Mader Blog

[An edited version of this post appears at The Mark.]

It’s been a month since the Honduran army, at the direction of the Supreme Court, removed President Manuel Zelaya from office, and a month since—on its own initiative—the army sent Zelaya into exile. A month of demonstrations and failed negotiations have not changed the status quo: the interim government of President Roberto Micheletti remains in power, isolated from its central American neighbors and ostracized on the world stage; and Zelaya remains determined to resume office, unrepentant of his illegal activity and encouraged by the support of world leaders from Obama to Chavez.

My June 30 article expressing support for Zelaya’s ouster has recently come in for criticism, with Dalhousie’s Prof. Robert Huish accusing me of (in essence) ignoring military brutality and the best interests of the Honduran people by supporting a conservative army coup. Though Prof. Huish makes a powerful emotional case, I stand by my position. Let me explain why.

Huish paints a disturbing picture of the state of affairs in Honduras. “[T]anks, tear gas, death threats, hired assassins, and soldiers keen to beat the poor to a pulp” have left the Honduran people “bleed[ing] in the streets,” he tells us. Those who protest are “sent . . . to early graves.” No right-thinking person could support such a brutal, repressive military regime, he suggests—and he’s right. If Honduras really were like that, I’d be the first to condemn the regime.

But Huish cites no specific source for his allegations, and reports from reputable human rights organizations paint a very different picture—one that is troubling enough without embellishment or exaggeration. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have identified acts of intimidation by the Honduran military, including the arrest of pro-Zelaya demonstrators and the obstruction of certain media outlets. And, of course, the military appears to have been responsible for the tragic and unnecessary death of Isi Obed Murillo, a fifteen-year-old boy shot during a pro-Zelaya protest at the Tegucigalpa airport on July 5. These repressive tactics are deplorable, and supporters of Honduran democracy should be the first to demand investigation and accountability.

Yet these documented military excesses and abuses, deplorable though they are, do not turn Honduras into the police state Huish describes. The restrictions on Honduran liberty imposed since Zelaya’s removal—the curfews, travel restrictions, and media controls—are all related to the current crisis; they are not designed to install a military government. I want to make clear that I think the measures are unwise and unnecessary. But it is important to remember that Zelaya has called for a mutiny in the army ranks, and that Hugo Chavez has repeatedly threatened invasion. Pierre Trudeau suspended civil liberties and rolled in the tanks in far less pressing circumstances during the October Crisis of 1970; and while that decision was (and remains) deeply controversial, it did not turn Canada into a military dictatorship.

So it is in Honduras. The military may well be operating with an unnecessarily heavy fist, and to the degree that it is, it is to be condemned. But the military has not overthrown the civilian government. Elections are expected to take place on schedule this fall, and I have seen no reports of army interference with that democratic process. In fact, interim President Micheletti has repeatedly indicated the government’s willingness to advance the date of elections so that Hondurans can choose a new government untainted by the Zelaya ouster; but Zelaya has rejected the compromise because it will not return him to office. The point is that whether elections happen now or in the fall, they will happen; and I will gladly join Prof. Huish in calling on the new government to investigate the military’s conduct during the crisis and to punish unnecessary excesses.

Yet that does not seem to satisfy Prof. Huish, who admits that he’d just as soon see the Honduran constitution swept aside—provided it is Zelaya who does the sweeping. “Honduras’s constitution has let down its nobodies,” he writes, those who are “too poor to see the doctor, too marginalized to go to school, and many [of whom] are doomed to die before the age of five because of dirty water, closed up hospitals, and preventable diseases.” Huish may well be right; I don’t pretend to be an expert on Honduran domestic politics. And as a political platform, his call for social justice has great appeal. But Huish seems to argue that the existence of social inequalities delegitimizes the entire existing constitutional order and (therefore) justifies Zelaya’s conduct in attempting an illegal constitutional change.

I disagree. The extent to which positive social rights should be constitutionally and legally protected is an age-old question in the democratic world. Different societies have come to different conclusions at different times, and the debate rages on—consider, for instance, our American neighbours’ current debate over health care. A country should be free to choose where on that continuum it falls at any given time, and that choice should take place at the ballot. As long, therefore, as all members of society have the right to participate in elections, we outside observers should respect—and support—the underlying constitutional order.

That doesn’t mean we should be content with the political status quo. It may be, as Prof. Huish suggests, that poor Hondurans face practical obstacles to voting; if that’s so, then I certainly would support efforts to remove those obstacles by, for instance, providing public transportation to polling stations and ensuring that citizens are not punished by employers for taking time off to vote. But it is dangerous to suggest, as Huish seems to suggest, that a failure to pass certain social policies delegitimizes a constitutional government. If that were so, then every election would become a civil war, as every losing party would claim an entitlement to overthrow the constitution in order to enact its own preferred policies. Democracy cannot survive in such conditions.

We need not be content with the politics of the Honduran government; but we must be content with the rule of law. By all means, let us agitate for policy changes that expand social rights; but let us do so in the context of elections. The alternative—rejection of the constitutional order and imposition of certain policies by strong-arm and fiat—is lawlessness. It puts power in the hands of the strongest, or the meanest, or the least compromising. It encourages violence and retribution. And it is, after all, how we got here in the first place.

The neatest thing about being a conservative is that I learn new things about myself all the time. Viz.: turns out I support military brutality. Who knew!

Prof. Huish makes two interesting points; I’ll respond here (and, hopefully, at The Mark) next week.

If the Canadian and other world governments had been as thoughtful in approaching the situation in Honduras as they have been hasty in casting judgment upon it, we wouldn’t be in the midst of a terrible foreign-policy blunder. But here we are. How did we get here?

The events leading up to the present crisis are largely undisputed. Manuel Zelaya became president in 2006, elected to a single four-year term ending in January 2010. The Honduran Constitution barred Zelaya from running for re-election, and as his term neared an end he sought to overcome the constitutional bar by amending the Constitution. But the Constitution prohibits amendment of the presidential term limit; so Zelaya sought to organize a constitutional convention that would re-write the rules. But the Constitution also prevented the president from calling such a convention, giving that power to the Congress. And the Congress said no.

Undeterred, Zelaya announced that he would go ahead with a referendum on the question of the term limit, and ordered ballots from Venezuela. The matter proceeded to the Supreme Court, which declared the referendum illegal. Zelaya demanded that the army assist him in administering the referendum (as they would, apparently, in the normal course of things); the army’s commanding officer refused, citing the Supreme Court’s decision; and Zelaya promptly fired him. When the Supreme Court ordered his reinstatement, Zelaya either refused or immediately fired him again.

The army, having refused to administer the referendum, seized the ballots that had been delivered from Venezuela. Zelaya then organized a mob and broke into the military installation where the ballots were held, seized them, and began to distribute them.

This is where things get a bit hazy. The army arrested Zelaya at his home. It is unclear whether they acted at the express order of Congress or the Supreme Court; what is clear, however, is that they acted with the approval of both. It is also unclear whether Zelaya chose to leave the country rather than face justice in Honduras. In any case, as soon as he was deposed, the Congress initiated proceedings, under the Constitution, to ensure the succession of power. An interim president was chosen to preside until the regularly scheduled elections choose a new leader this fall. Zelaya’s ouster has popular support, including the support of Zelaya’s own party in Congress. And at no time has the Honduran military attempted to seize any political power.

Yet almost immediately upon Zelaya’s removal, world governments — including the Canadian and American governments — leapt to Zelaya’s defense, condemning his removal as a “coup” and warning against the intervention of the Honduran military in domestic political affairs.

This is a mistake. The confrontation between the three branches of the Honduran Republic is a Honduran constitutional crisis, and it is up to Honduras to settle the matter. And that is what they have done. There is no question, and it cannot reasonably be doubted, that Zelaya broke the law – not only in pursuing his referendum in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision, but in refusing to reinstall the army commander and in seizing the referendum ballots from the military. The other branches were entirely within their rights – their rights under the Honduran constitution, and their inalienable rights as adjudged by a candid world – to order Zelaya’s arrest.

Now it may be, as some have suggested, that the precise mechanism by which Zelaya was arrested and removed from office was extra-constitutional. I’d have thought that the Supreme Court of Honduras would be the arbiter of that; or that at the least the people of Honduras, not the presidents of Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States, should be the ones to decide. But if the removal was extra-constitutional, Zelaya’s restoration is not the remedy. Indeed, having so clearly broken the law, Zelaya — if he is dissatisfied with exile — should face prosecution in Honduras.

Instead, world governments have refused to recognize the duly constituted government of Honduras and have demanded Zelaya’s restoration. Why?

I’ve heard various explanations, none of them compelling. It has been suggested — and I’m given to understand that this is the prevailing attitude at PMO and DFAIT — that Zelaya is the democratically elected president, and that he should remain in that position until a new president is elected in the fall. And it has been suggested that approval of the ouster would encourage a return to the military coups that were common in Central and South America in the twentieth century.

These explanations suffer a common fault: they are based on superficial assumptions about the state of democracy in Honduras, and in Latin America more generally. The explanations are related: we ought to support the democratically elected president as against the military, the thinking goes, because the president is a tribune of the people while the army is a reactionary force that would subvert democracy.

But in fact the exact opposite is true: there is absolutely no sign, hint, or indication that the Honduran military seeks political power, while Zelaya has openly sought to expand his political power beyond the bounds of the constitution in defiance of the laws of the land and the dictates of the political and judicial branches. Nor does the point hold more broadly: while military coups posed a great threat to Latin American democracy in the middle years of the twentieth century, the greater threat in the past two decades has come from elected presidents — elected presidents who use quasi-constitutional mechanisms like “non-binding plebiscites” to accrete power from the other branches, gradually eroding constitutional checks and balances to the point that once-functioning democracies like Venezuela have become the fiefdoms of megalomaniac despots like the “democratically elected” Hugo Chavez. The knee-jerk preference for a democratically elected president over the military may be laudable in the abstract but it is faulty in practice.

And that’s the great risk of our meddling — for meddling is what it is, and make no mistake. The risk — aside from our betrayal of the Honduran people in the moment of their triumph — is that Zelaya, once returned, will succeed in subverting the constitution and installing himself as president for another term. Backed by the threat of a Venezuelan invasion, and with the tacit approval of the United States and the United Nations, he certainly would be a fool not to try. And then what?

Zelaya says he has no intention of serving another term as president. The proof will be in the pudding. By rights he should be in prison. Thanks to the hasty and ill-advised meddling of the Canadian, American, and other world governments, he may return to office until year’s end. In January he will either stay or go. If he goes, then his temporary ouster will at least have put a stop to his illegal schemes.

If he stays, then we will have been complicit in the installation of a despot.

[Continue Reading]