The first Central American military coup in 16 years leaves no winners, except perhaps Hugo Chávez. It also highlights the hidden tensions between democracy and rule of law...

On Sunday morning, the president of Honduras awoke before dawn to the sound of yelling guards and shots fired. Soldiers burst in, rousting him from his bed at gunpoint. He was then escorted out of his home, still in pajamas, and dropped off in Costa Rica via military transport plane.

It was a “kidnapping,” President Manuel Zelaya said. Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, saw power cuts, media blackouts and fighter jets screaming through the skies. The news wires called it Central America’s first military coup since the Cold War.

Western observers were not pleased. The United States, the European Union, and the Organization of American States (OAS) all condemned the uprising. The U.N. General Assembly called an emergency meeting to discuss what to do.

Hugo Chávez, the fiery leftist president of Venezuela, was also outraged. “I have put the armed forces of Venezuela on alert,” Chávez said. If the Venezuelan ambassador were harmed or troops entered the Venezuelan embassy, Chávez theatrically fumed, it would be considered “a de facto state of war.” As of this writing, Chávez is adamant that Zelaya be reinstated. So, too, is the Castro regime in Cuba, the Correa administration in Ecuador, and others of like mind.

You don’t often see the likes of Chávez and Castro on the same side of an issue as the United States. At the same time, the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress – both which backed the military predawn raid – claim they are defending Honduran civil society, not subverting it.

So what’s going on?

Honduras, formerly known as Spanish Honduras, is a small Central American country of roughly 8 million people. The country’s primary exports, per The Wall Street Journal, are “bananas, shrimp, coffee, apparel and remittances from Hondurans in the U.S.”

Honduras is also well within range of the Chávez-Castro sphere of influence.

That is to say, Hugo Chávez fancies himself as the next Fidel Castro... and a growing number of Latin American leaders consider themselves chavistas, i.e., budding proteges of Hugo. Manuel Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president, is one of those who fell under the chavista spell.

The constitution of Honduras limits the president to a single four-year term. Having been elected in 2006, Zelaya’s term was set to end in 2010. So Zelaya, embracing the spirit of his buddy and role model, Chávez, decided to try and get the rules changed. Zelaya’s plan was to amend the Honduran constitution, no doubt with an eye for becoming leader for life... or at least for a very long time.

Zelaya wanted a referendum to gage popular support for his plan. The Honduran Supreme Court resisted this, citing the constitutional ban on such votes within six months of an election. When the military refused to distribute ballots (as was the custom), Zelaya sacked the army chief and pressed ahead anyway. He used ballots shipped from Venezuela and had them passed out by supporters in open defiance of the Supreme Court.

On the surface of things, calling in the military looks extreme. "If holding a poll provokes a coup, the abduction of the president and expulsion from his country, then what kind of democracy are we living in?" Zelaya asked.

It’s a fair question. But it’s also true that Zelaya’s motives and methods were thuggish from the start... that he directly defied both the Honduran Supreme Court and Honduran constitutional law... and that his military arrest and removal is defensible under these grounds.

The Serpent’s Egg

No one comes out looking good in this whole mess.

President Zelaya showed himself to be a power-hungry lawbreaker, escalating his strong-arm tactics as the end of his term (and the limit to his power) drew near. At the same time, the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress were technically within the bounds of written law... but removing a political leader at gunpoint seems a bit excessive in the eyes of the world. And the United States and European Union did themselves no favors siding with the likes of Chávez and Castro so readily. Is it really so cut and dry what should have happened here?

The only real winner in all this seems to be Hugo Chávez. If Zelaya is returned to his post, then Chávez can declare moral victory (and draw a supplicant Zelaya even deeper into his sphere of influence).

If Zelaya is not returned to power, however, then Chávez can rant and rave over this new travesty, and use Honduras as a rallying point to further consolidate Latin American support.

So why did the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress act so forcefully in deploying the military against Zelaya? Why didn’t they just try to stop the referendum from being carried out... or declare the vote count null and void... or take some other legal-themed course of action not so, well, melodramatic as a full-on coup?

A quote from Shakespeare’s Brutus in Act 2 of Julius Caesar comes to mind:

And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.

Long before the referendum showdown, tension had been building as Zelaya moved ever more aggressively leftward. Perhaps the Honduran courts and Congress saw Zelaya for what he was – a budding dictator – and sought to “kill him in the shell.”

Sadly, it might also be that Zelaya’s good-intentioned enemies feared the will of the populace.

After all, what if the constitutionally outlawed poll had given overwhelming support to the President’s bid for another term? What if the people’s voice had rung out, under illegal circumstance or no... and that voice had said “Zelaya forever?”

This possibility was not a trivial one. A keen sense of support (likely brought about, Chávez style, via populist rhetoric and economic bribes) is why the president wanted to hold the illegal referendum in the first place. After the coup, Zelaya also received moral support in the form of some 2,000 angry protesters burning tires in front of the presidential palace.

The Ugly Truth About Democracy

And so we come to the ugly truth about democracy. In the West we practically worship democracy, and the idea of democracy itself, as the highest of political ideals.

But democracy is not an unalloyed good. In fact, democracy can be downright dangerous – especially to the rule of law. With the will of the people behind him, a sufficiently charismatic leader can willfully trample the rule of law right into the dirt... and he can do so with loud cheers from his fervent supporters.

Perhaps this is why H.L. Mencken once said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want – and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The foreign affairs bigwigs of the United States and Europe also appear to know just what they want – a Latin America that gives every appearance of stability on the surface, regardless of what brews underneath. Hence their desire to see a Chávez protégé immediately returned to his perch, with no thought as to the stability of Honduran institutions or the longer-term dangers of undermining the rule of law.

But then, it’s not as if the U.S. (or Europe) can really take a principled stand for rule of law these days anyway, given all that’s happened since the financial crisis began...

Other Related Topics: Democracy , Honduras Investments , Justice Litle , Macro Trader , Military

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