It’s mainly being looked at through a Hugo Chavez-centric lens, but yesterday, the Honduran military arrested the country’s president, Manuel Zelaya, in Latin America’s first post-Cold War coup. Zelaya was an ally of the Venezuelan leader, and Chavez is already blaming the CIA for having a hand in Zelaya’s ouster.
The reality seems to be that this was more of an internal Honduran political affair. The Huffington Post, in fact, is reporting that the Obama Administration had been trying “for weeks” to avert a coup. So both Chavez and the United States (as well as other bedfellows like Fidel Castro and the Organization for American States) are calling on the military to restore Zelaya to power.
It’s tough to say what is less democratic here, since the immediate cause of the coup was a rather Chavez-like attempt on the part of Zelaya to negate his term limits, but the U.S. State Department is playing the safe card of, you know, opposing military coups and not looking like they’re trying to topple governments in Latin America. Given U.S. history in the region, that’s probably the safe bet.
Here’s a video from China’s CCTV. I was on the lookout for bias, but the most I found was some apparent indignation that Zelaya was “detained while still in his pajamas!”
UPDATE: Brookings’ Kevin Casas-Zamora argues (in The Argument, of course) that, even though he started this whole thing, Manuel Zelaya needs to be reinstated.