Understanding Honduras

Filed in archive Latin News on July 13, 2009

Honduras was much in the news for a while, and now it seems to have faded from the interests of the major news outlets.

There was a coup in Honduras. Or not, depending on your perspective and who you listen to...

MoJo wrote a short piece they tagged as "Honduras for dummies." They seem to think it was a coup. The President allegedly tried to enact some constitutional changes that would have allowed him to stay in office longer - to be reelected. The accusation is that he tried to change permanent sections of the Honduran constitution. Evidently an effort to make those changes constitutes a criminal act in Honduras. So the legislature there and the court system got involved and he was eventually arrested and removed from office. By the military.

Was it a coup? The Campaign for Liberty has an excellent (and detailed) description of the situation. It looks like a coup partly because the military was involved. Honduras doesn't have an version of our Posse Comitatus in place; but neither did we for the first 102 years of our existence as a country.

It will be an interesting story to follow.


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