Honduran crisis over?

 It seems as though we may have an agreement to allow Zelaya back into office until the election.  Emphasis on “may.”  Congress and the Supreme Court need to approve it, and we still don’t know what limits it will place on Zelaya’s executive authority.  That said, the crisis may be over.

Once the Brazilians signed on to the Secretary General’s declaration that the clock won’t run out with the November 29th presidential election, some sort of resolution became imperative.  Yesterday the U.S. declared that it backed the Brazilian position, and a resolution become inevitable. 

One of the most striking things about the entire imbroglio has been the utter political incompetence of Roberto Micheletti.  Maybe he wasn’t responsible for the idiot decision to put Zelaya on an airplane out of the country instead of placing him under house arrest, but every dumb move after that lands on his desk.  He tried to justify the ouster with a fake letter of resignation from Zelaya.  He imposed and removed and imposed and removed restrictions of civil liberties that he had to know would neither stick nor intimidate the opposition.  He went head-to-head with Brazil for God’s sake, with an empty threat to storm their embassy. 

Honduran politics ain’t beanbag.  How did such a political incompetent ever get anywhere?  I mean, one usually expects politicians to be good at politics, right?

Not that the OAS (or even Brazil) showed itself to be particularly slick.  We’ll know more details later.  Still, I understand why the Brazilian government chose not to be slick.  The OAS, well, I have less sympathy for Insulza. 

Anyway, it does look as though the United States may have brought this mess to an end.  Of course, some idiots seem to think that we should have angrily backed Micheletti, regardless of the whole plane-packing  and opposition-from-rest-of-hemisphere issues.  Thank God that didn’t happen. 

Comments

[pc]

My first reaction was "idiot" is probably a little strong, and then I saw the author. This was not a good issue for conservative ideologues.

What do you think of the all-but-inevitable charge that Obama and Hillary and co. could have brought the whole episode to a close sooner? If he'd sent envoys in August, do you think that the situation would have worked out the same, or were the last several months a necessary period for both sides to worked their way up to an agreement?

[Noel Maurer]

Good question. I honestly don't know. It is possible (maybe even probable) that greater U.S. pressure would have resolved things earlier.

But even if that's true, why would Washington have wanted to put more pressure on? Internationally, we would have run the risk of seeming like a bully. Domestically, conservatives would have screamed just as much. More importantly, there was nothing wrong with simply letting the clock run out with the election, given the ambiguity of the situation and the fact that Micheletti, for all his stupidity, was not looking to set himself up as dictator.

Until the rest of the hemisphere both responded strongly and made it clear that it would not accept letting the clock run out, there was no reason for Washington to act.

Once those two things changed, Washington did act, and strongly.

Won't change the optics, as you point out, but who would bring such an accusation against the United States? Latin American governments seem unlikely to do so, and U.S. conservatives almost certainly won't. No?

[Noel Maurer]

D'oh! Chavistas will accuse the United States of acting too late.

I'm not sure what the proper political response to that should be. The honest one, though, is that there was no reason (even from a Honduran POV) to actively oppose Micheletti until the rest of the hemisphere independently lined up behind that position.