HONDURAS LEADS THE WAY
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=513847
Americas: If anything proved there never was a crisis in Honduras, it was the peaceful, purposeful, high-participation election there Sunday. Against all odds, Hondurans showed the way out with democracy.
Elections in distressed countries are often dramatic events — think of El Salvador’s long voting lines in 1994 at the end of its civil war as voters desperately sought democracy, or the bullets Colombians defied from FARC terrorists who vowed to mow down voters in 2002, not to mention the spectacular elation of purple fingers at the first elections in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Honduras’ election Sunday wasn’t like that.
Although the turnout, at 62%, was 20% higher than the last election, it was an otherwise calm, serious, almost boring event. European Parliament observers called it transparent. It above all illustrated that elections are nothing new to Hondurans, whose constitutional democracy has been firmly in place since 1982.
Still, this was no ordinary election. It was a blazing star lighting the way out of a complicated crisis completely created from abroad.
Leaders of leftist and anti-democratic states led by Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela besieged the tiny country with a legitimacy crisis for five months, falsely painting the ordinary workings of the Honduran constitution as a military coup. They demanded the return of ex-president Mel Zelaya, a Chavez ally thrown out on June 28 for illegally trying to extend his term, prohibited by the constitution.
They got their pals in the Organization of American States to suspend the tiny country as a nondemocracy and make it a pariah.
They also created chaos: smuggling in the exiled Zelaya to Brazil’s embassy in Tegucigalpa to whip up mobs in orgies of looting.
The pro-Zelaya groups set off trash can bombs and fired Russian grenade launchers at the Supreme Court ahead of the election to discourage participation. They’re also suspected of killing relatives of Honduran officials in the government to create terror.
The U.S. went along with this for a couple of months, cutting $30 million in aid, pulling visas of Honduran officials, instituting a travel advisory, and threatening to not recognize the Nov. 29 election. It sided with the tyrannical multilateralism led by Hugo Chavez, not with the democracy of small, struggling nations.
But not even U.S. sanctions could break the Hondurans.
To win back goodwill, they accepted an Oct. 30 deal brokered by the U.S. and Costa Rica that left open the possibility Zelaya might be allowed to return, but left the decision to Honduran government.
But their biggest impact came in the calm, serious election they held, devoid of any big scandals. This is what democracies do.
The U.S., to its credit, is now supporting it. That realism began earlier than generally reported, with an Aug. 4 State Department letter to Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. Our sources say it was crafted by then-Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, who laid out the U.S. role: a “negotiated solution” (signed Oct. 30), no “crippling economic sanctions” and a strategy “not based on supporting any particular politician or individual.”
Mixed signals from the National Security Council and political appointees at State obscured the U.S. shift. But now the U.S. is about to to endorse the election as fair, in essence reversing its earlier stance.
That’s realism and it’s accompanied by a growing stream of nations also embracing it: Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Peru, followed by Germany, Japan, France, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
There also are signals that Spain, Russia and China will follow, and a State Department source says they are expected aboard soon.
It all leaves Chavez and his Bolivarian vassal states, as well as Brazil and Argentina, politically isolated. As they vow not to accept the election without Zelaya, they’re watching their allies peel away.
Now, they face diplomatic irrelevance. After all, if they can’t accept Honduras’ democratic election with a completely new president in the most peaceful of democratic transitions, then what do they want? And whose election is it?
All of this is happening for one reason: Hondurans insisted on standing by their constitution — both in ousting Zelaya and bringing in a new president to replace him. They should be proud for standing up for the rule of law, a rare thing these days. And they did it their way, with great courage that will be remembered.
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