Throwdown in Tegucigalpa

It took almost 7 years after the short-lived coup that drove Hugo Chavez from power for journalist Brian Nelson to produce a definitive, nuanced account of what happened that day in April 2002. To understand the motives of the anti-Chavez golpistas, and to understand how power fluidly shifted from the Carmona coup mongers back to the Chavistas, Nelson's book The Silence and The Scorpion (Nation Books) is required reading. A single day after the coup in Honduras, the situation on the ground in Tegucigalpa (and Mangua, Nicaragua, where the deposed president is meeting with Daniel Ortega and Chavez, two former coup leaders) is predictably murky. What we do know, though, is that, unlike with the situation in Iran, the Obama administration quickly made its position on Honduras clear.

According to this AP/CBC story, "Two senior officials in U.S. President Barack Obama's administration told reporters that American diplomats were working to ensure Zelaya's safe return." The coup was "illegal" and "illegitimate," said White House officials, prompting Honduras's acting president Roberto Micheletti, a member of Zelaya's own political party, to tell reporters that "nobody, not Barack Obama and much less Hugo Chavez, has any right to threaten this country." Chavez, a committed "anti-imperialist," has promised to commit troops to Honduras if his revolutionary comrade is not reinstated as president.

It is difficult to fully agree with Mary Anastasia O'Grady's piece in the Wall Street Journal defending the coup as a necessary step towards to saving Honduran democracy, and I am inclined to side with this unsigned piece on the Foreign Policy blog: "[O]ne need [not] defend Zelaya to argue that sending troops to break into a president's house and put him on a plane out of the country is generally not the best way to protect 'the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators.'"

Regardless, O'Grady tidily sums up the events that precipitated the coup:

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

It was the firing of Gen. Vasquez Velasquez (not to be confused with Venezuelan Gen. Vasquez Velasco, who played a pivotal role in that country's 2002 coup) that set events in motion. Velasquez, it seems, is Zelaya's very own Archibald Cox:

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.