Honduran Politics and the Chavez Factor

Interviewee Christopher Samatini; Interviewer Bernard Gwertzman
CFR.org
October 30, 2009

Christoper Sabatini, an expert on Latin America, says the apparent resolution to the four-month political crisis in Honduras amounts to a "breakthrough" for the Obama administration, whose officials helped forge a compromise. A deal that would allow for the Honduran Congress to restore Manuel Zelaya to the presidency for three more months would overcome what Sabatini called "tragic silliness" displayed by the two sides in the conflict. Sabatini says Zelaya's opportunism, which caused him to seek an alliance with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and fears about a Chavez-inspired system in Honduras contributed to the prolongation of the political crisis.

There seems to have been a breakthrough in the Honduran political stalemate stemming from the June 28 coup d'état in which President Manuel Zelaya was forced to leave the country. Can you summarize how this deal was worked out?

It's been somewhat of a rollercoaster ride and hasn't lacked for colorful characters and very colorful moments. Basically, most people awoke on the morning of June 28 to realize that President Zelaya--who had changed course halfway through his term and become an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and a member of the Bolivarian Alliance that Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro lead--had been removed in the dead of night in his pajamas at gunpoint by army troops and had been put on a plane and taken to Costa Rica. This immediately met with the condemnation of the international community as a coup d'état. But when people started to look a little more deeply at all that had happened, Zelaya clearly had overstepped the constitutional boundaries of his own power, had been pushing for reelection [when the constitution forbids this], and before that what was becoming apparent was an institutional train-wreck in Honduras between the Congress and Zelaya.

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