Bad News for the Axis of Chavez

So, the putsch worked! You must be very happy.... nostalgic for what might-have-been in Venezuela in 2002? And only, what, 7 or 8 demonstrators killed by the security forces as they protested? Hardly worth worrying about at all, I suppose.

smach, good lord. Did you even read what emigdio wrote above? Lobo was the duly elected President in scheduled elections, the putschists, as you call them, will soon be out of power. In fact, as emigdio has written before, both sides have looked terrible, and emigdio wrote about and protested those very same deaths. Shame on you for ascribing ideas to someone, someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the situation than you do. And by the way, I live on the railroad lines that people use to migrate to the states and I have talked to emigrants from Honduras, believe you me, none of them sounded a bit like you. Or are you going to claim you know more than they do?

Self-righteous posturing sure is fun. To my mind, arguing that a decision made by 60%+ of the Honduran electorate is undemocratic borders on self-parody - but then self-parody has been the leitmotif of the crisis from the moment Raúl Castro started lecturing the rest of the continent on the evils of unelected government.

A heavy whiff of farce has hung over this whole affair for months now. Frankly, nobody comes out of this mess looking good, except maybe those voters.

Give me a break. Yeah, another rich conservative got elected, instead of the rich conservative who served as the figurehead for the coup - big bloody deal. Unlikely you were going to see any other result, wasn't it? The last few months have been a salutary reminder to left-wingers of just how the security forces and political establishment in the country view them. This was, after all, an election campaign carried out in significant part during a suspension of political rights by the coup government, where Amnesty International has been concerned about violations of human rights during the campaign (see for example http://tinyurl.com/yehyxn4), and where media outlets critical of the coup government were shut down.

And the election has gotten the support of... Colombia, for example? Colombia, where Alvaro Uribe is setting up to do _exactly_ the same thing that got Zelaya deposed - change the constitution and then run again for another term? But of course, Uribe's a conservative, not a leftie, so different rules apply to him.

After embarrassing incidents of this sort, there's always a deliberate process of forgetting that goes on, when people like Mr Toro are eager to declare the whole episode over, sorry folks, move on, nothing to remember there, those dead people aren't important in the Greater Scheme of Things. This post is an initial installment in that process.

it is you who should give us a break. Do you even know a single Honduran? Have you ever been there? Do you even speak the language? I know them, I meet many of them when I volunteer to teach basic English survival skills for migrants headed to the states, now unless these migrants are all lying, you are full of shit. Both sides looked like hell, Zelaya not for wanting a referendum, but by try to forcibly impose on against the express will of the Congress and Courts (and against the constitution), he ordered his thugs to try to commandeer election equipment, imagine if George Bush decided to force a referendum so that he could run on a third term against the will of congress and the courts and the Constitution, pretend you would have been alright with that. You know so little about the history here and you have the gall to be self-righteous. There is a reason why they restrict endless re-elections. Mexico has a one term and out because of Diaz. The poor in Honduras don't want a Castro or a Chavez, they know the results of that. Try talking to some instead of trying to impost your own totalitarian vision you fascist pig.

and smuck, I mean smach, I supported the Clinton policy of restoring Zelaya to power until his term of office was over. Constraints on his usurption of power fine, coup no. The thing Honduras needs is an impeachment process. Zelaya is a villain who has caused enormous sufferings on the people of Honduras because of his policies. People traveled on foot, by riding on the tops of trains, by chickenbus from there all the way to the United States and did so all throughout his term in office. I worked with these people, funny how I never saw the likes of you here, you Fabian socialist, limo liberal pig. Try getting out in the world instead of pretending everything is the fault of America. You goddamn imperialist (and you do have an imperial attitude, proclaiming on things you have no clue about) pig.

Dear me, little man, you are annoyed, aren't you?

You think that _Honduran refugees are a product of Zelaya_... and you accuse me of being ignorant of the country and its history? You think that he caused the poverty that makes Hondurans immigrate to the USA - since 2006, when he became President? Be specific now, tell me about the enormous suffering that he caused to the people of Honduras since 2006. Tell me about his responsibility for a crisis in food prices that afflicted most of the world over that period. tell me how he invented the Central American drug trade. Remind me again of all of the opponents of Zelaya who have been killed since the coup.

Good you're teaching those folks English - you appear to have some command of that subject, anyway...

It is you, smuck, who is the little man. Go blackton. What has Latin American populism ever done for anyone south of the border? Only debt and ruinous monetary policies have been the results of the policies of the Perons and the Chavezes. As b says, Zelaya met much opposition in Honduras, even among those of his own party. Zelaya was involved in a power grab but to the smucks of the world, that is only wrong if the right does it. And is that really you, Senor Francisco? If so, I really enjoyed reading the Chronicles but for some reason, they stopped coming to my email inbox. What gives?

great rebuttal libref. of course smach can't offer any rebuttal to what I said that both sides looked like hell, for smach lives in a black and white world, where someone like Castro is a god. And of course smach didn't answer any of my questions, and truly knows nothing about the history or the people in the region. Zelaya must be somekind of virtuous hero because he makes the requisite populist noise that fools such as smach fall for over and over.

How about some basic facts from the LA times:

Lobo, a member of the opposition National Party, led with 56 percent of the votes, with more than 60 percent of the tally sheets counted, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal announced late Sunday. Elvin Santos of Zelaya's Liberal Party was second with 38 percent.

Lobo proclaimed the election "the cleanest in the history of the country." Santos quickly conceded defeat, saying it is time for "unity, the only path to confront the future and ensure the victory of all Hondurans."

And this: Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate a settlement to the Honduran crisis, said he would recognize the results of the election. To do otherwise, he told CNN's Spanish-language service, would be to further punish the Honduran people.

But smuck has zero interest in the poor in Honduras, smach values their poverty so smach can get on a high horse, God forbid if the people there ever get a decent life. Something, by the way, I have spent 1/2 of my adult life living in rural China and now rural southern Mexico trying to build a better life. Something I promise smach has never done. Oh wait, smach carried signs in a protest....ooohhh working class hero. Fucking poseur.

As to me, I make no apologies advocating for far less restrictions on migration from Latin America into the US. I strongly support CAFTA, and wish it were expanded greatly. I would love to see something akin to a North American Union not unlike the EU. Capitalism means free movement of goods and LABOR.

Smach, of course, would see this as imperialism. Keep the poor poor so that smach could feel self righteous.

by the way, I have seen first hand the benefits of education, clean water, health care, it is fools like smach and their blind love of populism who are just as bad as any right wing nut job.
When I lived in rural China, once in a while I met some western tourist who lamented that the people were getting electricity, new housing (while still retaining traditional elements), that instead of laboring knee deep in the mud all day were using tractors. They thought that poverty and only that represented the true China. Poverty porn addicts. This is smach all over.

How about it smach, what is your solution to poverty in Central America? Abolish capitalism and pretend that will bring wealth? Have everyone return to their pre-Columbian roots, live in mud huts, have no health care, etc. You would love that, wouldn't you?

blackton: Actually, you never asked me whether both sides looked like hell in this case, and neither did Toro - in both cases, you've been on full-scale gloats because the conservatives got into power in the country. As I said, these power grabs are fine for you and yours when they're undertaken by conservatives like Uribe in Colombia - still no mention about that case at all, eh? - but rather when it's left-wingers that undertake it.

How much have populists like Chavez and Castro contributed to the lives of people in that region? Just about nothing, their reigns have been disastrous. How much did the caudillos and elites who they replaced in government - for whom ballots were a convenient fiction, but who really governed through the army and the police - contribute to the lives of people? Just about the same. Are you actually naive enough to think that the poverty you see Honduras, or in Latin America more generally, can just be laid at the door of left-wingers over the last ten years or so? Who the hell do you think has been running the region for the last 200 years? The commies?

And so we get the Honduran case, where you and Toro are enraptured over an election that in significant ways is a throwback to the 1950s: an elected leader (a bloody bad one) deposed and a figurehead put in his place, civil liberties suspended through much of the election campaign, protestors killed or jailed or disappeared pour décourager les autres.... Wonderful - you think that's going to be bring prosperity to Honduras? You think that Porfirio Lobo Sosa is interested in poverty in Honduras?

Incidentally, you might note that I work in Central Africa, and have since the 1980s - both in academic jobs and on community development work. So you can get down off your high horse, little man. I have a rather good idea of the benefits of development, of education, clean water and so on, for people in such areas. I've also seen first-hand just how well things work when democratic norms are traduced to put compliant Western clients in power. You thinking that voiding an election is worth it if it gets rid of a populist? (Francisco Toro does, of course - he's pining for the lost chances of 2002.) It's not.

enraptured? where do I say I am enraptured by the Conservatives winning? I am enraptured that a Civil war has been avoided. And as I said, my solutions have squat to do with Conservatives taking power, open up the area to true development, have a true type of north American union. I can tell you tons of problems that exist in the Mexican Constitution that restrict growth and trade, simply because of fear that they will be overwhelmed by the United States. I told you I supported Clinton's efforts to get Zelaya back in power, and so did Toro who lauded the work Clinton did.

Why the hell should I ask you to look at both sides, why can't you be upfront about it instead of being deceitful and using inciting comments?

What really cheesed me off about what you wrote is the way you maligned Toro, when he wrote this but a month ago:

Francisco Toro and Juan Nagel write the Venezuelan news blog Caracas Chronicles. A version of this post originally appeared there.

The Honduran tragicomedy that has consumed the hemisphere's diplomats for months is at an end (read the details here). Barring the unforeseeable, which is always an iffy thing to do in Honduras, the coupster is out, the mercurial elected president is back in (pending a face-saving vote by Congress and the Supreme Court), and an election to replace him will be held on November 29, as planned.

In light of all this, who was the winner in the Honduran crisis?

Certainly not the elected leader, Mel Zelaya. He's back in power, but is significantly weakened. He will not be allowed to push for the constitutional reform that precipitated the crisis in the first place. He'll be forced to head a "unity government" (diplomatese for a “grownup supervised government"), and he'll have to find himself another job in January.

Certainly not the guy who unseated him, Roberto Micheletti. By giving up power to Zelaya, he loses a massive amount of face and may have to fight criminal charges down the road. In spite of having stopped the illegal referendum Zelaya was pushing for, his fate is up in the air.

Certainly not Zelaya's key ally in the region, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who can say goodbye (for now) to his main objective: ensuring Zelaya remained in power through indefinite reelection so that he could add Honduras as a virtual vassal. His intervention in the crisis, which went from ridiculing Micheletti to threatening to ignite civil war, was as hyperbolic as it was ineffectual; it left him sounding like a clown. Count on Chávez to ignore reality and call this a heroic, historic, glorious triumph of the Revolution, though.

Certainly not the OAS. In a futile attempt to compete with Chávez's maximalist rhetoric, the regional body let its presumed power get ahead of its actual leverage, effectively sidelining itself from the negotiations that eventually brought the crisis to an end. The crisis cemented the organization's reputation as a Presidents' Club more concerned with protecting executive branch prerogatives than with standing up for democratic governance. It was lost on no one, for instance, that its members' outrage over the ouster of a democratically elected president in Honduras came just a couple of months after most of them had demanded the Castro Brothers' dictatorship be readmitted to its ranks. In the end, the region's heavyweights (a.k.a., Brazil) showed that, without U.S. influence, they have little to no leverage.

No. The real winner in this drama is the top diplomat for the key power who quietly, patiently pushed for this settlement all along. It was Hillary Clinton's State Department that first pressed for an agreement along these lines. It was State that asked Costa Rican president Oscar Arias to mediate a deal like this, and it was State that stepped into the breach when the Arias compromise fell apart: They dispatched Assistant Secretary of State for the West Hemisphere, Thomas Shannon, to Tegucigalpa on multiple occasions to help settle the dispute.

It's therefore fitting that, from far off Islamabad, it fell to Hillary Clinton to announce the deal. Hailing the "historic agreement" between the two sides, she went on to stress that “I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that, having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order, overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue.”

Perhaps most importantly, by helping to reinstate a duly elected anti-American president, the deal will be a significant first step in the long, arduous task of re-establishing the U.S.'s democratic bona fides in the region. The entrenched view for many Latin Americans--and not just those on the chavista left--is that the U.S. favors democracy, but only when the people who get elected hew closely to U.S. interests. Undoing that view is an urgent task for the Obama administration, and Secretary Clinton understands that it can only be achieved if the U.S. shows itself willing to stand on principle, even when--especially when--those principles favor regional adversaries.

Similar deals along the same lines have already broken down at the last minute in the past, even if commitments this time appear to be more solid. If this deal leads Honduras away from crisis and toward a legitimate presidential election, if it leads Zelaya and Micheletti to the dustbin of history, then we can count it as Clinton's first substantial achievement in the region.