The Power and the Money

Dictatorship rising

In 2011, John Quiggin hypothesized that we were on the verge of eliminating old fashioned tyranny, “in the historical sense of absolute rule by an individual who has seized power, rather than acquiring it by inheritance or election.” 

I can understand his optimism. In the below photo, I am standing atop an abandoned monument to the absolute dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania. There are a lot of former dictatorships in the world.  

But ...

In 2011, in response to a post by John Quiggin, Doug Muir pointed out that there were still quite a few dictatorships left. We defined dictators as (1) a solitary leader, who (2) wields tremendous personal power, and (3) rules in a generally illiberal manner, and (4) will not leave office or surrender power unless compelled by force majeure, and (5) is not a traditional monarch. So we do not include Arab monarchies (like Saudi Arabia), collective one-party states (like Vietnam), illiberal democracies (like Hungary), elected governments formally limited by unelected bodies (like Iran), or military juntas (of which there seem to be none at this moment.) 

Still, back in 2011, you could see a pattern. The New World was free of dictators outside Cuba. Every other dictatorship other than Syria was either in post-colonial Africa or the post-imperial Soviet space. And the Syrian dictatorship, many thought, was not going to be with us for much longer. 

Another but ...

Today that pattern no long exists. Dictatorship is everywhere. Consider the countries that were dictatorships in 2011 and are still dictatorships in 2018: Angola, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Congo Republic, D.R. Congo, Cuba, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

The only two three countries to leave are Gambia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan ... the latter by dint of falling into prolonged civil war. (In comments, J.H. pointed out that Gambia is no longer a dictatorship.)

What about newcomers? Well, we have Fiji, Maldives, Nicaragua and Tanzania, and Togo ... plus Egypt, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. It seems as though China has joined them and Honduras is making a play after the incumbent got the Supreme Court to nonsensically overrule the constitution and then blatantly stole an election. 

In total we have six small newcomers and five major ones. Only two are in sub-Saharan Africa. Two have nuclear weapons.

The world is still more peaceful than ever before. But inasmuch as you believe that said peace is due to the spread of democracy, we may have some frightening years ahead.

I would like to be wrong. Please tell me that I am wrong.

Juan Linz was wrong

 I think I need to spell it out more clearly: Juan Linz was wrong.

(1) There are very few instances of democratic collapse in Latin America which involved partisan gridlock. The only one which clearly fits the bill is the Brazilian coup of 1964 ... except for the fact that Brazil tried a parliamentary system in 1960-63, which did nothing to resolve the country’s underlying political conflicts. Three others fit if you squint hard: the Argentine coup of 1966, the Honduran coup of 2009, and the Chilean coup of 1973. The latter, however, also involves a President who was in open defiance of the Supreme Court as well as Congress.

This is a small subset of the democratic collapses in Latin America. 

(2) Now, Latin America is all presidential regimes, save the 19th-century Brazilian Empire and that brief early-Sixties experiment. But Africa has a mix of presidential and parliamentary systems. And on that continent, both systems are equally-likely to break down.

(3) Postwar Europe has not had a lot of democratic collapses, but there have been a few close calls. They do not fit the Linz formula. Perhaps the coups in Czechoslovakia and Hungary should not count, because they both involved the Soviet Union ... but they nonetheless occurred in parliamentary systems. The collapse of the Fourth French Republic was not a coup per se but it was certainly a constitutional breakdown ... and the Fourth French Republic was a parliamentary system. The 1982 putschists in Spain launched their assault on a parliamentary government. Finally, the 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 coups in Turkey overthrew prime ministers, not elected presidents.

The U.S. may go into a crisis. We may develop a political culture most unsuited to our constitutional structure. Jonathan Chait explores that idea here. But if that causes us to go into crisis, it won’t be because of our constitution per se.

Was there ethnic cleansing in Honduras after the Soccer War?

The Soccer War was not about soccer. Rather, it was about Salvadorean immigration to Honduras. In 1967, the Honduran government began to expropriate Salvadorean properties and deport Salvadorean immigrants. We do not know how many were deported before the fighting began, but the estimates range between tens of thousands and 100,000. El Salvador invaded to stop the expropriations and deportations. In the peace settlement, Honduras agreed to exactly that.

Problem is, we do not know much about Salvadorean immigration to Honduras before the war, nor what happened to the Salvadoreans afterwards.

Here is what we know. The 1961 census recorded 38,002 Salvadoreans, although the IBRD estimated that the number was actually around 100,000 as early as 1950 ... although that number includes Honduran-born children. It is high compared to the census estimate of 20,285 in 1950, but given birthrates it is not that high: a third of the migrants in 1950 had arrived before 1944; a number around 60,000 in 1950 is quite reasonable.

The war happened in July 1969 and was accompanied by a large flow of Salvadoreans back across the border. El Salvador reported that 81,159 fled during 1969. (See page 59.) That number, however, includes Honduran-born children of the immigrants. In August 1969, the Honduran government reported that a special count of Salvadoreans had uncovered 154,453 people. (See the bottom of page 16 here.)

There is a problem: the 1974 census reported that there were only 100,743 foreigners in the country in 1969. Can that number be reconciled with the count of 154,453 Salvadoreans? The answer is yes.

First, we do not know but it is possible that the larger count includes Honduran-born children. The secondary sources that I have seen imply otherwise, but it is easy to imagine how what we would today call an untrue meme could enter the scholarly literature.

Second, there is a timing issue deriving from how the government produced the 1969 estimate five years later. We do not know the number of foreigners in-country in 1974; the government collected the data but never published the aggregate figures. The March 1974 census schedule, however, asked where you had lived five years earlier. (See question 9 on page 2.) The estimate of the number of foreigners living in-country in 1969 comes from that data. In other words, of the number of foreigners living in Honduras in 1974, 100,743 of them had also been there in 1969. The implication is that even if you do not believe that the 154,453 estimate includes Honduran-born children, it is consistent with the 100,743 number as long as you believe that a lot of Salvadoreans left between August 1969 and March 1974.

Did a lot of Salvadoreans leave during that period? As mentioned, we know around 100,000 left around the war. (The same Salvadorean agency estimated that the ultimate figure came to around 130,000.) We also know that there were only 7,733 Salvadoreans living in El Salvador in 1988. (That figure did not include the 13,325 living in refugee camps, according to page 18 here. I visited one of those camps at the time and am now furious with my younger self for losing the negatives.) Now, it is possible that the decrease was due to natural attrition. But the immigrants would have had to have skewed improbably old in 1969 for most of the them to be dead by1988, so it is not likely.

The decrease also might have been due to naturalization. On page 16, this American document implies that the Honduran census figures recorded country of citizenship, not country of birth. That would be a problem, because Honduras has always had liberal naturalization laws for Central Americans. Article 18 of the Constitution of 1957 allowed Central Americans to obtain Honduran citizenship by a simple administrative procedure after one-year in-county as long as their home country reciprocated. Article 16 of the Constitution of 1965 said the same thing. Article 24 of the current Constitution of 1982 changed the wording again but kept the substance. The Salvadorean Constitution of 1962 granted the necessary reciprocation in Article 12. I have not checked the census volumes, but the good people at CEPAL have and their discussion on page 163 implies that the figures refer to place of birth. (I will check; if you hear nothing more then the CEPAL people are right.)

The upshot is that it appears that a lot of Salvadoreans fled Honduras in the five years after the war, despite the putative victory settlement that allowed them to stay.

But there is still a problem with that conclusion: Salvadoreans might have simply started to lie to the census-takers. The accents are close, the racial mixes near-identical: the nations are at least as similar as the United States and English Canada and closer than England and Scotland.

(Side note: Canadians have a very distinctive accent! Which also happens to be identical to the one spoken in Western New York. Which is a quite distinctive accent compared to the rest of America ... but Rob Ford could credibly claim to be from Buffalo. Should masses of desperate Canadians ever need to flee to the United States, they can pretend to be from Erie County.)

At this point I give up for a blog post.

To recap: El Salvador fought a war to stop the deportation of its nationals from its neighbor. It more-or-less won the resulting war. But nevertheless the Salvadorean population in Honduras disappeared in the next decades anyway despite civil war in El Salvador. What we do not know is if that population decided to hide in plain sight or went back home.

It is a question worth investigating.

UPDATE: I significantly edited this a post on Wednesday afternoon.

Heed the ZEDE

 Tom Bell of Chapman University has found a copy of the Honduran charter city enabling legislation. 

According to Tom’s analysis, the legislation is pretty far-reaching. Inside the “Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico” (aka, ZEDE) a presidentially-appointed “Committee on the Adoption of Best Practices” replaces the old Transparency Commission. A “Technical Secretary,” selected by the Committee, runs the place. It then gets to opt-out of the existing Honduran tax system. (I do not if that includes social security taxes.) It also gets tariff-free status.

Not quite a charter city under the original conception: no foreigners running anything, except possibly on the Committee. (I do not know if Committee members or the Technical Secretary have to be Honduran.) Foreign courts can be used, but as far as I can tell only if the parties to the dispute agree.

Nor is opting out of Honduran taxes particularly beneficial: Honduran income tax rates top out at 25%, corporate dividends are expensed and evasion is easy. (To be fair, the Honduran state does not operate very well, so those taxes do not provide as many public goods as in say, Nicaragua.) Even if you believe that low taxes would attract investment and generate growth, we do not know how low taxes will be: there is a requirement that the charter city provide “adequate education, health care, social services, labor rights, and environmental protections” and the cities will need to kick up 12% of their revenue to the central government.

In other words, it seems like a free trade zone in which democratic governance is suspended. (Moreover, a free trade zone in a country that already enjoys free trade with the United States.) That seems not like a recipe for growth. What am I missing? 

Charter cities are back!

It seems as though the Honduran charter cities project is back on. Congress just passed enabling legislation to establish “Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico (ZEDE).”

The previous project collapsed in two stages. First, the foreign members of the Transparency Commission that was supposed to oversee the charter city pulled out. Then the Supreme Court declared the whole thing unconstitutional.

The project also returned in two stages. First, in January 2013, by a vote of 110 to 13, Congress changed the constitution. The text of the new amendments can be found here. (An easier-to-read version can be found here.) Congress changed three articles, but only two had to do with charter cities.

Article 294 got a new sentence aimed right at the Supreme Court: “Notwithstanding the text of the preceeding two paragraphs, the National Congress may create zones subject to special regimes under Article 329 of this Constitution.”

The amendments then watered down Article 329, which gave Congress the right to establish the charter cities. This blog discussed the first version of Article 329 here, in detail. I am annoyed to say appears not to have been linked to by any of the usual suspects. They appear to prefer to operate in an atmosphere of hope and dreams.

Gone is the stuff about treaties and outsourcing executive functions to foreign countries and special trade laws and all. Instead, among the verbiage, you have these four key sentences:

The State may establish zones subject to special regimes which will have judicial personality, be subject to a special fiscal regime, have the power to take on obligations that will not require a guarantee or signature from the State, sign contracts until its goals are achieved over time and across administrations,and enjoy functional and administrative autonomy including the functions, facilities, and obligations that the Constitution and laws confer on municipalities.

The authorities of the zones subject to special regimes have the obligation to adopt national and international best practices.

The law can establish obligatory binding arbitration to resolve conflicts between nature and juridical persons resident inside the areas covered by these regimes.

Courts in zones subject to a special regime may adopt judicial systems and traditions from other parts of the world.

Today they passed the enabling legislation by a vote of 102 to 26. I have not yet been able to find a copy of the new law. (Help is always welcome.) Press reports are a bit vague. Here is Proceso:

The ZEDE will have its own juridical personality and may be created with the goal of creating international financial centers, international logistical centers, autonomous cities, international commercial courts, special investment districts, renewable energy districts, special economic zones, and zones subject to a special judicial system. They also may be special agroindustrial zones, special tourist zones, social mining zones, social forest zones or whatever other unspecified special regime that includes a combination of some of these other regimes.

That really does not say very much.

The special fiscal regime authorizes the ZEDE the right to create its own budget, to impose and collect its own taxes, to determine the fees charged for its services, to sign all types of contracts and agreements until its goals are accomplished, including across various administrations.

That was a little more specific.

The ZEDEs fall under special jurisdiction and shall have their own autonomous and independent courts with exclusive competence in all cases not subject to obligatory arbitration. The courts will be created by the judiciary through the Judicial Council under the supervision of the Technical Secretary and will operate under English common law.

In addition, the internal regulations of the ZEDE will establish that they are extraterritorial tax and tariff zones, distinct from the rest of the national territory.

OK, then.

If the above report is right, then the ZEDEs are little more than a low-tax free-trade-zone with their own special court system. Kind of like Delaware.

I kid. Delaware is inside the American customs area.

I am skeptical of the standard charter city idea. This is a very watered-down version. So ... good luck with that, Honduras. For the rest of you, don’t get too excited.

Dubai in Central America?

 It seems as though Honduras is going ahead with a Charter City. I’ll have a bit to say about that in some later posts, but right now I just want to aggregate some primary source information about what the Honduran legislature  has and has not passed. The basic idea is to create a city where national laws and national institutions do not apply. Instead, new rules can be written on a clean slate, with a government that can outsource and contract functions to any other government (or private entity) that it wants. The result, it is hoped, with be economic growth with political order, a made-to-measure version of Dubai. After all, if an absolute monarchy bordering Saudi Arabia could do it, why can’t anyone?

The first part was a pair of constitutional amendments. Article 304 now allows Congress to select judges (with a two-thirds vote) for special courts in the “Special Development Regions.”

Article 329 meanwhile, now states: “The Special Development Regions shall have their own legal personality, their own public administration, their own legal system that will be approved or disapproved by a simple majority of the national Congress, their own legal exemption in conformity with Article 304 of this Constitution, the power to sign treaties and international agreements concerning trade and cooperation in matters under their control, subject to the ratification of the national Congress … In the fields of budgets, taxes, tax collection, tax administration, as well as the ability to sign contracts that shall pass into the next national administration, and the ability to borrow internally or externally as long as such debts lack any guarantee from the State of Honduras.”

So far, so vague. But on August 23rd, Congress passed the enabling legislation for the special development regions. It added that the regions will have the ability “shall establish their own police and have the power to exercise their function themselves or by delegation. To this effect, they have the power to sign cooperation agreements to strengthen the same with other countries.” More impressively, the statute restricts the ability of the national government to intervene in the special region’s affairs, and states that any “jurisdictional conflicts” will be settled by an arbitration panel of three judges selected from a pre-assigned list of forty people, half selected by Congress, and half selected by the “Transparency Commission” that runs the region. (An unofficial translation of the amendments and the legislation can be found here.)

The Transparency Commission is kind of sort of limited by the “Normative Councils,” elected by the region’s permanent residents (foreign and Honduran). The normative councils set taxes and ratify changes to the region’s governmental organization

Now, Hondurans will be allowed free entry to the region, and any businesses there will need to have at least 90% of their workforce and 85% of their payroll go to Hondurans, except that “both ratios can be modified in exceptional cases determined by the special development region’s regulations.”

Finally, on December 6th, President Porfirio Lobo appointed the Transparency Commission. It consists of five people: two American economics professors, the former head of the INCAE business school in Costa Rica, a former IABD vice-president, and a former Singaporean general.

The boundaries of the region have not yet been established, and although the Economist mentioned that the region will use the Mauritian legal system (and therefore ultimately the British one, since Mauritius, like the Bahamas, still uses the Privy Council as its ultimate court of appeal), I have not yet obtained independent confirmation of that fact.

And there you have it. Before I discuss what I think the implications will be, what do you think? Does this idea have potential, or will it be a failure?

The Nicaraguan exception?

 One story that doesn’t get enough attention has been the collapse of public order in Central America. Why has that happened? Well, there are several possible hypotheses, including the U.S. decision to begin deporting violent felons at the end of their sentences ... but the clear problem is drug trafficking.

Why would drug trafficking suddenly become much worse? The above maps present a suggestion. In 2003, “suspect air activity” was a jumble, mostly over Colombia. As of three years later, in 2006, a lot of “suspect maritime activity” still went directly to Mexico. Over time, that changed. By 2010, Honduras had captured most of the air traffic, while sea traffic migrated to Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Panama. In essence, interdiction efforts by the Mexican government worked, sort of: fully-loaded 727s no longer landed in Sinaloa, and for all the hype over long-distance submarines, boats also stopped coming. Instead, planes diverted to Honduras, and maritime traffic to Panama and Costa Rica (mostly to supply local markets) or Guatemala (where the stuff was then moved overland to Mexico).

Activity in 2011 (see left) shows the pattern even more clearly, but with an interesting gap. Planes fly over Venezuela and land in Honduras, with a few stragglers heading on to Hispaniola or the USVI. Ships head into violence-torn Guatemala and Honduras, where whole tracts are outside the remit of the state.

Also in 2011, lots of maritime traffic heads directly into Costa Rica and Panama. (See right.) 

But where doesn’t it go? Nicaragua. For all his faults, and there are many, Danny Ortega seems to have kept his country from being overrun by drug traffickers. The maps are revealing. (Click on the maps to enlarge.)

Flip the question. Why are ships headed into Costa Rica and Panama? The two countries don’t seem to be a source of transshipments elsewhere. There is nothing flying out, and there is little reason to go to either country if you want to move drugs overland into Mexico, given how easy it is to get to Guatemala and Honduras. But there is a lot of sea traffic into both countries directly from Colombia. If drugs from Guatemala and Honduras could easily pass through Nicaragua, then there wouldn’t be much traffic into the Costa Rica-Panama pair. Back in 2006 neither place showed much direct traffic; the implication being either that a Nicaraguan supply source was cut off, for which there is no evidence, or that as the cocaine markets in those countries grew over the last five years the suppliers were unable to send much through Nicaragua.
 
The question is why Nicaragua is aloof. Is Danny Ortega less corrupt than Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica? That seems unlikely in the extreme. His fellow Bolivarians (and patrons) in Venezuela have no problem with overflights from cocaine-producing regions. Is the Nicaraguan state stronger than the ones in Guatemala and Honduras? That seems possible, but anybody who’s been to Nicaragua will report that generalized public order is little greater than in the countries to its north (in fact, at first glance, it seems rather worse) and quite a bit less than in Costa Rica or Panama. Nonetheless, Nicaragua not only is bypassed by the drug traffic, it seems exempt from the inexorable rise in violent crime that’s plagued the rest of the Isthmus.  The homicide rate in Nicaragua has been bouncing around 13 per 100,000 for several years, up from the early part of the decade, but little different from the 1990s.  It is, in short, a mystery.

Is it just luck, or is Managua doing someting right? Here is a suggestion that it is the country’s socialist legacy what’s to credit. The idea is that community policing and greater community-police connections (established by the Sandinistas during the 1980s) have kept crime low. Here is a suggestion that it might be because Nicaragua sent immigrants to Florida instead of California, where they putatively became less exposed to organized crime. As someone with a lot of family (and time spent) in South Florida, I doubt this. The same article also suggests that it may simply be that the Zetas haven’t gotten to Nicaragua yet. That is possible: some in Nicaragua have the same fear. But it seems unsatisfying, what with trafficking and violence increasing to both the north and the south.

Nicaragua’s non-participation in the drug trade is striking, as is its (relative!) non-violence. But in order to predict whether it will last, we need to know more Any ideas?

The clock, unbeaten

  President Arias of Costa Rica just announced that his government will recognize the results of the Honduran election.  President Obama has been saying the same since the half-collapse of the U.S. attempt to broker a compromise, but now that someone of Arias's stature has signed on, it is pretty much over for Zelaya.  The clock will run out. 

 
The U.S. has handled things as well as could be expected.  For all my expressed (and ironic, for those of you who didn't pick that up) frustration at the lack of American power in Honduras, the truth is that Washington could have been much more muscly and forebearing.  It is a good thing (for the United States) that we were not. 

Brazil, not so much.  When it comes to the politics of energy, investment, and cross-border crime, the Brazilian administration has been very good at speaking softly and carrying a big stick.  When it came to a coup outside the country's normal sphere of influence, reverse it.  It wasn't bad until the declaration that they wouldn't recognize the elections, at which point it became pretty clear that Brasilia did not have much of a plan.  Moral stances are well-and-good, but absolute moral stances can do harm to the position that they are meant to support. 

Add the strange decision to invite the Iranian president for a visit to the Honduran imbroglio, and one has to wonder if Lula really knows how to play this game at the level his country has found itself at.  To be fair, he's been very good when his country's interests have really been at stake, so maybe I should stop complaining. 

The limits of empire

 The world really needs a good game-theoretic model of informal empire.  I suppose Bruce Bueno de Mesquita already has one, but I’d like to see something more specific. 

What’s informal empire?  Well, if “empire” happens whenever one sovereign state exerts its authority over an area previously under a different sovereignty (or none at all) then that empire is “formal” when the imperial state exerts its authority through a bureaucratic chain-of-command that runs from the imperial executive through the local government and down to the person in the street in the new territory.   (Similarly, an empire has formal characteristics if judicial decisions can be appealed upwards to courts in the center, or if the imperial legislature can pass laws for the subordinate territory.) 

Since 1898, the United States has generally eschewed formal empire.  The exceptions are Haiti in 1915-34, the Dominican in 1916-24, Japan in 1945-52, Germany in 1945-55, Okinawa in 1945-72, and Iraq in 2003-04.  (The European Union exercises formal authority over parts of the governments of Bosnia and Kosovo.)  The U.S. has relied on a combination of treaty arrangements, sanction mechanisms, and moral suasion to get its satraps to do what the government of day wants them to do.  The famous SOFAs kinda sorta sometimes formalize quasi-imperial arrangements by giving U.S. troops special privileges inside host countries, including sometimes the right to shoot people, but that is not the same thing as giving the American government the right to give local bureaucrats direct orders under the threat of unemployment or imprisonment.

Sometime informality works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Right now, informal empire has hit its limits in Afghanistan and Honduras.  The U.S. can’t make President Karzai crack down on corruption, form a coalition with Abdullah, or negotiate with the Taliban.  Considering both the number of troops we’ve got running around the country and the number of dollars we pour into its government budget, the lack of influence (let along control) is pretty depressing.  What kind of an empire is that?

In Honduras, the recent agreement between Micheletti and Zelaya appears to have collapsed.  The Honduran legislature has not voted to reinstate Zelaya, and Micheletti is continuing his modus operandi of “what the hell?” by picking a fight over who will lead the interim cabinet until Congress votes.  Washington may be able to pick something up out of this mess, but U.S. leverage is limited.  Aid is suspended and visas were as well until recently; stronger sanctions, meanwhile, will just sock it to a lot of very poor people.  We could give up and run out the clock, which would be the best option if the rest of the hemisphere agreed.  They don’t, so something had to be done, and a few days ago it looked as though the Secretary of State had done it, by brokering a solution.

Only now Micheletti keeps going off the reservation, and there seems to be no quiet easy way to keep him on it.  There is still something a little ridiculous about the lack of American leverage.  What kind of an empire is this?

Not much of one, actually.  To be honest, I suspect that the U.S. will be able to knock some sense into Micheletti.  If pushed, I’d bet on the agreement coming back to life.  But still, the limits of informality are clear.  Even in Afghanistan, let alone Honduras, local political actors are autonomous, and the threats that the U.S. could use to sanction them are not credible. 

Running an informal empire is complicated, and running a formal one is often impossible.  The implications are left as an exercise for the reader. 

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. 

Passing the buck

  Most of you probably know by now that Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras and taken up residence in the Honduran embassy.  That is unexpected, but neither good nor bad.  What is both unexpected and bad is the reaction from the United Nations:  Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon just declared that the U.N. “does not believe that the conditions exist to organize credible elections that will bring peace and stability.” 

The good thing is that Lula is going to meet with President Obama in Pittsburgh to discuss the crisis.  If the U.S. is smart about this, and I have every reason to believe that our government will be, then we will defer to Brasilia.  It is probably true that our beloved hemisphere still needs a hegemon to preserve stability and insure prosperity.  It is also true that it would be better for my beloved country that said hegemon (a) not be the United States; (b) be a country a lot like the United States; and (c) be at the end of the day somewhat less powerful than the United States. 

Considering the low import of this crisis, I would once again recommend exactly the opinion what probably cost me my shot at a State job that I would not have accepted:  the United States does not need a Latin America policy ... as long as Brazil has one.

Then again, I have been blindsided by the possibility that this crisis might outlast the Honduran election.  So I ask you, gentle readers, what should Washington do about the situation in Honduras?  What should Brasilia do?

Waterloo on the Choluteca?

  This is not helpful.  It isn't that I'd expect thoughtful foreign policy analysis from Senator DeMint, but holding up our ambassador to Brazil in order to try to get the Administration to oppose the policy supported by entire rest of the hemisphere does nothing for anybody.  Is there really a domestic return to this sort of posturing?

In my own fair and balanced way, however, I'll add that the absolutist stance recently taken by the Brazilian foreign minister is also not helpful.  Like Senator DeMint's calls to have the U.S. back Micheletti, Celso Amorim's demand for “the unconditional return of the deposed Honduran to the presidency” is also aimed at some domestic audience.  I suppose that the Brazilians should enjoy their ability to make such statements unworried about their international consequences; with the country's relative power growing, and the U.S. slowly withdrawing, they won't have that freedom much longer.

The Honduran government just expelled Venezuelan diplomats.  It's sort of funny, in a way, since those diplomats didn't recognize the Honduran government to begin with.  That, at least, is comic opera.  What is more worrisome is the recent statement by said diplomats that they aren't leaving.  Meanwhile, Zelaya is in Nicaragua making vague threats and stirring up some anger on the part of that country's beleaguered opposition. 

I think the pressure is going to get ratcheted up.  One possible sanction that the U.S. could quietly impose without tanking the Honduran economy would be to suspend business and tourist visas.  Of course, what we don't know is whether the block to a compromise is on Micheletti's side or on Zelaya's ... and without that knowledge, it's hard to figure out the best way forward.

UPDATE, JULY 22:  The recent compromise talks have collapsed.  The Supreme Court appears to have rejected a proposal put forward by a representative of the Micheletti government.  Then again, the attorney-general has issued a 16-page indictment against Manuel “Mel” Zelaya.  Congress has approved a budget of $5.9 billion, eight percent lower than last year.  It counts on $554 million in foreign financing; it isn't clear how the sanctions on Honduras by multilateral lending institutions will affect that, since they seem to be counting on around $100 million in such financing, and access to other private funds is often contingent on lending by the multilaterals. 

For those of you who want a run-down on what to read:  El Heraldo is the conservative newspaper.  Consider these two simultaneous headlines:    “People’s bloc opts for neighborhood protests” versus “Today, great march for patriotism and valor.”  No points for guessing which favors what.  La Tribuna is a little more fair and balanced, although it is also fairly conservative by American standards.  El Tiempo is okay, I'm not thrilled by its coverage. 

An admonition to Micheletti supporters and an admonition to his opponents

  In a previous post, I mentioned Mexico in 1936 and Argentina in 1945 as possible parallels for what the Honduran military was thinking when it exiled President Zelaya instead of simply arresting him.  Steven Taylor mentions a third parallel, a cautionary tale:  Colombia in 1953. 

He raises a good point:  breaking the law in order to save it is always risky and often stupid.  But the specific parallel doesn't apply.  General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla took power in 1953 and established a dictatorship that lasted four years; Roberto Micheletti ascended to the interim presidency with a vote of Congress and seems to be waiting until the November election to hand over power to either Elvin Santos or Porfirio Lobo. 

In other words, the typical historical parallels really don't apply in this situation.  An inability to recognize that is the main reason why the OAS is botching the diplomacy.  (As opposed to the U.S., which is playing it very well ...  but very much in the national interests of the United States and nothing else.)  They keep seeing Pinochet when what they've really got is an unelected Liberal government marking time until they can hand over to an elected government ... preferably also Liberal.  If the OAS diplomats can recognize that, then they can get inside the other guy's head (and his decision loop) and start brokering compromises that will allow everyone to win.

But I have my doubts that insisting on constitutional purity and making absolute demands will accomplish anything.  Demanding that some soldiers be punished, or agreeing that Zelaya should be tried while remaining titular president, those could get somewhere.  But so far that isn't the tack the OAS is taking. 

See also my comment and Steven's response here.  The short version below the fold.

Bad politics at the OAS, updated

  It strikes me that the diplomats trying to reinstall President Zelaya, particularly Secretary General José Miguel Insulza of the Organization of American States, are employing a lousy strategy.  The problem is that Honduras is a still a democracy.  The new government is conducting everything with an eye to the November elections, and unless the diplomats recognize that, they won't succeed.

You can't understand the coup in the context of a military takeover, because the military has not taken over and does not appear to be calling the shots.

The interim government needs to be persuaded that any compromise or backdown on their part will be a vote-winner.  There are a number of ways that could be accomplished.  The government could agree that Zelaya's expulsion was unconstitutional, give one of the military leaders a slap-on-the-wrist, and invite Zelaya back to reassume the presidency while facing trial.  (The same way, say, President Clinton faced trial.)  They could have Zelaya reassume the presidency after issuing a public apology for violating the Supreme Court order.  They could sit down and hammer out a third compromise.

The problem right now is that the OAS seems to have only sticks.  Getting hit with sticks, however, might just increase Liberal support at the polls in November; nationalist sentiment tends to work that way.  Delegitimization is a good prod, but Micheletti can't only be offered a choice between admitting his party is undemocratic and running out the clock, because he'll choose the latter.

Instead, we have Insulza in Tegucigalpa refusing to negotiate with anyone.  The military has admitted that it screwed up in banishing the President, and the OAS can't figure out a way to broker a compromise.  Instead, we've got a tragedy:  the death of an innocent. 

Anatomy of a coup

  The op-ed for Forbes is up. 

 I co-authored it with Steve Haber of Stanford University.  When I say we co-authored, I really mean co-authored:  Steve and I write by continuously tossing ideas past each other, dissecting them to death (and usually rejecting them) scribbling and re-scribbling versions, reading out loud to each other, and then finally finishing.  It's a lot of fun.  

The more expanded analysis is below the fold.  It takes into account some (surprisingly heated!) discussions with colleagues, Steven Taylor's blogging, and several of the comments on this blog.  I don't think I'll be dropping this issue anytime soon, so more comments and questions are highly welcome.

Zelaya’s ouster was legal.  Zelaya broke the constitution by insisting on a referendum.  The legal logic is simple.  Article 5 prohibits consultative referenda that would change Article 374.  Article 374 prohibits any change to Article 373.  Article 373 states that the only way to change the Constitution is to have Congress pass an amendment twice by a 2/3rds vote.  Zelaya’s referendum called for a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution, which means changing Article 373, which can only be done by changing Article 374, which in turn violates Article 5. 

Article 313, in turn, gives the Supreme Court the right to arrest the president and bring him to trial if he commits a crime.  Violating an order of the Supreme Court is, by definition, a crime.  Zelaya refused an order to desist with the referendum.  He disobeyed that, going so far as have supporters break into a warehouse where the ballots were stored.  A Supreme Court justice, therefore, issued an arrest warrant on June 26th and ordered the military to carry it out.

Zelaya’s expulsion was illegal.  According to the New York Times, the military team charged with arresting the President decided at the last minute to bundle him off to Costa Rica instead of holding him under house arrest.  Zelaya should have been suspended from the presidency and detained pending trial by the Supreme Court.  There are no provisions for banishment in the Honduran constitutiton, and even if Congress decided to institute it as a penalty, it could not be applied without due process.   

Zelaya’s ouster was a mistake.  The Supreme Court and the military made three miscalculations.  First, the Supreme Court overestimated the threat from Zelaya’s referendum.  They had already pronounced it unconstitutional and the state had withdrawn most of its support.  The referendum, therefore, would have been a mess, dependent on volunteers, covering only part of the country.  It seems unlikely in the extreme that it would have added to Zelaya’s prestige, even had it passed.  In fact, a case can be made that the referendum would have been so disorganized that Zelaya’s opposition could have used it to further paint him as an authoritarian. 

It would have taken an unprecedented electoral earthquake for another self-proclaimed radical Bolivarian to win the upcoming November election.   The Liberal Party primary in December 2008 elected Elvin Santos as the nominee — and Santos had angrily resigned as Zelaya’s veep in protest against his policies.  Meanwhile, the chief opposition comes from Porfirio Lobo, the candidate of the conservative National Party.  A mismanaged, badly-organized, and illegitimate referendum was unlikely to produce such an earthquake. 

That said, I understand why the Supreme Court decided to enforce the letter of the law.  They waited until it became absolutely clear that Zelaya would defy the court’s order — in the two days before his arrest, Zelaya declared he had no intention of obeying the court and had supporters break into sealed warehouses.  That said, the Supreme Court had no duty to order Zelaya’s arrest.  They could have punted and let him sink himself by holding a wreck of a referendum. 

Zelaya’s expulsion was a bigger (but more understandable) mistake.   The Army worried that if they simply held Zelaya under house arrest, his presence could serve as a lightning rod for the opposition.  The best historical example of what the Army probably had in mind would be Juan Perón in 1945.  The Argentine government arrested Perón on October 9th — the subsequent mass demonstrations provoked when Perón addressed the public from jail (and organized by his wife) forced the government to release him on October 17th.     The Honduran Army had no desire to give Zelaya any chance to emulate Perón and mobilize the street.  They calculated that if they whisked Zelaya out of the country, he would be unable to organize an effective opposition and go quietly into that vast night.  A good historical parallel would be Mexico in 1936.  When Lázaro Cárdenas packed El Jefe Máximo Plutarco Calles off to Los Angeles, that was the end of Calles’s ability to organize against the Mexican government. 

The problem is obvious.  It isn’t 1936 or 1945; it’s 2009.  Modern communications and the platform provided by the OAS and U.N. mean that Zelaya doesn’t need to be in the country to organize opposition.  All he needs to do is show up on television at the United Nations.  Meanwhile, there is no effective way in a country as open as Honduras to prevent Hondurans from receiving his messages.  The fact that the new government appears to be (quite constitutionally, I have to add) in the process of declaring a state of emergency is a sign that bundling Zelaya off is not having the desired effect of limiting the ability of Zelayistas to mobilize.  The streets mobilized despite his expulsion, leaving the new Honduran government with a worst of all worlds:  the expulsion has undercut its legitimacy and prompted international opprobrium, while the domestic opposition is proceeding regardless.  That’s why the interim government has begun to suspend civil liberties.

The Honduran constitution, I have to add, allows Congress to temporarily suspend such liberties.  Thus far, the only legal breach appears to have been Zelaya’s expulsion. 

International opposition was inevitable.  The elected presidents of countries like Brazil and Mexico could not afford to let Hugo Chávez get out in front of the Honduran issue, given the optics of shoving the President into an airplane and exiling him.  They have leftist constituents at home, and they want to keep Chávez looking as illegitimate and silly as possible in the eyes of those constituents.  Opposing the coup for them is good domestic politics.  The presidents of other countries, like Chile and Panama, probably don’t have to worry about Chavista sentiment within their electorates, but considering the history of both places it was unlikely in the extreme that their leaders would stop to parse the legal fine print.  They look at the situation and think “Pinochet!” or “Noriega!”  I find that completely understandable.

In addition, the leaders of much of Latin America have foreign policy reasons to undercut the Bolivarian Republic.  So far, Chávez’s meddling has been rather confused, but he retains the capacity to cause trouble … and with the possibility of oil prices going back up in the next few years, that capacity runs a strong risk of growing.  Hugo wasn’t going to invade Honduras from Nicaragua or anything like that (much as I suspect that he would like to be able to do that) but it is good foreign policy to keep his Bolivarian Alternative from gaining legitimacy as the hemisphere’s voice of democracy.

It is pretty clear that Acting President Roberto Micheletti didn’t expect the international opposition.  Thus the ham-handed declarations that Zelaya had “resigned” or was involved with drugs.  The declarations were so ham-fisted that they wound up making the government look illegitimate, even though Zelaya’s removal and Micheletti’s appointment have taken place within the Constitution. 

Barack Obama is very good at realpolitik.  The Administration got out in front of hemispheric opinion, isolated Hugo Chávez, and bolstered the prestige of the presidents of Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.  At the same time, they’ve left the door open to a negotiated solution, and refrained from using hard sanctions.  U.S. aid to Honduras makes up only 4% of the Honduran government budget, and the military aid that’s been suspended makes up only 4% of that 4%.  Meanwhile, it will take a long time for the suspension of new World Bank loans to effect the situation on the ground — nobody in Honduras is being thrown out of work because a bridge-building project is being discontinued.  Now, the United States could reinstall Zelaya whenever it wanted to by imposing serious trade sanctions (or threatening to invade) but those actions would run the risk of wrecking the Honduran economy and prompting a civil war when angry unemployed people took to the streets.  In short, the Administration is pursuing a supremely cynical policy in the guise of idealism, one designed to bolster the interests of the United States and its citizens. 

Suspending Honduras from the OAS is an effective sanction.    The economic sanctions so far have been small beer.  The border closings by the neighbors are the most serious.  How long can the neighbors keep the border closed?  Honduran imports from the rest of Central America are valued around 10 percent of its GDP, which is high — but none of them are irreplaceable.  In fact, exporters in the rest of the Isthmus are already complaining to their governments.  Conversely, Honduran exports to the rest of Central America come to about 4 percent of GDP.  That is a hit (although new markets can be found for some of the exports) but Micheletti would need to conclude that their economic impact would swing more votes to the National Party than would allowing Zelaya back in. 

In fact, stronger sanctions could backfire in two ways.  One, they could box the Liberals into a corner.  Voters generally don’t like weak governments, and it looks weak to back down in the face of economic pressure.  Two, if strong enough they could cause the government to collapse, as unemployed people take to the streets.  This is why sanctions are often ineffective, and, I would argue, more so against electoral democracies ... which Honduras still is, even with the events of the past week.

Nevertheless, international opposition is a powerful tool.  It acts via three mechanisms.  The first is that denouncing the government at the U.N. and suspending it from the OAS delegitimizes the government.  Delegitimization will create problems for the Liberal Party, which so far has completely “owned” the coup.  That will cost them votes.  It also bolsters the Zelayistas and contributes to the aura of instability, further giving the government an incentive to compromise.  Finally, delegitimization increases investor perceptions of risk, which drives up bond spreads and makes Honduras’s debt more costly to service.  That latter is a sanction, but one that governments can take into account without seeming as weak, simply because they aren’t caving to a personalized outsider but an impersonal economic force. 

The Honduran government will probably hang on.  All Micheletti needs to do is run out the clock until November’s election.  The chances of a Bolivarian resurgence are fairly low.   The seemingly symbolic sanction of suspending the seat at the OAS does in fact impose pain on the Honduran government, but it probably doesn’t impose enough pain to prompt Acting President Roberto Micheletti to reinstate Zelaya.  The only thing that could do that would be a street rebellion inside Honduras — the Honduran security forces are less than a tenth of Iran’s relative to the size of the population, and far less ideologically motivated.  So far, however, a full-scale people power protest seems unlikely.

Micheletti might agree to allow Zelaya to return if the elections are accelerated.  Congress could change the date of the election, which the Constitution doesn’t specify.  All the Constitution specifies is that the president will be inaugurated in January after the election and serve no more than four years.  If Micheletti thinks that the Liberals have a better shot at an early election than they do from toughing it out to November, then they could allow Zelaya back.  Otherwise, it would take a resurgence of street violence, which thus far looks unlikely.  

The importance of form

  The heat is turning up on Honduras’s new government.  Ambassadors are leaving, the borders are closed, World Bank money is gone, as are the U.S. military’s training programs.  Meanwhile, the hemisphere is united against the new government.

There would seem to be three lessons here.  (Note my weasel phrasing!  It isn’t accidental, as all three regular readers know by now.)  First, form matters.  Steven Taylor alluded to this point, and I think he’s correct.  Now, I don’t think that he’s correct about the underlying legality.  The Honduran constitution makes no provision for calling a second constitutional convention.  The Supreme Court, therefore, was completely within reason to tell Zelaya to knock it off with the referendum. 

Nor (given the facts so far) am I sure that Taylor is right as a matter of domestic political strategy.  If it was simply a matter of domestic calculus, a Supreme Court order followed by a quick bundling of the president out of the country might have been the best way to avoid worse conflict.

But Professor Taylor is completely right that hustling the President out of bed at 3am looks terrible. In retrospect, it was certain to produce a bad international reaction, even though I wouldn’t’ve predicted how bad beforehand.  (Hey, I was wrong.  Yes Bernard, I’ll get to Ecuador one of these days.) 

What the Honduran military and Supreme Court and I missed was the reverse Chávez effect.  Once Hugo (inevitably) started tub-thumping and threatening war, the best way for the United States to undercut him was to walk back its initial position and bandwagon on the international opprobrium.  And man, has the United States been successful.  Nobody seems to note that Washington was behind the international curve. 

In short, Honduras has gotten itself into a pickle.  The Supreme Court and military should have thought more about the politics.  The confused messages about resignations and drug-dealing and all the rest did not help; it was propaganda aimed at five-year olds, people who watch Glen Beck, not serious observers.  Now, it would have been damned risky for the Court to issue an order removing and arresting the President, but it would have been much better to have done that (preferably with a concurring Congressional vote ) and hope that Zelaya would be a little slow in mobilizing support, giving you time to bundle him off to Costa Rica after having crossed all the constitutional T’s ... or at least having seemed to. 

Form matters, even when the substance is uncertain and impossible to determine.  Perhaps especially so.  And that goes double in a hemisphere where electoral democracy enjoys the contradictory status of being simultaneously hegemonic and fragile. 

A lack of leverage

  The U.S. really doesn't give a whole lot of aid to Honduras.  Look at the figures, including military aid, from the USAID Greenbook:

That isn't a whole lot of leverage.  Of course, small amounts of aid may make it more likely that they'll be yanked, since such yanking won't wreck the national economy.  But that is the problem with using aid as an instrument of empire.  Contingent bribes — e.g., do good and we will give you more money — are fairly easy to administer.  Contingent threats — do what we want or the cookie jar will be taken away — are a lot harder.  You need to be giving enough money for the recipient to care, but not so much that withdrawing it would cause drastic adjustments that would reverberate back upon the donor. 

To put the above figures in perspective, remittances from the U.S. averaged 16% of GDP over the same period, peaking at 21% in 2006. 

In short, the U.S. didn't have a whole lot of leverage to keep the military-Court combo from ousting President Zelaya, even if the Obama Administration had wanted to.

(Say, should I add a “Honduras” tag to the blog?) 

A dog not barking in Honduras

  The fact that none of my posts about the Honduran coup carry the “Empire” tag is remarkable, considering the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American politics.  Even more remarkable is the idea that should events evolve in such a way as to warrant such a tag (which I consider unlikely), it will probably be either due to either direct meddling by the Alba countries or pressure from Unasur/Río Group/Brazil, not the interference of the United States.  That is quite a shift. 

Of course, the U.S. is still quite hip-joined to Honduras.  There is Soto Cano Air Base.  There is CAFTA.  There is the Millenium Challenge Account.  There are remittances.  Honduras isn’t dollarized, but it is a great case for dollarization, what with remittances above 14% of GDP, a fixed exchange rate and about 24% of all loans denominated in U.S. currency.  And we train its military. 

But Washington isn't leading events.  Sure, maybe it could, but it’s resisting temptation.  (Thank God!)  And that is a very big change. 

More on the Honduran constitution

  Hmm.  My opinion of the coup is moving back towards legal. 

In November 2003, the Honduran government (still under President Maduro) amended the constitution.  (You can find a history of all Honduran constitutional reforms here.)  The reason, ironically, was that they wanted to repeal the traditional absolute immunity held by high government officials in both the executive and legislative branch.  Thus, they repealed Article 205, clause 15, which had read: 

[Congress has the power] To declare if there is cause against the President, presidential delegates, Congressional deputies, Supreme Court justices, members of the National Electoral Tribunal, Chief of the Armed Forces ... and Subdirector of Administrative Probity.

They also altered Article 313, clause 2, as follows:

Original:  [The Supreme Court of Justice has the power] To begin initial proceedings against high state officials, when the National Congress has declared cause.

New:  [The Supreme Court of Justice has the power] To begin initial proceedings against high state officials and deputies.

The implication, I think, is that the Supreme Court has the power to remove officials from office when it determines that they have broken the law.  President Zelaya pretty clearly broke the law when he refused to obey an order from the Supreme Court to call off the referendum, and as I pointed out earlier, the Honduran constitution clearly (if stupidly) bans any consultatory referenda touching on presidential term limits. 

So my new version is:  Zelaya broke the law, the Supreme Court called him on it, and the military took the initiative in enforcing the Court's order.  (Maybe too much initiative.)  That interpretation will depend on how closely the armed forces and the Supreme Court cooperated in the ouster.  (The more it looks like the Court got the ball rolling, the more legal the coup will seem.)  Given the legal fog, the Obama Administration seems to be taking a pitch-perfect tone here.  Some other governments, like Brazil and Colombia, may have walked themselves into positions that they are going to regret. 

Be sure, though, to take my positions with a grain of salt.  I change them as the facts change, and as radically as necessary.  For a subtler discussion of the implications of the coup, go here.                            _{(Photo courtesy of Steven Taylor.)}

UPDATE:  The whole mess is filled with judgment calls.  Zelaya wanted to call a constitutional convention, which he publicly admitted would be intended to change the constitution to allow for re-election.  The referendum question that the Supremes kiboshed, however, only called for a convention, with no other stipulations.  So ... were the Supremes justified?

It all comes back to the problem that a constitution which declares procedural matters to be forever inalterable is a badly-written constitution.

An Andrew Jackson moment

  “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
                                                                        —President Andrew Jackson

 

The common misquote of the above is much sexier:  “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”  Which is not a bad summary of Manuel Zelaya’s throwdown when his country’s Supreme Court told him that he could not go ahead with his planned referendum on repealing term limits.  Zelaya’s “No one will stop Sunday’s vote!” is on a par with Jackson’s aphorism.

In fact, it is worth considering what was in Zelaya’s televised speech on Sunday, after the Honduran Supremes slapped him down.  “The Court of Justice, which makes justice only for the powerful, the bankers and the rich of this country, has declared illegal the people’s participation in a legitimate and constitutional poll ... What a shame for all Hondurans, this Court of Justice!  We’re in the presence of a technical coup d’état.  It’s a swipe at Honduran democracy.  I want to appeal to the commanders of the Armed Forces, the officers and the soldiers.  They are part of the people, they should not play this game of the media elite and economic oligarchy, of a deviant bourgeoisie.”

Why is this significant?  Because Honduras could have avoided this crisis with a better constitution.  The Honduran constitution had two major flaws.  First, it took re-election off the table forever.  I mean that quite literally.  Read: 

Article 5:  Voting in advisory plebiscites is mandatory.  Projects intended to reform Article 374 of this constitution will not be objects of referenda or plebiscites.

Article 373:  The National Congress can alter this Constitution in ordinary session with two-thirds of the votes of all members. 

Article 374:  In no case can be reformed the previous article, this article, the constitutional articles that refer to the form of government, the national territory, the presidential term, the prohibition that no citizen can again be president who has carried out the role under whatever title, and the one referring to those who cannot become president of the republic for the subsequent period.

It is a bad bad idea to declare any procedural part of a constitution to be forever inviolable.  The U.S. constitution does this in respect to the apportionment of the Senate, and that is a bad idea that may yet come back to haunt us. 

The Honduran constitution then added insult to injury with its second flaw:  a complete lack of procedures by which the courts, legislature, or popular opinion could remove a sitting president for breaking the law.  The closest is Articles 321-327, which lay out the responsibility of public servants and organisms that break the law and cause civil damages to individuals, or Article 233, which lays a pretty draconian anticorruption law.  But neither really apply in this situation. 

In short:  Zelaya broke a stupid constitutional clause.  Twice, in fact, first by firing an officer who refused to administer an unconstitutional referendum and second by proceeding with the referendum anyway.  Congress could not do anything.  At that point the increasingly-angry military, acting in concert with the Supreme Court, decided to extraconstitutionally remove the president from office. 

I do not like it.  But I am also not sure that this is an abrogation of democracy either.  Judging by their statements, the Obama Administration is equally torn:  they would like Zelaya back, but they aren’t going to wade into another country’s Andrew Jackson moment. 

What do you think?

P.S.  I am not a fan of Andrew Jackson.

Coup in Honduras, updated

  It seems as though the Honduran military just deposed President Manuel Zelaya.   That said, this is not a stereotypical South American coup:  Congress appears to have ratified the Army's action, and a civilian is taking control. 

In an unsurprisingly pointless move, Hugo Chávez put his military on alert.  (Or at least he says that he did; it would not surprise me to find that no official orders have been given.)  He went on to declare, “The people of Alba are in combat, because this does not end today.”  The leaders of the Alternative Bolivariana have condemned the “coup” and its leaders will hold a summit in Nicaragua today. 

But Alba's declaration is less political than it sounds.  Unasur, the OAS, and the United States have all condemned the ouster, although the U.S. is not calling for Zelaya to be reinstated.   

I don't know why the military moved before Congress did, or why the new leaders are going through this charade of pretending that Zelaya resigned before he actually resigned.  But I do know that Zelaya ignored a Supreme Court ruling on June 25th that ordered him to reinstate the general that he had fired because the general refused to use to the Army to organize an unofficial referendum on abolishing term limits.  (I met Zelaya's predecessor about a year ago;  he didn't have a lot of good to say about his successor.)   I'll add here that Article 374 of the Honduran constitution, stupidly, declares that the ban on re-election can not be reformed in any way, no how, forever and ever.  A dumb provision, however, is still a provision. 

For what it's worth, my guess is that the coup will stand.  There is enough of a fig leaf of legality about it to allow OAS governments to walk back their condemnation.  Now, escalating street protests could force the U.S. to pressure the Honduran congress into reversing its vote.  But if I had to bet right now, based on what I've heard from Tegucigalpa, Zelaya will remain out of power.

UPDATE:  The legality of the situation is shakier than the above implies.  Hell, it seems to be blatantly illegal, a good old-fashioned coup.  Why have I changed my mind?  Well, as far as I can figure, the Honduran constitution has no provision for the congressional removal of the president.  The closest provisions are as follows:

Article 205, Section 12:  [Congress has the power to] accept the constitutional oath of office of the elected President and Vice-president of the republic, and other appointees they select; grant them permissions and accept or reject thier resignations and fill vacancies in the case of the complete absence of one of them;

Article 205, Section 20:  [Congress has the power to] approve or disapprove the admistrative conduct of the executive branch;

Article 242:  In the case of a temporary absence of the the President of the Republic, the Vice-president will carry out the functions of the President.  Should the Presidency be permanently vacant, the Vice-president will exercise the powers of the executive branch for the remainder of the constitutional term.  Should the Vice-presidency also be vacant, the powers of the executive branch will be exercised by the president of the National Congress.

Thus, the need to declare that President Zelaya had “resigned” before giving the executive powers over to Roberto Micheletti.  (The office of Vice-president is currently vacant, so having the power pass to Micheletti is kosher ... it's the whole removing of Zelaya what appears to be illegal.)  Note that while Micheletti says that everything is constitutional, this article from the Honduran press cites no clauses or precedents. 

The whole thing looks much shakier upon skimming the text of the constitution in the light of day, or least what passes for it in this, the fourth straight week of rain in New England.  I'll go ahead and call it a “coup.”  It's chances of standing are less than I originally believed.