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Rare hemisphere unity in assailing Honduran Coup

(New York Times)
Updated: 2009-06-29 11:11

BOGOTA, Colombia: With their condemnation on Sunday of the coup ousting President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, governments in the Western Hemisphere from across the ideological spectrum found a rare issue around which they could swiftly arrive at unity.

At the same time, from the Obama administration's measured response to the reaction of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who put his military on alert over an apparent affront to the Venezuelan ambassador in Honduras, the responses both revealed and disguised fissures over different forms of democratic government that are taking root in the region.

On the one side are countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, where voters have given much greater power to their populist presidents, partly by allowing them to extend their time in office and sometimes eroding the function of Congress and the Supreme Court, institutions portrayed as allies of the old oligarchy. On the other side are nations of varying ideological hues, including Brazil, Latin America's rising power, where resilient institutions have allowed for more diversity of participants in politics, ruling out the so-called participatory democracy that Mr. Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has been eager to promote in the region.

Mr. Zelaya himself pushed this tension with institutions to its limits in his clash with Honduras's judiciary last week over his call for a referendum intended to clear the way for term limits to be eased. On Sunday, the Supreme Court of Honduras said that the military had acted in accordance with the Constitution to remove Mr. Zelaya.

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But such legalistic arguments failed to dissuade governments from condemning the coup, particularly in countries like Chile, Argentina and Brazil, where bitter memories linger over human rights abuses by military officials that toppled civilian rulers in the 1960s and 1970s.

"The notion of military involvement in such an ouster is an anathema in much of the region," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington that focuses on Latin America.

Condemnations of the coup quickly united governments as ideologically disparate as Havana's Communist governments and conservative Colombia, a close ally of the United States. "It is a legal obligation to defend democracy in Honduras," said Augusto Ramírez Ocampo, a former foreign minister of Colombia.

And while governments in the region may reject military ousters much more easily than, say, the civilian demonstrations that forced democratically elected leaders to resign earlier this decade in Argentina and Bolivia, the Obama administration has also shifted the way in which Washington reacts to such events.

By Sunday night, officials in Washington said they had spoken with Mr. Zelaya and were working for his return to power in Honduras, despite relations with Mr. Zelaya that had recently turned colder because of the inclusion of Honduras in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, a leftist political alliance led by Venezuela.

The effort to engage Mr. Zelaya differed from Washington's initial response to Venezuela's brief coup in April 2002, when the Bush administration blamed Mr. Chavez for his own downfall and denied knowing about the planning of the coup, despite the revelation later that the Central Intelligence Agency knew developments about the plot in Caracas on the eve of its execution.

After his return to power following the 48-hour coup, Mr. Chavez demonized the Bush administration, and the ties that frayed with the United States are only now being repaired in part by the decision last week by Washington and Caracas to return ambassadors to embassies from which they had been expelled.