If it walks like a coup, and quacks like a coup…

28 June 2009

I love the way people are quibbling over the word “coup” to describe the coup in Honduras — and still trying to convince the world that somehow this “action” was something within the parameters of the Honduran Constitution.

Which I seriously doubt any of these commentators have ever read. Neither have I, but I did look up the document in the U.S. Army/Library of Congress “county studies” series. Here’s what it says about the Honduran Constitution, and the role of the President and the military:

“The government is republican, democratic and representative” and “composed of three branches: legislative, executive and judicial, which are complementary, independent, and not subordinate to each other.” In practice, however, the executive branch has dominated the other two branches of government. Article 2, which states that sovereignty originates in the people, also includes a provision new to the 1982 constitution that labels the supplanting of popular sovereignty and the usurping of power as “crimes of treason against the fatherland.”

Whether this means holding a referendum without court approval is supplanting of popular sovereignty… or whether using the courts to order the army to stop a referendum is usurping of power…might we worth discussing, but somehow, I don’t think anyone has bothered to actually read the document before they started writing. And, certainly, nothing allows the courts to call out the Army to force the President out of the country.

As set forth in Article 272, the armed forces are to be an “essentially professional, apolitical, obedient, and nondeliberative national institution”; in practice, however, the Honduran military essentially has enjoyed autonomy vis-à-vis civilian authority since 1957. The president retains the title of general commander over the armed forces, as provided in Article 245 (16). Orders given by the president to the armed forces, through its commander in chief, must be obeyed and executed, as provided in Article 278.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think it says that a judge can issue an order to break into the President’s house at 6 in the morning, hustle him on a plane and send him out of the country still in his pajamas. Nor anything about the judges sending the Army out on the streets to attack dissidents… or foreign ambassadors.

And, as in this BBC photo… it sure looks like a coup to me: