Military coup in Honduras
Sigh... And just a few days before an election.
From Reuters:
Army overthrows Honduras president
The Honduran army ousted and exiled leftist President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday in Central America's first military coup since the Cold War, triggered by his bid to make it legal to seek another term in office.
U.S. President Barack Obama and the European Union expressed deep concern after troops came for Zelaya, an ally of socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, around dawn and took him away from his residence. He was whisked away to Costa Rica.
Zelaya, who took office in 2006 and is limited by the constitution to a four-year term that ends in early 2010, had angered the army, courts and Congress by pushing for an unofficial public vote on Sunday to gauge support for his plan to hold a November referendum on allowing presidential re-election.
Speaking on Venezuelan state television, Chavez -- who has long championed the left in Latin America -- said he had put his troops on alert over the Honduran coup and would do everything necessary to abort the coup against his close ally.
A bit more:
Honduras, an impoverished coffee, textile and banana exporter with a population of 7 million, had been politically stable since the end of military rule in the early 1980s. But Zelaya has moved the country further left since taking power. His push to change the constitution drove a rift between his office and the nation's other institutions.
A former businessman who sports a cowboy hat and thick mustache, Zelaya fired military chief Gen. Romeo Vasquez last week for refusing to help him run Sunday's unofficial survey on extending the four-year term limit on Honduran presidents.
Reading between the lines here, the government had been politically stable since the military ceded power in the 1980's. Zelaya is a crony of Chavez who wanted to amend the Honduran constitution to remove the four-year term limit. I am guessing that this will be a good thing for the Honduran people -- we will see when the next election takes place.
There are a lot of updates over at
Venezuelanalysis -- worth checking out as the reports from the media are contradictory -- Zelaya resigns, he doesn't resign, power and phones are being cut off...
A lot of the people involved studied at the USA's School of the Americas (now called the
Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation).
School of the America's Watch has the story and some photos.
Posted by DaveH at June 28, 2009 4:29 PM