The press agency Reuters has reported that Zelaya, the President of Honduras who was deposed by a rightist military coup, has finally returned to his home country.(1) This has not wholly been confirmed, but we may assume it true. Zelaya was deposed by the army with the connivance of the Supreme Court of Honduras and the ruling majority of its Congress after the latter accused him of attempting to change the country’s Constitution to allow multiple terms for the Presidency. The Constitution itself, bizarrely, forbids such attempts at altering it. Perhaps this was initially conceived as a democratic measure to prevent the caudillo style of ‘strong man’ government prevalent in the weak countries of Latin America, but the real effect has been precisely the opposite. A Constitution that does not permit its own alteration is not a democratic framework, but a chain that fetters the people, and is equally hateful to progress as is living by a covenant with God. In creating this clause, which is founded in the country’s 1982 Constitution following, its framers irrevokably planted a seed that could not but bloom into a political crisis at some later point.
That is not to say that Zelaya’s actions are themselves to be encouraged. Continue reading “The Prodigal Son Returns to Honduras?”