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If this is what a golpe de estado (a coup d'état) is like, I don't really see what all the fuss is about. Frankly, what transpired yesterday in Honduras couldn't have been much more peaceful. Not a single shot was fired, nor was anyone killed (although there were rumors for quite some time that the mother of now ex-president Manuel Zelaya had a heart attack when she was kidnapped). I did see some soldiers here in Jutilcalpa - about ten walking down a street in the morning and an army truck pass by my street in the evening, but there was no trouble at all. Honestly, it could have been a lot worse.
And it certainly seemed like it was going to be worse when I first woke up. At about 7AM Sunday morning, I passed by my landlord's brother on the way to the bathroom, who informed me of the coup. "It's really bad," he said. "The military kidnapped the president and his family, and they've cut out all electricity to prevent any new signals from reaching countries outside of Honduras. We have no power, and we can't make calls to the U.S. The scary part is that Hugo Chavez pledged support for President Zelaya ("Mel"), and said he would send Venezuelan troops if Mel needed help." The next person I spoke with informed me that Venezuelan troops and Nicaraguan troops had already arrived in Guatemala and were at the Honduran Border, preparing to enter. "No, no, they're in Nicaragua," my friend Ricardo corrected me. "And there have already been skirmishes on the border." His daugther argued that we don't really know for sure because "they're" not letting us hear any news (the infamous "they") "It's a conspiracy!" she exclaimed.
Thus is the nature of trying to parse through what the hell is happening in Honduras. (Though I'm not sure it's any different than in the U.S. where you also get a dozen different versions of the story depending on who you talk to). It turned out by the end of the day that there was no organizing of Nicaraguan or Venezuelan forces, nor had their been any skirmishes. Moreover, The lapse in electricity could have been attributed to normal everyday occurences (it is not uncommon to lose power here in Juticalpa), rather than a conspiracy to prevent news from getting out. I had no problem using my cell phone to call the U.S. yesterday. But such is human nature - we love to over-dramaticize to the utmost extreme.
The route by which we arrived at the present state is not entirely clear to me for several reasons: 1) It has a lot to do with the cuarta urna (a referendum), which nobody seems to understand, and 2) the two major newspapers seem to be very partisan and polar opposites of each other (one leaning to the left and in support of the ex-President, the other in opposition of Mel and in support of the coup), and very little of what people talk about on the street seems to correspond with what I read in the papers (admittedly, I've only just begun reading the newspapers and neither my comprehension of the papers nor of conversations is 100% yet). But I will try my best to recreate my understanding of what transpired.
It seems that everything can be traced back to the Cuarta Urna, which was a referendum that ex-President Manuel Zelaya proposed, and would have been voted on yesterday had the coup not taken place. When I first started hearing about the Cuarta Urna, all anybody said about it was that Mel was trying to change the constitution to allow the president to continue for more than one term. People were describing it as a vote for "yes, the president should be allowed more than one term," or "no, he should not." All the people who describe the cuarta urna in this matter were diametrically opposed to it, and thought it was a violation of the consititution in an attempt by Mel to become a dictator.
Upon talking with some people who were in favor of it, it seemed that there were more components to the Cuarta Urna than just this one questions - there were components that would increase the ability for the departments within Honduras to self-govern, and there were components to help alleviate poverty. Still, tons of people labeled the referendum "illegal" and "unconstitutional." I didn't really understand why people thought this, even if the referendum were only about whether or not the president should be allowed to run for more than one term. After all, Mel wasn't changing the constitution - he was putting up a referendum to allow the people to decide whether they wanted to change the constitution. And if the majority of people were opposed to it, what were they afraid of? If they all voted "no" the referendum would fail. Plus, Mel is so unpopular that it seems virtually impossible that he would be reelected even if the referendum did pass. But when I asked my friends who opposed the Cuarta Urna if they were going to vote against it, they said they weren't going to vote. They gave various reasons; some said voting was dangerous while others said they were pissed the referendum was even taking place and were boycotting voting for that reason.
From what I've subsuquently read about the Cuarta Urna, it seems that it was more of a pole than anything else. The pole would have asked Hondurans if they wanted to have a measure placed on the ballot in November to vote on whether or not they wanted the creating of a Consitutional Assembly. Should Sunday's pole and the subsuquent ballot measure in November succeeded, then the Consititutional Assembly would have had the option of modifying the consitution to allow the President to run for more than one term. All in all, this seems to me to be a very long, drawn-out, multi-step, democratic process. I don't know if the process contradicts anything in Honduras's constitution, but on the surface at least it looked benign. Yet virtually every organization in Honduras labeled the pole as illegal and unconstitutional.
Last week, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled the Cuarta Urna illegal, and demanded that it not be carried out. General Romeo Vásquez, head of the Honduran Armed Forces, said the military would see to it that the Court's ruling would be carried out, and Mel responded by removing him from his post on Tuesday. This was subsuquently followed by a Supreme Court ruling on Friday to reinstate General Vásquez and open an investigative committee to look at President Zelaya´s actions. Friday's paper hailed both the military and the President of Congress Roberto Micheletti for acting to restore order while avoiding a golpe de estado, while at the same time portending an ominous future for Mel. In fact, as I sat here this morning reading Friday's paper it seems the paper was all but describing the certainty of a coup.
Sunday morning, Mel was captured and deported to Costa Rica. Everyone called it a Golpe de Estado, but was it? When we got power back, CNN en español featured a debate on this very topic. The argument to the contrary sounded pretty reasonable: there had been a judicial order to deport Mel, and the military followed the judicial order. The military at no point had control over the government; they simply emptied the post of president so that the National Congress could go about the legitimate process of choosing a new president. The Honduran Consititution says that said in the absence of the president, the President of Congress would become president. Congress voted nearly unanimously to remove Mel from the office of President, and then voted to appoint Roberto Micheletti as the new president. Again, I don't know what the Honduran Constitution says about impeaching a president, but at least on the surface it appears that there were some democratic processes followed (of course I don't know if they were legitimate processes).
So we have a new president, a still-functioning government that never gave up power to the military, and no signs of the violence or oppression that is normally associated with coups. The only sign that anything is different is that the new president has requested a curfew (un toque de queda) of 9PM for last night and tonight. So while repeating the disclaimer that I don't have much confidence in my ability to grasp what is going on, for the moment I'm still of the opinion that if this is what a coup is like they're not so bad after all (this is obviously tongue in cheek). ¡Vamos a ver!
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