It would be tempting for Washington to dismiss Sunday morning's military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya as just a minor banana-republic convulsion. But the Obama Administration doesn't have that luxury. Zelaya is a member of the left-wing club of Latin American leaders — and its honcho, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, has already deemed this a hemispheric crisis that will challenge the new north-south bonhomie Obama established two months ago at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Less than an hour after Honduran military aircraft had whisked Zelaya into apparent forced exile in Costa Rica, Chávez was accusing the CIA of having a hand in his ouster. "The Yanqui empire," he said, "has much to do" with what he called "this troglodyte coup."
President Obama, as he's done this past month with Iran, will have to take special care to convince the hemisphere, if not the world, that the reality is just the opposite. He called Sunday morning on "all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter," insisting the crisis "must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference." It was a good start — as was the announcement by Obama's ambassador in Honduras later in the day that the U.S. will not recognize any government installed to replace Zelaya. Obama needs to remember how sorely the memory of a failed 2002 coup attempt against Chávez still lingers in Latin America — and how convinced the region remains (not without reason) that the Bush Administration backed it. As a result, Obama may find that while he'd like to be the voice of dialogue, Latin leaders of all political stripes are likely to exhort him to come down hard on what Zelaya called the "kidnapping" of a democratically elected president.
That clamor will be especially loud if reports are true that Honduran soldiers also rounded up the ambassadors of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and other leftist Latin governments, drove them to an air-force base and roughed them up before apparently releasing them. It was a haunting reminder of the kind of benighted behavior that marked military takeovers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries — putsches that were too often aided by Washington — until democratic government became the norm after the cold war. And it all but nullifies any justification that Honduras' epauletted brass — as well as the Supreme Court, which reportedly ordered Zelaya's arrest this morning — thought it had for the uprising.
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