Con­science com­pels me to add that in focus­ing so directly on the coup I don’t mean to imply that Mel Zelaya, the ousted pres­i­dent, is some kind of exiled saint. As Kevin Casas-​Zamora of the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion notes, he had his own dif­fi­cul­ties respect­ing the spirit and the letter of the Hon­duran constitution:

As other Latin Amer­i­can lead­ers, Pres­i­dent Zelaya fell victim to the virus of pres­i­den­tial reelection….The real prob­lem, how­ever, was that by orga­niz­ing a de facto ref­er­en­dum to test the pop­u­lar­ity of his idea, Zelaya pur­sued his ambi­tion with total dis­re­gard of his country’s con­sti­tu­tion. The latter explic­itly for­bids hold­ing referenda—let alone an unsanc­tioned “pop­u­lar consultation”—to amend the con­sti­tu­tion and, more specif­i­cally, to modify the pres­i­den­tial term. Unsur­pris­ingly, the president’s idea met with the resis­tance of Con­gress, nearly all par­ties (includ­ing his own), the press, busi­ness, elec­toral author­i­ties, and, cru­cially, the Supreme Court, that deemed the whole endeavor illegal.

But the idea that one ille­gal act doesn’t excuse another is one of the pil­lars of the rule of law. Though the unpros­e­cuted skele­tons in our own closet sug­gest that the US doesn’t have the same moral stand­ing on this ques­tion as before, it’s nice to see Obama deal­ing with the Hon­duras sit­u­a­tion in unam­bigu­ous terms.

(AP Photo)

Yes­ter­day the Hon­duran Con­gress, work­ing almost cer­tainly at the behest of Roberto Micheletti (who was Speaker of the Con­gress until the coup), sus­pended the fol­low­ing con­sti­tu­tional rights for its cit­i­zens between the hours of 9pm and 5am: habeas corpus, free­dom of assem­bly, free pas­sage, free­dom from police coer­cion and vio­lence, and free­dom from com­pul­sory self-​incrimination (the right to remain silent).

From Ray Walser at, nat­u­rally, The Corner:

Con­gress, the courts, and the mil­i­tary joined forces to send [Hon­duran Pres­i­dent] “Mad” Mel [Zelaya] pack­ing. In a delib­er­ate, bipar­ti­san manner, they selected a new pres­i­dent to serve until reg­u­lar elec­tions in November.

And for the reality-​based among us, here are the first 3 parts of the OAS res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing the coup—

1. To con­demn vehe­mently the coup d’état staged this morn­ing against the constitutionally-​established Gov­ern­ment of Hon­duras, and the arbi­trary deten­tion and expul­sion from the coun­try of the con­sti­tu­tional pres­i­dent José Manuel Zelaya Ros­ales, which has pro­duced an uncon­sti­tu­tional alter­ation of the demo­c­ra­tic order.

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1/ From “Near-Extinct Birds of the Cen­tral Cordillera,” a short story in Ben Fountain’s Brief Encoun­ters with Che Guevara:

Some evenings Alberto joined them, usu­ally when one of his inter­views was being broad­cast; he’d settle onto the steps with a mug of tea and listen to him­self lec­tur­ing the coun­try on his­tor­i­cal inevitabil­ity or the Boli­var­ian strug­gle or the ven­emous strate­gies of the World Bank. After one such broad­cast he turned to Blair.

“So, Joan Blair, what do you think of our position?”

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