Obama's Honduras Problem
The United States and Latin America After the Coup
Article Summary and Author Biography
After the June ousting of President José Manuel Zelaya, Honduras has become a test of the Obama administration's posture toward the whole of Latin America.
MICHAEL SHIFTER is Vice President for Policy at the Inter-American Dialogue and Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
Snapshot
Since the June 2009 military coup, violence and human rights abuses have spiked in Honduras. In some ways Washington is responsible for this dismal turn by backing the country's new leaders and sending more military aid. Fixing the problem will be tough, but it is possible.
For the better part of June, Honduras was near the bottom of the list of concerns when the United States looked south. But then, on June 28, the country's military forcibly removed José Manuel Zelaya, a democratically elected president. To be sure, Zelaya had attempted an unconstitutional power grab, but whatever questions may surround his rule, Zelaya's ouster by the armed forces bore the features of a coup, an all-too-familiar scene in Latin American history.
No one could have predicted that Honduras, the third-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, would test the Obama administration's posture toward Latin America, its commitment to multilateralism, and its overarching policy on democracy.
So far, the United States has steered a cautious middle course that seeks to combine taking a principled stand with relying on more pragmatic negotiation. It is a characteristic Obama approach -- but in this case it risks conveying weakness and ambivalence to all sides. The question, then, is whether the Obama administration could have reduced the risk by being more actively engaged. Perhaps. A less punitive stance toward the de facto government at the outset of the crisis may have better prepared a path for restoring democratic rule.
The international reaction to the coup was swift and harsh, with unanimous condemnation followed by calls from the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) to return Zelaya to power. It was an instructive lesson to the Obama administration about the evolution of the region's political dynamic, as it revealed the delicate balance between military and political interests throughout the region -- not to mention the forceful role of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
The Honduras crisis touched a nerve throughout much of Latin America, but not because, as some analysts have contended, Zelaya's ouster was the region's first coup in several decades. (The removal of Ecuadorian President Jamil Mahuad in 2000 met the definition, although it elicited virtually no regional response.) Rather, the image of 200 military officials taking an elected president out of the country in the middle of the night set off political alarms for leaders in other Latin American states.
