The Coup That Wasn’t

Some of you may remember that after then Honduran President Zelaya was removed from office I wrote a piece about Obama’s motivations for joining with Chavez and others in calling for Zelaya to be returned to power. Although the main point of the article was an analysis of Obama’s decision-making - that I stand by - I also completely muffed the Honduran story. I went so far as to call Zelaya’s removal a "coup".

As many of you proved in your well-researched comments: I was wrong.

I believed that Zelaya had complied with the Supreme Court ruling that he not hold a binding referendum to illegally change the Honduran Constitution. I was wrong about that. I believe that Zelaya hadn’t yet violated the Honduran Constitution. I was wrong about that. And I believed that Zelaya’s removal was premature because he hadn’t yet taken steps to attempt to seize power. As it turns out I was wrong about that one too.

Slashdot.org, an extremely popular technology news aggregation site, has often published stories about alleged voter fraud in American elections using computer-based voting machines. They have a story up today about these types of machines in Honduras.

It turns out that Honduran authorities have seized 45 of them. Although there was no election on June 28th because the military kicked Zelaya out of the country and cancelled it, these machines each contain "certified" voting records. And - not surprisingly - every single one indicates that Zelaya won the referendum overwhelmingly.

Turns out that the Honduran military wasn’t jumping the gun after all. They were just in time.
Given this most recent news, there can be no excuse for President Obama or any American official to continue to support Zelaya’s attempts to retake control of the country. It’s not even enough for us to remain silent. America’s responsibility in this affair is to either directly support the Honduran people or - at a minimum - call for silence from Chavez, Castro, and others while the Hondurans perform their national duty of protecting the Constitution.

If the story is going to involve a people standing up to protect rule of law in their country and kick out a wannabe dictator I don’t mind being wrong at all.