To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

On Sun­day morn­ing, masked, armed sol­diers dis­armed the pres­i­den­tial guard at the of­fi­cial palace in Tegu­ci­gal­pa, Hon­duras, woke Pres­i­dent Manuel Ze­laya at gun­point and bun­dled him off to the air­port for a flight to Cos­ta Ri­ca in his py­ja­mas, where he has been sum­mar­i­ly ex­iled. Lat­er that day, the Hon­duran Con­gress vot­ed him out of of­fice in ab­sen­tia, re­plac­ing him with the Con­gress pres­i­dent, Rober­to Michelet­ti.

Con­dem­na­tion of the ac­tion came swift­ly. T&T's Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning im­me­di­ate­ly de­nounced the over­throw of the elect­ed Pres­i­dent in a state­ment on Sun­day, call­ing for the im­me­di­ate resti­tu­tion of the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly elect­ed Hon­duran leader. US Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma called on the Hon­duran po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship to re­spect de­mo­c­ra­t­ic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Char­ter. Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez de­cried the ac­tion as "a troglodyte act of the 19th cen­tu­ry."

Pres­i­dent Chavez is known to be a sup­port­er of the pop­ulist poli­cies of Mr Ze­laya, and the in­ci­dent that led to the Hon­duran Pres­i­dent's ouster has some telling par­al­lels in re­cent Venezue­lan his­to­ry. At the core of the armed ac­tion against the elect­ed Pres­i­dent of Hon­duras is a sim­mer­ing is­sue that has been fer­ment­ing for months in the Cen­tral Amer­i­can na­tion. Pres­i­dent Ze­laya has been try­ing to change the Hon­duran con­sti­tu­tion through a non-bind­ing ref­er­en­dum to ex­tend term lim­its on the pres­i­den­cy. The Hon­duran Supreme Court, its elec­toral of­fi­cials and Om­buds­man have re­ject­ed the ref­er­en­dum, de­scrib­ing it as il­le­gal. The Hon­duran Pres­i­dent then or­dered the army to dis­trib­ute bal­lots for the ref­er­en­dum, a re­quire­ment of the elec­toral process in that coun­try. The army's chief, Romeo V�squez Vel�squez, re­fused the or­der and was fired. The heads of the navy and air force re­signed in quick suc­ces­sion.

On the eve of the open­ing of polls for the ref­er­en­dum, sol­diers, act­ing on as yet unan­nounced au­thor­i­ty, took ac­tion. The al­most uni­ver­sal con­dem­na­tion of the ac­tion is un­sur­pris­ing in the re­gion, where armed over­throw of elect­ed gov­ern­ments re­mains an all too re­cent and bit­ter mem­o­ry for many coun­tries. When Pres­i­dent Chavez pur­sued the scrap­ping of term lim­its for his pres­i­den­cy in 2007, the na­tion­al ref­er­en­dum was put to the pop­u­la­tion af­ter sig­nif­i­cant de­bate and de­feat­ed by a vote of 51 per cent. In Feb­ru­ary, how­ev­er, Chavez won an­oth­er ref­er­en­dum on the mat­ter and can now con­tin­ue to face the elec­torate with­out con­sti­tu­tion­al re­straint. It can be ar­gued that in Venezuela term lim­its have been scrapped with the en­dorse­ment of a ma­jor­i­ty of the peo­ple.

The re­ac­tion to Pres­i­dent Ze­laya's ouster may be couched in terms of elec­toral democ­ra­cy in the first world, but in Latin Amer­i­ca, the strained re­la­tions be­tween pop­ulist pres­i­dents who ap­peal to a large base of vot­ers and the in­ter­ests of in­sti­tu­tions and cor­po­ra­tions who rose to suc­cess in an era of far more con­strained pop­u­lar par­tic­i­pa­tion in the elec­toral process re­mains a vi­tal and on­go­ing fac­tor in the pol­i­tics and gov­er­nance of these na­tions. For much of the 20th cen­tu­ry, na­tions in Latin Amer­i­ca strug­gled with this bal­ance, which in far too many cas­es veered in favour of the pow­er­ful and well armed. Many of these mil­i­tary in­cur­sions end­ed up hav­ing a neg­a­tive net ef­fect on the eco­nom­ic growth of not on­ly the coun­tries that en­dured them, but the un­set­tled na­ture of these regimes af­fect­ed neigh­bour­ing na­tions, who were their clos­est and most nat­ur­al trad­ing part­ners.

Hon­duras is bound­ed to its west by Guatemala and El Sal­vador and to the south­east by Nicaragua, and the idea of mil­i­tary force pre­vail­ing over the elect­ed will of the peo­ple must be deeply un­set­tling to these na­tions as well as to oth­ers in the re­gion. The blood­less but nonethe­less vi­o­lent re­moval of the elect­ed Hon­duran Pres­i­dent was a rash, des­per­ate ac­tion in re­sponse to an is­sue that should have been man­aged through the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic in­stru­ments avail­able to the Hon­duran Con­gress. Sun­day morn­ing's in­va­sion of the pres­i­den­tial palace was a fail­ure in the Hon­duran po­lit­i­cal process that favoured the im­me­di­ate strength of the mil­i­tary sword over the last­ing pow­er of the leg­isla­tive pen.