Giving Honduras the Haiti Treatment

WITH THE OVERTHROW OF PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA, Honduras has fallen under military rule of the kind that dominated the Central American nation from 1963 to 1981. The man named by Honduras’s Congress to serve out the remainder of Zelaya’s term, Robert Micheletti, will of course claim that civilians are still in charge. But when soldiers oust a sitting president and decide who his successor will be, it is the soldiers that rule.

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Two hundred soldiers came in the night to overpower President Zelaya’s guard, and bundle him off for a flight to Costa Rica. The kidnapping was somewhat reminiscent of the seizure of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by U.S. troops back in February, 2004.  The United States claimed it was saving Aristide from death at the hands of gunmen armed and organized by…the United States. Aristide was sent to the French-dominated Central African Republic.

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After the military put Honduran President Zelaya on a plane to Costa Rica, they claimed he had signed a letter of resignation. That’s the same lie told by organizers of the U.S.-backed coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, back in 2002. Chavez returned to power with the help some elements of the military and hundreds of thousands of his supporters in the streets  read article