Thread: Honduran coup tests Obama in Latin America

Honduran coup tests Obama in Latin America


Anthony Boadle
Reuters
July 7th, 2009


Deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya got his strongest endorsement yet from President Barack Obama on Tuesday as the exiled leftist leader returned to Washington to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The United States has joined Latin America in unanimously condemning the military coup in the banana-producing country that ran Zelaya out of town in his pajamas ten days ago.

But Washington has been reluctant to slap sanctions on Honduras and cut off U.S. aid. Instead it is cautiously looking for a negotiated and peaceful resolution to a crisis that looks like a win-win situation for the United States’ main adversary in the hemisphere, Venezuela’s leftist leader Hugo Chavez.

Zelaya, a wealthy rancher who turned left in office and signed on to Chavez’s growing anti-U.S. coalition, is hardly the best poster boy for democracy. His moves to follow Chavez’s example and extend presidential term limits in Honduras sparked the political crisis in which the Honduran Supreme Court, with the backing of Congress, ordered the army to oust the president.

After years of U.S. neglect of Latin America during the Bush administration, Obama is trying to improve relations with the region and cannot afford to be on the wrong side of a crisis that many Latin Americans see as a flashback to a dark era of military dictatorships supported by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.



The Pentagon suspended military cooperation with Honduras last week, even though it maintains a U.S. base in the Central American country that served as an “unsinkable aircraft carrierâ€

It seems to me that this Zelaya sought to subvert the constitution of Honduras and that subsequently he was removed for doing so. That is what ought to happen in Democracies where leaders do that when they were not even elected to do chaneg the Constitution and I would hope it would happen here if a President tried to change our Constitution is an unlawful way. So for Obama to have that position about the deposed Zelaya is rather curious and actually very very frightening. I feel i am in a twilight zone here. What is happening?