2009 Honduran constitutional crisis

Based on Wikipedia: 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis

At 5:30 in the morning on June 28, 2009, approximately one hundred Honduran soldiers stormed the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa. They dragged President Manuel Zelaya from his bed, still in his pajamas, put him on a plane, and flew him to Costa Rica. By breakfast, Honduras had a new president. The deposed leader learned of his replacement while watching television from exile.

This wasn't a banana republic cliché from the 1950s. This happened in the twenty-first century, to a democratically elected president, in a country that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid. And the strangest part? Almost everyone in the Honduran government—the Supreme Court, the Congress, the military, even members of Zelaya's own party—insisted it wasn't a coup at all. They called it constitutional succession.

The rest of the world disagreed.

A Country Divided by Wealth

To understand what happened in Honduras, you first need to understand what Honduras is. Two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty line. Unemployment hovers around twenty-eight percent. The country has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in Latin America, which is saying something, because Latin America has the most unequal wealth distribution of any region on Earth.

Here's what that inequality looks like in numbers: the poorest ten percent of Hondurans receive just 1.2 percent of the country's wealth. The richest ten percent collect forty-two percent. About one-fifth of the entire national economy comes from remittances—money sent home by Hondurans working abroad, usually in the United States, often illegally, scraping together wages to wire back to families who can't find work at home.

This is the context in which Manuel Zelaya became president in 2006. He was an unlikely populist. Born into a wealthy family, he made his money in timber and cattle ranching before entering politics. He ran as the candidate of the Liberal Party, one of Honduras's two traditional power brokers, and his election was unremarkable—just another establishment figure taking his turn at the top.

Then something unexpected happened. Zelaya started governing like he actually wanted to help poor people.

The Sixty Percent Raise

The policy that most alarmed Honduras's elite was simple and direct: Zelaya raised the minimum wage by sixty percent. Overnight, the daily minimum went from about six dollars to roughly nine dollars and sixty cents.

For workers earning minimum wage, this was transformative. For business owners accustomed to paying poverty wages, it was an outrage. But Zelaya wasn't finished. He forged an alliance with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, joining the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, known by its Spanish acronym ALBA. This was a regional trade bloc explicitly designed to counter American economic influence in Latin America.

Chávez was, at that time, the boogeyman of the Latin American right. He had rewritten Venezuela's constitution to consolidate power and remove presidential term limits. He nationalized industries. He gave fiery speeches denouncing American imperialism. To Honduras's wealthy elite, watching their president buddy up with Chávez felt like watching their country slip toward socialism.

Zelaya even proposed converting the Soto Cano Air Base—which hosts American military forces—into a civilian airport, partly funded by Venezuelan money. To understand how provocative this was, imagine a Mexican president proposing to shut down a U.S. military installation and replace it with infrastructure funded by China. The symbolism was impossible to miss.

The Fourth Ballot Box

In November 2008, Zelaya announced something that would ultimately cost him his presidency. He wanted to add a fourth ballot box to the upcoming 2009 elections.

This requires some explanation. In Honduran elections, voters typically face three ballot boxes: one for president, one for Congress, and one for local offices. Zelaya wanted to add a fourth question: Should Honduras convene a National Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution?

On its face, this seems democratic—asking the people whether they want to revise their fundamental governing document. But Honduras's constitution, written in 1982 during a period of military rule and brutal repression of leftists, contains some unusual provisions. Certain articles are "entrenched," meaning they cannot be modified under any circumstances. Among these untouchable provisions is the ban on presidential re-election.

Honduras doesn't just limit presidents to two terms, like the United States. It limits them to one. A single four-year term, and you're done forever. Article 239 goes further: it states that any president who even attempts to change this rule "shall immediately cease" to hold office. Not after an impeachment trial. Not after a court ruling. Immediately.

Zelaya's opponents saw his constitutional referendum as the first step toward removing this term limit, following the playbook Chávez had used in Venezuela. Zelaya denied any intention to seek re-election—his term was ending in January 2010 anyway, and the election to replace him was already scheduled for November 2009. But his critics didn't believe him.

The Legal Battle

Honduras's institutions lined up against the referendum with remarkable unanimity. The Attorney General's office warned Zelaya he would face criminal charges if he proceeded. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal ruled the poll illegal. A lower court issued an injunction, which the Supreme Court upheld. Congress passed a resolution warning Zelaya to change course.

Then Congress went further. On June 23, 2009—just five days before the scheduled vote—they passed a new law prohibiting any official polls or referendums within 180 days of a general election. This made Zelaya's June 28 poll retroactively illegal, though Zelaya argued a law passed after an event was scheduled couldn't criminalize that event.

Even the Bar Association weighed in. Honduras's lawyers unanimously agreed that Zelaya was violating the law. They recommended that government officials refuse to follow his orders.

Zelaya pressed forward anyway. He published executive decrees attempting to legalize the referendum. When the military refused to distribute ballot materials—citing the Supreme Court's ruling that the poll was illegal—Zelaya fired the head of the military command, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez. The defense minister and the heads of the army, navy, and air force all resigned in protest. The Supreme Court ruled that General Velásquez must be reinstated.

The confrontation was now total. Every branch of government opposed the president. The president refused to back down.

The Night of the Soldiers

What happened next depends entirely on who you ask.

The Honduran Supreme Court had, according to its own account, issued a secret arrest warrant for Zelaya on June 26. The charge was treason against the fatherland. The military was ordered to execute the warrant. In the early hours of June 28—the very day the referendum was supposed to occur—soldiers surrounded the presidential residence.

They did not, however, arrest Zelaya. They did not bring him before a court. They put him on a plane to Costa Rica while he was still in his pajamas. By the time he landed, the National Congress had convened an emergency session. A letter of resignation, supposedly from Zelaya, was read aloud. No one objected. The Congress voted to remove him from office and install Roberto Micheletti, the President of Congress and next in the presidential line of succession, as interim president.

There was just one problem: Zelaya said he never wrote that letter. He called it a forgery.

Micheletti declared a "state of exception" on July 1, suspending civil liberties and imposing curfews. The new government insisted this was all perfectly constitutional—that Zelaya had forfeited his office the moment he attempted to change the term-limit provisions, and that the military had simply enforced the constitution.

The international community was not convinced.

The World Responds

The United Nations condemned the removal of Zelaya as a military coup. The Organization of American States, commonly known as the OAS, did the same and suspended Honduras's membership—a dramatic step the organization rarely takes. The European Union joined the chorus of condemnation. Even the United States, which had historically supported regime changes in Latin America when they served American interests, called for Zelaya's restoration.

Domestically, opinion was divided. Demonstrations erupted on both sides. Zelaya's supporters, drawn largely from labor unions and poor communities, demanded his return. His opponents, including much of the business community and middle class, celebrated his removal and insisted the country had been saved from a would-be dictator.

The truth was messier than either side admitted. Zelaya had clearly violated court orders and pushed forward with an illegal referendum. But removing an elected president at gunpoint and flying him out of the country in his pajamas is not a constitutional procedure, no matter how many judges approved it after the fact. The Honduran constitution had no provision for what had happened. There was no legal process for removing a sitting president.

The Long Stalemate

Costa Rican President Óscar Arias attempted to mediate. He proposed what became known as the San José Accord: Zelaya would return to the presidency with reduced powers, there would be political amnesty for both sides, and elections would be moved up by a month. The United States supported this compromise.

It went nowhere. Micheletti's government refused to reinstate Zelaya. Zelaya refused to accept elections held under what he considered an illegitimate government. International support for the scheduled November elections remained thin, with many countries refusing to recognize any outcome.

Then Zelaya did something unexpected. On September 21, 2009—nearly three months after his removal—he appeared at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. He had somehow returned to Honduras in secret, after several previous attempts had been blocked.

The Micheletti government responded by declaring a state of emergency and suspending five constitutional rights for forty-five days: personal liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, habeas corpus, and freedom of assembly. The irony was impossible to miss. The government that claimed to be protecting the constitution was now suspending fundamental constitutional rights.

These suspensions were officially revoked on October 19, 2009, but the damage to Honduras's international standing was done.

The Election That Ended Nothing

The November 29 elections went forward despite everything. Zelaya urged a boycott. International observers were scarce. The legitimacy of any result was already compromised.

Porfirio Lobo, from the conservative National Party, won the presidency. Initial reports claimed turnout around sixty percent—higher than usual, which the new government cited as evidence of democratic legitimacy. Those figures were later revised downward to forty-nine percent. Zelaya disputed even that number.

Some of Zelaya's supporters ended their daily protests after Congress voted to keep him out of office. The movement had lost. Democracy had technically been preserved—elections happened, a new president was inaugurated—but something had broken.

The Quiet Resolution

Porfirio Lobo took office on January 27, 2010, seven months after the crisis began. As part of the transition, a deal was struck: Zelaya would be allowed to leave the Brazilian embassy, where he had been trapped for months, and go into exile in the Dominican Republic. He would not be prosecuted. He would not be restored to power. He would simply go away.

And so he did. The constitutional crisis ended not with resolution but with exhaustion. No one was held accountable for the coup—if it was a coup. No one was punished for the constitutional violations—whichever side committed them. Honduras moved on, still poor, still unequal, still divided.

What It All Meant

The 2009 Honduran crisis sits uncomfortably in the history of Latin American coups. It wasn't a classic military takeover—the generals didn't seize power for themselves. It wasn't purely constitutional—presidents don't get legally removed by being put on planes in their pajamas. It was something in between, a hybrid event that exposed the limits of constitutional government in a deeply unequal society.

Víctor Meza, who served as Zelaya's interior minister, offered this assessment: "We underestimated the conservatism of the Honduran political class and the military leadership." The impression that had stuck, he said, was that Zelaya had taken a dangerous turn to the left, and therefore the interests of the powerful were in jeopardy.

John Donaghy of Caritas, the Catholic relief organization, put it more bluntly: "The real conflict in Honduras is between the poor and wealthy. It's a system that has kept the poor down for years."

Zelaya himself had argued that Honduras's poverty stemmed from a constitution written during brutal repression, designed to protect powerful families and entrench existing inequalities. Whether or not that's true, his attempt to challenge that constitution ended with soldiers at his door.

The wealthy saw a would-be dictator copying Hugo Chávez's playbook. The poor saw an ally being punished for raising their wages. Both interpretations contain truth. Neither captures the whole picture.

Perhaps the most telling detail is this: some of the people who protested in support of Zelaya had never voted for him. They weren't defending the man. They were defending the principle that elected leaders shouldn't be removed by soldiers, regardless of what courts say afterward. Once you accept that principle can be violated, you've accepted that democracy is conditional—that it applies only when the right people win.

Honduras in 2009 was a test case for how constitutional democracy handles an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. The president refused to obey the courts. The courts had no way to enforce their rulings except through the military. The military had no constitutional authority to remove the president. Everyone claimed to be defending the constitution. Everyone was probably violating it.

In the end, the side with the guns won. That's usually how it goes.