Artistic Piece #3

7-7-09 Journal entry - Political turmoil

Yesterday I saw a beautiful sunset. The clouds were lit up in deepening shades of red, purple, and blue - skillfully painted as if by an artist's hand. It was a peaceful backdrop to the Honduran mountains looking one way down the road and to the beach at the other end of the road. A tree with bare spiky branches provided a stark contrast to the richly adorned summer sky. With this beautiful, grandiose, and altogether serene sky, who would guess that the Honduran government is split between loyalties to two presidents and two schools of thought - Western Democracy and the Latin American leftist dictatorships veiled by democracies and the Alba alliance, yet really run by Chavez, Castro, and their socialist cronies. Mel Zelaya, Honduras' former president, is one of Chavez's buds and he had been taking steps to gain more personal power within the democratic framework, literally testing every check and balance of the Honduran government. On June 28, 2009 he had planned to hold a "public consultation" poll to ask the Honduran people whether they would support a motion to appoint a committee to revise the Constitution to extend the number of terms that a president can serve. This motion would have appeared on the November ballot, and would have followed in the footsteps of Hugo Chavez, who implemented a similar motion in Venezuela in the past so that he could serve unlimited terms as president (and essentially veil a dictatorship in the facade of a democracy). Earlier in June the idea to hold this poll (and thus pave the way for Zelaya to potentially serve more terms as president) had been criticized by the Congress and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The army also opposed this motion, and in retalliation Zelaya removed the head of the army - an action declared illegal by the Supreme Court. Moreover, Zelaya's earlier transgression was kicking out the organization that was planning to monitor the poll on June 28. By kicking out this organization, Zelaya made his intentions clear that he wanted full control of the outcome of the poll. It has recently come to light that Zelaya had generated two sets of ballots - one blank and the other already filled out so that the poll would be 80% in favor of his motion. These ballots were recently discovered in a hidden location and solidify that Zelaya's intentions were to skew the vote in his favor so that he could legitimize his illegal action to extend the president's term in Honduran government. He was sneaky, but not quite enough to pull the wool over the Honduran government. In a valiant effort to preserve democracy and not let Honduras fall prey to the dictatorship agenda that Zelaya had sought, the Supreme Court ordered the military to oust Zelaya on the morning of June 28 so that the poll would not occur. Thus the military coup d'etat was not a coup in the sense that the military seized the country by force and put a military leader as President - but rather the coup was a desperate attempt to prevent Zelaya from gaining momentum beyond the grasp of the Honduran government's checks and balances. The coup did not appoint a military leader but rather the Honduran government appointed the second-in-line to presidency, Micheletti (the head of Congress) as interim president. This coup was not an act of force so that the military could take over the government, but rather the military was simply the "bark" to scare Zelaya away so that the government could resume its democratic process. Zelaya was a threat to that process, and the government had no choice but to match Zelaya's threat with a warning of their own and to effectively salvage Honduran democracy. The Supreme Court and Congress had already tried - and failed - to prevent Zelaya from holding the poll that would legitimize his motion to set up a committee to change the Constitution. The government had no legal way to prevent Zelaya from holding the poll - which would have been corrupt - and since checks and balances failed the Supreme Court relied on force - not even force but just a large presence of military troops - to scare Zelaya enough to leave the country so that he would not debilitate Honduras' democratic government with dictatorship intentions. Although the poll itself may have been harmless and at least marginally consistent with the idea of democracy - to be a government for the people, Zelaya had planned to skew the results of the poll and to use the poll as a way to defend his later motion to change the constitution - something that would not truly be supported by the 80% margin he had illegally set up. He would have manipulated the democratic process so that it falsely appeared as if he had popular support when he may well have had less than 50% support for his motion. It is not democracy to manipulate a poll to a desired outcome, no matter what benefits he would have brought to the Honduran poor. How can you justify the potential end if the means are so corrupt? Moreover, he was operating at the margins of democracy, at best, and although he was democratically elected by the people three and a half years ago, I believe the government has the right to remove a president who has clear intentions to monopolize and manipulate the democratic government. And since the other methods of denying Zelaya power had failed, using a bigger threat - albeit not the ideal method of removal - was necessary in this case to put an end to Zelaya's attempt to usurp more power.
I absolutely disagree with supporting Zelaya just because he is the "legitimate" president, having been elected democratically by the Honduran people. By attempting to horde more power and to follow Chavez's lead, Zelaya did not act democratically. He had dictatorship intentions, and he tried to veil these intentions by going through a democratic process - but he would have gone against the will of the Honduran people and the Honduran government in doing so. It was a tremendous act in support of maintaining a balance of power between the branches of the Honduran government for the Supreme Court to order the military to oust Zelaya so that the head of Congress, Micheletti, could be interim president. It is not an ideal situation, of course, and it technically is a transgression against the "legitimate," democratically-elected President; however, it was a necessary transgression in order to maintain balance in the branches of the Honduran government. He had not actually gone against the Constitution, but he had intentions of doing so and the Supreme Court and military's actions were a preventative effort to preserve power within the reign of all the other democratically-elected officials in government, not just one man with intentions similar to Chavez. Rather than dismiss the June 28 coup as a regression to the 1980s military coups that placed militants at the head of power in Latin American countries, I think that the US needs to rethink what "backwards" means and to recognize the entire situation in Honduras as not just another military coup but as an action to prevent a corrupt president from using the channels of democracy to a dictatorship end. Supporting Zelaya as the "rightful" president just because he was democratically elected is a very superficial way to "support democracy." Zelaya may have been the "legitimate president," but his intentions to betray the people and the country who he was leading through his corrupt poll and intent to add more terms to his presidency should have made it clear to us that we should not trust his claim to democracy but rather should be wary of his strong alliance with Chavez. We need to consider the political situation in Honduras as a whole, not just freak out that there's a "military coup" in Honduras and that we need to reverse the effect of the coup to reinstate the "rightful" president. From a historical perspective, this military oust of Zelaya could have saved Honduras from falling prey to dictatorship intentions and yet another leader to vy with as an ally of Chavez. It was not a "backwards" move or a regression to militant rule as has pervaded Honduran and Latin American history, but rather a preventative step in the direction to preserve a democracy that was quickly slipping out of the other branch's control and falling further into the lap of Zelaya. We should not defer to the appearance of democracy without considering the potency of dictatorhsip brewing under the surface.
In my time here - and truly in the past few days - I've really had my eyes opened to a different perspective on the US and its foreign policy. Of course the US already is neck-deep in so many other global issues, particularly the Middle East, and Honduras only occupies a small speck of our attention, but being here in Honduras where this news is big news has convinced me that rather than act quickly to stanch even the appearance of violence, we should hold a magnifying glass to the problem to consider the entire landscape of the political situation rather than just a hot spot. If the US truly supports democracy, we should support the beauty and intricacy of the entire democratic process and realize that it's worth it to make some small sacrifices if the preservation of democracy is at stake rather than just support a surface-deep appearance of democracy embodied by a corrupt president who is an ally to our foes and who has dictatorship intentions.