Zelaya’s Return to Honduras Darkens Honduran Democracy

Ray Walser / June 02, 2011

On May 28, former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya returned home nearly two years after the June 2009 actions that removed him from office for violations of the national constitution.

Accompanied by Venezuela’s foreign minister Nicholas Maduro and delivered via Air Hugo Chavez, Zelaya was greeted by thousands of cheering admirers. He returned under a deal struck with current Honduran President Porfirio Lobo on May 22. The agreement was brokered with the assistance of the unlikely combination of democratic Colombia and authoritarian Venezuela, and it enjoys the blessing of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Zelaya’s return paved the way for Honduras’s readmission to the Organization of American States (OAS) on June 1.

The Los Angeles Times’s reaction is typical of the sunny U.S. press reaction to Zelaya’s return, calling the event important “because it demonstrates the region’s intolerance for military coups, which were once common in Latin America.” Friends of the Latin America left are again casting Zelaya as a national hero. Very few are able to recall Zelaya’s serial violations of checks and balances and constitutional order or the destabilizing support tendered by Hugo Chavez’s petro-political slush fund. (more…)