivera said that in 2005 the Congress repealed the impeachment law. Currently the only means to remove a President was through the filing of a criminal case by the Public Ministry (Attorney General) with the Supreme Court. In such circumstances, the Supreme Court would appoint a Supreme Court Magistrate to hear the case. A ruling by the Magistrate against the President represented the only means to legally separate him/her from the office.

Thus the Supreme Court's opinion confirms that when the Honduran Congress pretended to remove President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales on June 29, 2009, it was a patently illegal act for which it had no constitutional powers.

The "legal succession" was illegal. This will come as no surprise to any of our regular readers.

The cable portrays Roberto Micheletti, head of the congress, as actively pursuing the position of president through organizing votes and working for Zelaya's removal, rather than passively receiving the presidency by "legal" succession.

The cable portrays Ambassador Llorens in somewhat ambiguous relation to the unfolding pressures for a coup. In his dealings with the congress, he urges no "premature" action. That is somewhat less than arguing that they refrain from trying to remove the sitting president at all.

In his conversations with the head of the supreme court, he seems to be seeking to define a legal procedure for removing the president-- again, not precisely discouraging the effort to do so. And while we would not say he produced the rationale, what he reports on June 25 becomes the basis for those who claim the coup was legitimate: a case brought by the public prosecutor before the supreme court.

(We assume that the Ambassador understood that such a case would have had to be tried, not merely brought; on the Honduran side, for a complex series of reasons, simply bringing the charges seemed to be enough reason to consider the president impeached.)

Ambassador Llorens comes across as a confidante of those who become the authors of the coup d'etat.

An earlier cable from June 18, 2009 documents a breakfast meeting between Llorens and Generals Romeo Vasquez Velasquez and Miguel Garcia Padgett in which he told the Generals that "the heavens would fall" if the military made any unconstitutional move.

Of course, it didn't happen that way. The US was reluctant to cut off military aid after the coup, only taking that step months later.

Diplomacy is of course a difficult dance. Llorens does report talking to President Zelaya in his June 25 cable. But the tenor of his reported remarks there is much less pointed: he says he urged Zelaya to "to do everything he could to lower the tensions and send conciliatory public messages and engage in dialogue with the opposition". He reports urging Zelaya to remember that he is president of "all Hondurans".

Comparing the two sides of his diplomacy, it is clear that Ambassador Llorens wanted actions of a specific kind from President Zelaya; whereas he himself makes no reports of urging the Congress to engage in dialogue.

Is it any wonder why many Honduran intellectuals believe that the US was complicit in formulating the coup?

While former Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, in a recent interview, absolved the ambassador of direct responsibility, he concluded that the US

was, of course, directly involved. Of course, who—I’m not able to signal and say that Ambassador Llorens was directly involved in promoting the coup. Some people believe that. I know for a fact that CIA operatives and military personnel of the United States were in direct contact with the conspirators of the coup d’état and aided the conspirators of the coup d’état. The coup was not something improvised. It was something that was laboriously and in a very punctilious manner prepared in time, so that from January onwards, you have this media campaign. All national newspapers, all major television chains and stations are involved, in this long period, in a propaganda campaign against the government, Zelaya’s government.

This legacy of distrust is not going to disappear because Honduras was readmitted to the OAS. It has not been healed by the agreement that allowed Zelaya to return to the country without facing immediate imprisonment.

It will remain a lasting legacy of US diplomacy that, while attempting not to take sides in a Honduran dispute, managed to give the authors of the coup the impression that if they just did things with an appearance of legality, everything would be fine.

When the US actually reacted, initially denouncing the coup, and much later, imposing modest sanctions, the outrage expressed by the de facto regime and the Honduran Congress told one side of the story: these authors of the coup were not expecting to be punished.

Now we have a glimpse at the other side: the communications that gave these actors the impression that removing the sitting president would not be problematic, as long as it was done using the correct legal procedure, and as long as it did not lead to the imposition of a military junta-- even for the short six months of Zelaya's remaining term of office.

Canahuati Shamed?

Adolfo Facussé, head of the National Industrial Business Association (Asociación Nacional de Industriales, ANDI), started a rumor Monday that Mario Canahuati was going to resign as Foreign Minister.

Facussé told the press this was because Canahuati was distressed over not being included in the secret meetings between Lobo Sosa, Hugo Chavez, and Juan Manuel Santos. He said it was embarrassing for Canahuati to not be included in the meeting, when the Foreign Ministers of Venezuela and Colombia were. Instead, Arturo Corrales, Lobo Sosa's planning minister, participated.

"Don Mario Canahuati for respect and his own dignity, should resign from his position,"

Facussé told the press.

He further suggested that the Lobo Sosa government should respect Canahuati and if he didn't have the President's confidence as Foreign Minister, perhaps Lobo Sosa would appoint him to manage soliciting foreign investment. Facussé pointed out that Mario Canahuati was the former head of the Honduran Council of Private Business (Consejo Hondureño de la Empresa Privada, COHEP).

Why is Facussé trying to create a breach between Lobo Sosa and Mario Canahuati when there is none?

Perhaps it is because both he and Canahuati were backers of Micheletti, who just warned about the dangers of meeting that supposedly shamed Canahuati. Maybe he's warning Canahuati of business's unhappiness with Lobo Sosa's policies. Maybe its just that they were business buddies. We don't know.

Facussé specifically suggested Canahuati be put in charge of the "Honduras is open for business" conference to be held next week in San Pedro Sula. He took the opportunity to criticize the list of invited companies and individuals saying it was heavy on the industries with things to sell to Honduras and light on investors.

Facussé seemed not to know that Canahuati's Foreign Relations Ministry is in charge of the event and was responsible for the invitations.

In any case, Canahuati said he's not resigning and supports Lobo Sosa.

Blustering Bravado

Roberto Micheletti does not believe in free speech, even though it is protected under the Honduran Constitution. He actively suppressed free speech in Honduras by forcibly closing dissenting media outlets during his regime.

But he also doesn't understand free speech as protected in the US Constitution and law. He told El Heraldo he intends to sue Ambassador Hugo Llorens in US court over what he wrote about Micheletti in the leaked State Department cables on Wikileaks once Llorens is no longer an Ambassador.

"I will file a case against him so that he proves to me all the things he says I've committed,"

said Micheletti. The cable in question is the one that states that according to embassy sources, Micheletti is a partner in the firm granted the concession to the Nacaome dam as part of "gazetazao". What the cable says about Micheletti is

While the de facto regime leader Roberto Micheletti and his colleagues portrayed themselves as practitioners of efficient and honest government, they appear to have cut a significant number of back room deals, which were egregious even by local standards. The dam concession is the prime example.

and

Credible Embassy sources have directly implicated Micheletti and some of his closest business partners in this deal.

and

According to Embassy sources, Micheletti was one of the Honduran partners in the consortium granted the concession. The chief actors included Saavedra, Micheletti, Minister of Public Works Saro Bonano, and Micheletti intimates Johnny Kafati and Roberto Turcios. It is inconceivable that this deal could have been put together without Micheletti's knowledge.

But this was not public speech and hence is not liable as defamation or slander. Llorens didn't publish this publicly, he informed his employer as part of private business communications which later, through no fault of Llorens, became public. It's private, protected speech as a matter of US law.

Micheletti told HRN radio that he would file the case in US court once Llorens loses his diplomatic immunity.

"I'm not afraid of him nor am I afraid of the gringos, nor do I fear anyone."

This should be interesting. Micheletti can get a case filed long distance with money to hire lawyers; lawyers will be happy to take his money; but perhaps Micheletti forgot he lost his US visa and therefore cannot enter the US to testify in the case. In any event, there is no case here.

This is a lot of bluster and bravado with no legal basis under US law.

Twenty-First Century Socialism

The Unión Civica Democratica (UCD), a far right organization in Honduras funded by the US government, is holding a conference in Tegucigalpa today called "Antidote to Twenty-First Century Socialism" with Roberto Micheletti Bain as the keynote speaker. We have not yet explored what it is they want to cure us of.

Twenty-first century socialism is the brainchild of Heinz Dietrich Steffan, a German professor, in his book "El Socialismo del Siglo XXI" published in 2000. It was popularized outside of scholarly circles by Hugo Chavez starting in 2005. It is currently said to be the basis of reforms in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

So what is twenty-first century socialism? According to Dietrich, neither capitalism nor real socialism have managed to solve the urgent world problems. To resolve this, Dietrich proposes a new kind of socialism with four basic institutions.

The first institution is the equivalence economy, based on Marx's theory of labor and value. Under this system, value is determined by those who create it, instead of the market. Dietrich proposes creating an economy of values based on the idea that something derives its value from the work put into it, not the law of supply and demand. Value replaces price.

The second institution is participative democracy, which uses the plebiscite to decide important questions that concern its citizens. Dietrich calls for a high quality democracy that slowly moves from representative to participative democracy. Key is self-determination via everyone participating in the decision making process.

The third institution is basic organizations, that is, the political or social organizations closest to the community that they serve. These in turn are assisted by larger organizations, such as political parties or NGOs.

The fourth institution is development or structuralism, an economic theory that holds that the core industrial center with an agricultural periphery produces underdevelopment and increases the gap between developed and underdeveloped nations. The industrial development of raw materials (such as wheat, soy, wood) adds value to these exportable materials, and their use internally instead of imports leads to less of a development gap between the industrialized and developing nations. This economic theory has its roots in dependency theory, which holds that the current world economy is rigged in favor of the developed nations.

Dietrich refined twenty-first century socialism down to a single phrase in a 2007 interview, saying

"it's when the majority have the greatest historically possible degree of control of the decision making in the economic, political and cultural and the military institutions that govern their lives."

We've seen Micheletti's antidote: stage a coup and trample civil rights. Which one would you prefer?

Double Standards

So did Porfirio Lobo Sosa remove himself from office when he talked about reforming the constitutional article about presidential re-election this week? Lobo told HRN radio
"If the people want re-election, then lets have that, and if they don't want, we won't have it....In the end, the people decide....the worst thing we can do is deny the right of the people to decide."

All of this conversation about re-election and letting the people have a voice, currently absent, in how the country is run, centers around proposed reforms to Article 5 of the Honduran constitution. Article 5 governs plebiscites and referenda and sets the rules for holding them.

Under the current rules, it takes the action of 10 Congress people plus the President and a resolution from the Secretary of State's council, or 6% of the electorate to bring the question of holding a plebiscite or referendum to the attention of Congress, which must then get a 2/3 vote of support to hold it.

The Resistance passed this threshold in their call for a constitutional convention, obtaining the signatures and fingerprints of 1.3 million registered voters, or about 25% of the registered voters, but Congress ignored them.

But back to re-election. Remember the infamous Article 239 of the Honduran constitution? The one that the backers of the coup and the de facto regime claimed automagically removed Manuel Zelaya Rosales from office for talking about re-election? Miguel Estrada claimed it. Octavio Sanchez made the same claim. Micheltti repeated it incessantly.

The claim ignored the due process requirements of the Honduran Constitution and was nonsense.

Today no one is saying Lobo Sosa removed himself from office by talking about re-election.

Why not?

"Every Stone in its Place": Marvin Barahona

Why does cultural policy and historical knowledge matter in a place like Honduras?

Honduran historian Marvin Barahona, author of a number of books about Honduran identity and 20th century history, provides some answers in a long presentation of Dario Euraque's recently published book El golpe de Estado del 28 de junio de 2009, el Patrimonio Cultural y la Identidad Nacional ("The coup d'Etat of the 28th of June of 2009, Cultural Patrimony, and National Identity").

Barahona's essay is too long to translate in its entirety here. But it is worth citing how Euraque's important work is being received in Honduran intellectual circles, and why it is, more than a commentary on the coup, a critical work in Honduran historiography.

Barahona starts by saying he is resisting the temptation to either begin with the Honduran Congress discussing the Ruins of Copan at the beginning of the 20th century, or with words drawn from a magazine commenting on "the visit to the Copan Archaeological Park in January 2010 by the president of the de facto government, Roberto Micheletti Bain, invited by the Asociación Copán to show him the bounties of the site."

He then goes on:

The underworld of the tunnels designed by generations of archaeologists seem to have been waiting, in the last three decades, for a retinue like this, that emerged from the underworld of politics, as knowledgeable experts of the most ancient caverns of politics and as architects of the latest coup d'Etat that shocked the national conscience by its historical anachronism, and left a trail of instability and chaos in the governability of the country.

What links these two subjects-- archaeology and the de facto regime? Read on:

For that, if it were possible, I would want to extend an historic bridge between the most distant past and the most recent past, to link deeds that at first glance don't seem related, such as the use of official culture to make the collective consciousness forget its past and the abuse of the State to favor the interests of a minority to whom culture and the past has been of interest only as merchandise for tourists, as a business in which they could enrich themselves.

Barahona, following the lead of Euraque, identifies the commodification of national culture as yet one more regrettable product of the reactionary politics of contemporary Honduras.

The trajectory is complicated, but it includes the elevation of one part of the precolumbian Honduran past-- that of the Maya of western Honduras-- to stand for the entire nation, a process Euraque called "mayanization". In this process, Euraque's book shows that all political parties in Honduras and academics, both national and foreign, have played a part. The result is a failure to connect most contemporary Hondurans with a deep past of their own:

And when we recognize this incredible disproportion between the many books written about the Ruins of Copan and the few studies about the peoples and cultures that are still alive, such as the Tolupan or the Pech, the Tawahkas and the Miskitos, the Lenca and the Garifuna, then it is required to think that the cultural policies of the State are as unjust as the form in which national income is distributed, dedicated in the last two centuries to benefit a few wealthy families, to the detriment of thousands of meztizo, Indian and black families that don't fit in the official culture and still less in the economy and the national budget.

As Barahona notes, Euraque's book argues that the antidote to this poison lies in

a new cultural policy of the State, concretized in projects to rescue the cultural diversity of the peoples that give it flesh, to rescue national history in local archives, to give to archaeology its rightful place, to reconstruct the characteristic features of popular culture and provide communities with people qualified to recover local historical memory and that of the population marginalized by official culture.

Barahona argues that

the goal of giving to Honduras a democratic, inclusive, participatory cultural policy capable of responding to the challenges of the world today, continues to be a valid effort and an inescapable responsibility of the State and society...

Therefore it won't suffice, in the present day, to insist on mayanizing Honduras to sell to foreign tourists the bounties of our past, nor less will it do to continue privileging the value of the stones of the distant past...

And even putting each stone in its place, there remains no doubt that Honduras needs this new cultural policy to avoid letting the study of its archaeology continue in the hands of the same foreign institutions as at the beginning of the 20th century..

The alignment of archaeology, especially foreign archaeology, with conservative politics, in other words, may not be new but it is not to be supported in the future.

Knowledge of history, Barahona concludes, is indispensable, and democratization of history continues to be critical for Honduras:

every effort to reconstruct the national identity, including all its protagonists without exclusions of any kind, implies a large scale effort to re-elaborate national thought, to put it into action and place it at the level of the requirements of our time.

But the final words should go to Darío Euraque, whose summary account of his motivation in writing a memoir of his experiences during the coup d'Etat has also been published now:

Today there exists a new government in Honduras: nonetheless, the authorities imposed on the management of the Institute of Anthropology and History by means of the coup d'Etat, lacking in experience or intellectual vision of our culture, continue in their offices. I suspect that they continue violating the cultural policy that I promoted since 2006 in coordination with the Secretariat of Culture. Not only the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras suffered, but also our National Identity, the fragile institutionality of the State, and ironically even the support given to cultural tourism promoted by the Institute of Tourism and Chamber of Tourism of Honduras decreases.

“Alta es la noche y Morazán vigila.”

The First Reaction from the US Embassy

Wikileaks has now released more Honduran cables (see quotha for a list with links). The latest includes a cable from June 29, 2009-- the day after the coup itself. Paragraphs 13 and 14 are a report about the coup in the heading "significant events":

¶13. (C) WHA Honduras - Honduran military forces arrested
President Manuel Zelaya June 28 according to orders issued by
the National Congress and the Supreme Court of Honduras.
Zelaya was taken to a local air force base and flown to Costa
Rica. Emergency Action Committee (EAC) Tegucigalpa
subsequently met to discuss the ramifications of the seizure
of the president by host-cost country military forces. The
RSO noted the general climate in the capital was calm;
however, a standfast order was issued, and additional
security measures were implemented. The Embassy released a
Warden Message regarding the actions against Zelaya and urged
AmCits to remain in the residences or hotels for the day.


¶14. (C) Later in the day, Congress officially named Roberto
Micheletti interim president. The U.S. Ambassador gave a
press conference outside the Embassy; he insisted that
President Zelaya was the only democratically elected
president of the country and urged that freedom of expression
and circulation be restored. He also demanded the release of
those government officials said to be in military custody.
The EAC reconvened to assess the situation. Protest activity
has centered around the presidential palace, some roads in
the capital were blocked, and there were some troops on the
street. However, traffic flow was reported normal in most of
the city. Authorized Departure for family members was
discussed, but not warranted at this time. Embassy personnel
were advised to remain in their homes for the rest of the day
and to limit their movements today, June 29. All Peace Corps
volunteers have been accounted for and are on standfast. Post
will be open today for emergency services only. The EAC will
continue monitoring events in-country and provide updated
information as available. (Tegucigalpa Spot Report; telcon;
Warden Message; Appendix sources 8-10)

There has been an explosion of punditry over the first cable, all reaching whatever conclusion they had already reached, in which perhaps the most interesting thing from our perspective is the repudiation of the analysis by conservative congress members and their continued insistence that there was "no coup": Connie Mack and colleagues are more insistent on this point now than any Hondurans, with the possible exception of Roberto Micheletti. Otherwise, the Honduran perspective has been that yeah, it was a coup, but (in the notorious phrase) a "good coup".

We would agree that the cables are unlikely to change minds, and we doubt there are any true smoking guns to find. The smoking guns were all out in the open in US policy on Honduras: dithering about whether it was a "military" coup; Thomas Shannon assuring the Honduran and US right wing that whether or not the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord was implemented properly, the US would recognize whoever came out on top in the presidential election; and the outright failure of scholarship embodied in the Library of Congress producing a report that validated the coup through an analysis repudiated by leading scholars of the Honduran constitution, through relying on the personal communications of an advocate of the coup.

But from the perspective of researchers on history, and on the production and circulation of meanings, seeing the precise way things unfolded does matter.

It matters that on the day after the coup, the US Embassy, despite the ambassador speaking out against the coup, reported that President Zelaya had been "arrested" (when he had not been); that this was on "orders of the National Congress and the Supreme Court" (when it was not); and that he "was taken to a local air base" (without mentioning the stop at Soto Cano/Palmerola).

And it matters that the cable says "Congress officially named Roberto Micheletti interim president". Not only does that mistakenly imply that congress had the authority to act ("officially": why not say "illegally", or "extra-officially"-- especially as the special session held violated the rules of order for Congress, people who voted reportedly included members without authority, and the reported number of votes has always be questioned).

Worse: it gives Micheletti a status that even the Honduran Congress did not try to give him. Their claim was that he was now "President". By inventing an office of "interim president", the US early on chose to treat Micheletti as a legitimate actor, insisting that he and the real elected president negotiate.

The US, in other words, never quite got the point about what constituted the rule of law in Honduras. In this they joined many Honduran political actors; and yes, I hear you all already telling me that's how politics works.

But some situations present us with a moment of choice: do we follow principle, or abandon it? The US never even seems to have contemplated the issues-- despite having an ambassador who clearly understood them in place in the country.

Hugo Llorens Concluded Coup was Utterly Unjustified

------- Comment -------

¶19. (C) The analysis of the Constitution sheds some interesting light on the events of June 28. The Honduran establishment confronted a dilemma: near unanimity among the institutions of the state and the political class that Zelaya had abused his powers in violation of the Constitution, but with some ambiguity what to do about it. Faced with that lack of clarity, the military and/or whoever ordered the coup fell back on what they knew -- the way Honduran presidents were removed in the past: a bogus resignation letter and a one-way ticket to a neighboring country. No matter what the merits of the case against Zelaya, his forced removal by the military was clearly illegal, and Micheletti's ascendance as "interim president" was totally illegitimate.

¶20. (C) Nonetheless, the very Constitutional uncertainty that presented the political class with this dilemma may provide the seeds for a solution. The coup's most ardent legal defenders have been unable to make the intellectual leap from their arguments regarding Zelaya's alleged crimes to how those allegations justified dragging him out of his bed in the night and flying him to Costa Rica. That the Attorney General's office and the Supreme Court now reportedly question the legality of that final step is encouraging and may provide a face-saving "out" for the two opposing sides in the current standoff. End Comment.

These are the last two paragraphs in a cable sent from Tegucigalpa in July, 2009, by US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens.

The cable, included among a massive release of documents by Wikileaks, has already been discussed by the Miami Herald. They chose to emphasize the fact that the ambassador reached the conclusion that the coup was "clearly illegal".

That conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention to the facts, and tells us more about the ability of the US media to refuse to understand those facts than about the content of the cable or US policy.

Instead, we would emphasize the point by point summary of the arguments of coup supporters and the devastating rejection of those points:

¶3. (SBU) Defenders of the June 28 coup have offered some combination of the following, often ambiguous, arguments to assert it's legality:

-- Zelaya had broken the law (alleged but not proven);

-- Zelaya resigned (a clear fabrication);

-- Zelaya intended to extend his term in office (supposition);

-- Had he been allowed to proceed with his June 28 constitutional reform opinion poll, Zelaya would have dissolved Congress the following day and convened a constituent assembly (supposition);

-- Zelaya had to be removed from the country to prevent a bloodbath;

-- Congress "unanimously" (or in some versions by a 123-5 vote) deposed Zelaya; (after the fact and under the cloak of secrecy); and

-- Zelaya "automatically" ceased to be president the moment he suggested modifying the constitutional prohibition on presidential reelection.

¶4. (C) In our view, none of the above arguments has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution. Some are outright false. Others are mere supposition or ex-post rationalizations of a patently illegal act. Essentially:

-- the military had no authority to remove Zelaya from the country;

-- Congress has no constitutional authority to remove a Honduran president;

-- Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process;

-- the purported "resignation" letter was a fabrication and was not even the basis for Congress's action of June 28; and

-- Zelaya's arrest and forced removal from the country violated multiple constitutional guarantees, including the prohibition on expatriation, presumption of innocence and right to due process.

This reads almost exactly like a summary of the arguments we have made, in this blog and its predecessor, Honduras Coup 2009.

We also like the ambassador's choice of words for paragraphs 11 through 13 of his cable, which he entitled "The Article 239 Canard". As he properly noted, this was only cited post-facto to retroactively claim that President Zelaya had removed himself from office by advocating constitutional reform. The US Embassy cites numerous good reasons for rejecting this entire line of argument.

Most wonderful in this section is the final paragraph:

¶13. (C) It further warrants mention that Micheletti himself should be forced to resign following the logic of the 239 argument, since as President of Congress he considered legislation to have a fourth ballot box ("cuarta urna") at the November elections to seek voter approval for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Any member of Congress who discussed the proposal should also be required to resign, and National Party presidential candidate Pepe Lobo, who endorsed the idea, should be ineligible to hold public office for 10 years.

This is indeed the case; but look who's in the Presidential Palace now, with full US recognition.

Finally, we fully endorse the conclusion in paragraph 18 that the illegal actions of the Honduran Congress did more than remove Zelaya; they were an illegal removal of an entire branch of government by the other two branches, a violation of the very notion of checks and balances:

In the absence of any of these conditions and since Congress lacked the legal authority to remove Zelaya, the actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d'etat by the legislative branch, with the support of the judicial branch and the military, against the executive branch. It bears mentioning that, whereas the resolution adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove the entire executive branch.

There is every reason to expect more material posted on Wikileaks will be relevant to understanding US policy in Honduras.

The question this July 2009 cable raises is, why was the US so timid in its actions when it had access to such a clear exposition of the issues?

1.3 Million versus 200

The Unión Cívica Democratica (UCD) held a rally a couple of days ago in Tegucigalpa. Crowd estimates in the press vary between 100 and 200 people. Among the crowd were former members of the golpista regime of Roberto Micheletti, including María Martha Diaz and Martha Lorena Alvarado, and the right wing pundit, Jorge Yllescas. Jimmy Dacaret, their leader, read a statement questioning the intentions of the government in even discussing with various civil groups their view on a constitutional convention, since

"the Hondurans have it clear that the only reason to install a constitutional convention is to make possible presidential reelection and change our democratic system."

Another speaker, Secretary of the National Register of Persons, Fernando Anduray addressed an unveiled threat at Porfirio Lobo Sosa, saying

"we are your friends, the white shirts, who put you in power, but just as there was a constitutional succession, we could do it again."

The UCD group ended their rally with their mantra "No one is above the law."

Hearty bravado, but not the kind of rhetoric that Honduras needs now. Threatening to carry out another coup is hardly pro-constitution speech.

Compare the small size of this crowd with the 1.3 million people who signed the petition for a constitutional convention. They're not threatening to topple the government because they don't like what its doing, but they do want to change it, in a legal fashion. They can see beyond the red herring of "presidential reelection" to find meaningful changes to the constitution that would let them participate in decisions, and to give them a better life.

Let's let Porfirio Lobo Sosa answer the UCD:

"In the discussions there were different positions, some to one side, others that didn't want to talk, and some who didn't understand others. In the middle is the large majority of different organizations that want peace, that want dialogue, that want that there be changes in Honduras, that will bring about a bettering of the conditions of life in our country..... I understand there are some who don't want anything to change, because no doubt they are doing well, but there is a large group of Hondurans, more than 80 percent, who say that there have to be changes, because the majority is not living the life they have a right to."