Constitutional crisis in Honduras ends with President forcefully overthrown

[tangaroa]

The Honduran military, on the request of the Supreme Court, seized President Manuel Zelaya and exiled him from the country. Later, Congress officially dismissed Zelaya from his job (report in Spanish, use the Fish to translate) and appointed another person from Zelaya's Liberal Party as the new President.

Zelaya had ordered a referendum on whether the public accepted the idea of changing the Constitution. This was widely seen as an attempt by Zelaya to justify his staying in office beyond the one term allowed by the Constitution. The military, which is tasked with conducting elections, determined this referendum to be beyond Zelaya's legal authority (as did the Attorney General's office) and refused to cooperate, so Zelaya fired the military's chief of staff, who the Supreme Court ordered reinstated. Zelaya refused the Court's order, and then came the recent events.

In any other country when the military deposes an elected President it is called a coup d'etat. In Honduras we have the unique situation where all other existing legal authorities have apparently blessed the military's actions or at least been of the same mind. Did a coup just happen or was one just prevented? Perhaps both interpretations are correct.

The military also killed Cesar Ham, the leader of the left-wing Democratic Unification Party, who had earlier warned of a coup. Reports differ depending on the source's politics on whether this was a deliberate assassination or if Ham had resisted arrest, and there have not been enough reports to confirm that this even happened or who else the military may have sought to seize in addition to Zelaya.

More information is at wikipedia which is a good enough source in the absence of detailed reporting. A good collection of links is at the blog of Fausta Wertz, who is a conservative but she's doing the job.