Token protest

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya (left) and Hugo Llorens, the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, in Managua, Nicaragua, on July 30.-CESAR PEREZ/REUTERS Ousted President Manuel Zelaya (left) and Hugo Llorens, the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, in Managua, Nicaragua, on July 30.

Los pobres son muchos y por eso Es imposible olvidarios. The poor are many and thats why, It is impossible to forget them.)

Roberto Sosa, 1969, Honduras.

ON June 29, the Honduran armed forces rousted their President, Manuel Mel Zelaya of the Liberal Party. They threw him on a plane and sent him into exile in Costa Rica. Roberto Micheletti, another Liberal Party member and a Deputy in the Honduran Congress, took Zelayas place. Nobody, not even the United States, recognised Michelettis government. U.S. President Barack Obama deplored the coup, telling the media that it was not legal and that if the dawn expulsion was accepted it would take the hemisphere back to a dark past.

Two months before the coup, Obama told the Summit of the Americas: The United States will be willing to acknowledge past errors, where those errors have been made. The coup in Honduras was the test. Would the U.S. once more back a coup of the propertied against the people, or would the government stand by the rule of law? By the charter of the Organisation of American States (OAS), of which Honduras was a member, and by its own Constitution, the coup was illegal. To live by his new standard, Obama had to condemn the coup and vote in the affirmative with the other OAS states (34 to 0) calling for Zelayas restoration.

But could he allow a devout ally, the Honduran elite, to suffer the consequences of its actions? Zelaya was elected in 2005 with the support of a considerable section of the Centre-Right, not only the base of his Liberal Party but also that of the Honduran elite, the business section, the Churches and the military. Born into an affluent family, made richer by his own exploits in the timber trade and agriculture, Zelaya turned, for a host of pragmatic reasons, towards the pink tide that has swept Latin America. This tide is, of course, the Bolivarian Revolution, which has vitalised the mass social movements and driven progressive or Left-leaning parties to political power from the Southern Cone to Central America.

Honduras was once the staging area for U.S. attacks on the leftist guerillas in Nicaragua (the Sandinistas) and in El Salvador (the FMLN, or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front). Today, the Sandinistas and the FMLN are in power. It would be impossible for the Honduran elite, in their virtually gated zones around Colonia Palmira and Loma Linda, not to fear the Bolivarian dynamic. It is this, as much as anything else, that spurred the revolt against Zelaya. At a considerable disadvantage to itself, that elite had given everything to the U.S. in the dirty wars of the 1980s. It had lied to protect the secret U.S. camps on its two borders, and it had welcomed hundreds of millions of dollars to train its military (money spent on a gun culture that might have trained the population in other socially useful skills).

Zelayas political kinsman is Carlos Roberto Reina, another Liberal Party reformer, who, in his tenure as President in the 1990s, tried to wash out the dirt of the 1980s. Carlos Robertos brother, Jorge Arturo, put the problem best in July 1985: The U.S. has put its eyes on Nicaragua, its hands on El Salvador, and its feet in Honduras, flattening us. Given this history of subservience by the elite, the U.S. government owed them something.

The U.S. government, therefore, quickly diluted Obamas condemnation with lack of open action. Hugo Llorens, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, remained in office, and remained unobtrusive, as other embassies turned their backs on the coup regime, either by leaving the country or by being openly defiant (the Venezuelans received an expulsion order but refused to leave). Llorens is a lightning rod. He was on the National Security Council during the unsuccessful 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, and some have suggested that he had advance warning of the Honduran coup. The World Bank suspended its disbursements, but the U.S. State Department continued to funnel its $180 million in aid. A month after the coup, the U.S. revoked the diplomatic visas of four Honduran officials who had returned to Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. It was more symbolic than substantive.

The Republican Party in the U.S. threw itself on the issue, deploring Obamas initial statement on the coup. Conservatives at the Heritage Foundation purported to be troubled when a true totalitarian, Raul Castro; a pseudo-democrat, Hugo Chavez; and President Obama stand together, in the words of Ray Walser, a senior policy analyst. Clifton Ross, a writer who is now in Tegucigalpa, says that the Republicans hoped to weaken Obama diplomatically and prevented him from acting against the coup with red-baiting, anti-Chavez lies and manipulation.

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint (Republican) held up Obamas nominations of Arturo Valenzuela (Assistant Secretary of State) and Tom Shannon (Ambassador to Brazil) on the basis of the Republican disquiet with Obamas Honduras policy (finally, on July 27, their nominations were moved to the Senate, but the message was received). Fingers pointed at Far-Right Republican operatives, such as former Bush administration official Otto Reich, saying that they had their hands in the destabilisation of the Zelaya government.

The U.S. government has been trying, in various ways, to roll back Chavez growing influence in Latin America. In May, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Zelaya in Honduras during an OAS meeting and warned him about a referendum regarding the rewriting of the military-era Honduran Constitution of 1982 and about his close association with Chavez. After the coup, Phillip Crowley, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs in the State Department, offered Latin American leaders a lesson: We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.

Hillary Clinton offered her objection to the re-election of OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza on the basis of his bid to reinstate Cuba into the OAS and for his fierce attempts to restore Zelaya to the presidency. This latter is against the stated U.S. policy, but it sent a comfortable message to the elites in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, who are eager for the U.S. to run down the clock: the next Honduran presidential election is in four months, when the Zelaya issue would have become legally moot. Was Washington dithering because time was the ally of the Honduran elite, or was the State Department genuinely paralysed?

Washington seemed unable to go back on its commitment to the OAS and yet unable to abandon its old friends. It is here that the OAS took the lead. The historian Greg Grandin put it thus: So once again, South America comes to Washingtons rescue. Ben Dangle, editor of Upside Down World (a well-regarded blog that covers Latin America), points out that the unity against the coup from Latin America was so huge. It made Washington look bad to be one of the last nations somewhat supporting Michelleti, and thats significant. Washington turned its problems over to the Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, an old friend and Costa Ricas President. Kevin Casas-Zamora, a former Vice-President of Arias, notes that without U.S. weight behind it, this dialogue led by Arias would not have happened. Arias had condemned the coup when it occurred, so it must have taken Washingtons muscle to get Micheletti to the table. The same with Zelaya.

In the 1980s, Arias earned disfavour from the Sandinistas for his role as mediator, asking them to make concessions that the U.S.-backed Contras did not have to make. So Zelaya had to take some hits from his own side to show up at Arias home in the San Jose suburb of Rohrmoser.

The U.S.-brokered Arias mediation disturbed leading members of the OAS. Brazils Celso Amorim told Hillary Clinton that the mediation should follow the OAS resolution and that there should be no conditions on Zelayas return to power. By taking such a strong position from the outset and continuing to pressure the U.S., Marc Weisbot of the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research said, the OAS and Latin American countries have pushed the U.S. to take the steps against the coup that it has. But given that the mediation came with conditions meant that Washington did not go all the way with the OAS. The U.S. State Department released a statement saying that the government hoped that the Arias mediation restores the democratic order in Honduras, a euphemistic way of avoiding any talk of restoring Zelaya to the presidency and yet holding fast for the democratic process.

Peter Hakim, who presides over the important Inter-American Dialogue, told me that the Honduran case presented a test of the Obama administrations commitment to multilateral approaches. He acknowledges that the U.S. followed the Latin American lead, but when the OAS demands went nowhere the U.S. took a somewhat larger part. By this, Hakim refers to Hillary Clintons call for Arias as mediator. He believes that behind the scenes, the U.S. is pressing the de facto Honduran officials to accept the Arias proposals and assuring them that Zelaya will not be a threat.

This is precisely what Casas-Zamora pointed out, saying, Zelaya should return to the presidency, though not necessarily to power. Zelaya will need to end his bid to amend the Constitution, and he will need to enter a power-sharing agreement with other centres of power in Honduras. If the crisis has a good ending, says Hakim, the U.S. will have an added incentive to stick with multilateral diplomacy.

Casas-Zamora agrees that the U.S. is trying to give the message that the inclusion of regional actors is very important and the United States wont go back to the days when it single-handedly intervened with a heavy hand. But this is a curious kind of multilateralism, as Hakim seemed to acknowledge, when he pointed out that the U.S. may be learning that multilateralism can be made to work. But made to work for whom?

A few days before the coup, Miguel Luna, one of the city councillors of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S., received an e-mail warning him that events in Honduras would take a turn for the worse. Luna is from the Dominican Republic, which has had its share of coups and U.S. involvement. He represents the largely African-American and Latino neighbourhood of Elmwood, whose population nurses a healthy suspicion of the exercise of U.S. power, whether in their own neighbourhoods or in their homelands.

Luna was frustrated that Llorens denied any knowledge of the coup, and felt that despite the moves made by the Obama administration, other, more malign, forces were at work. Luna drafted a resolution against the coup, which the city council passed on July 16. It called for the immediate reinstatement of President Manuel Zelaya. When asked what a city council was doing making claims about foreign policy, Luna retorted, This is not just about Honduras. This is about democracy. Luna will visit Honduras as part of one more emergency delegation from the U.S. to Honduras. If this coup prevails, Luna told me, you will see Latin America moving backwards 100 years. This is a price that we cannot afford.

Zelayas expulsion has one positive effect for Honduras. It has galvanised the social movements and raised the sense among the poor of where their interests are best served. As Grandin puts it, the momentum building in Honduras could continue, including an emerging alliance between the traditional organised Left, new social movements, real democrats, and the long-suppressed reformist wing of the Liberal Party. The events of June have moved both the Honduran poor, who are too many to be forgotten, and, in distant Rhode Island, a city council with its own beleaguered commitment to democracy.