Confounding Intelligence

Matters, insists the recently removed president of Honduras, are not as they seem. He is innocent of the charges his country's Supreme Court and the Honduran Congress have levelled against him. He had no intention of prolonging his position as president of the country beyond his four-year mandate, according to the country's Constitution. A democratic election has, after all, resulted in another president-elect, prepared to take the presidency in the new year.

This entire misadventure was simply a misunderstanding.

Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales now proclaims his innocence of the intent levelled against him. Aided, abetted and counselled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian presidents, he presents as one egregiously wronged, an affront to decency and democratic justice. He was "conducting a survey", he claims, to determine whether the public of Honduras felt, like him, that presidents should be permitted to go beyond a single four-year term.

Not to benefit himself, understand, but for "future administrations". Not, heaven forfend, to alter the Constitution against the specifically-stated denials by the country's Supreme Court who judged his actions and his intent to be illegal, but for the good of the nation. And if, perchance, his bid to alter the Constitution had been successful, why then, he might think again, and put himself forward for presidential election once more.

If Venezuela was amenable, why not Honduras?

This absurd explanation was sufficient for the American administration to support this shameless charlatan's bid for extending his rule. And sadly, Canada swallowed it as well as the UN General Assembly and, of course, the OAS. What divine right has the United States, for one, to insist that this man "remains the democratically elected president" of Honduras, when its Supreme Court, and its 'democratically elected' Congress took emphatic and entirely legal within their Constitution, steps to remove him?

The naming of Roberto Micheletti by the Honduran Congress is legal under the Honduran Constitution. And his stint as president is acknowledged as being an interim measure, until January 2010, when the duly elected present-in-waiting takes office. Yet the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by acclamation insisting that world governments not recognize any Honduran administration other than the Honduras-disgraced Zelaya.

It was a Honduran democratic process, entirely legal and entirely justified, given the circumstances, that removed the man from office, as a disgrace to his public office, and a threat to the Honduran Constitution.