Posted on 06/29/2009 9:48:18 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Hondurans awoke Monday in a country with two presidents. One, adjusting to his second day of exile, is still recognized by countries around the world. The other, who enjoys the strong backing of all of Honduras's major institutions, has quickly become a diplomatic pariah.
Roberto Micheletti, a 63-year-old businessman and stalwart Liberal Party member, took the oath of office Sunday to replace another Liberal politician, Manuel Zelaya, 56, a rich rancher who was deposed in a predawn raid that day and exiled to Costa Rica.
Mr. Zelaya is a tall man who sports a trademark Stetson. He studied industrial engineering, but dropped out of college to manage his family's ranches. He served in Congress before running for president in 2006 on a populist platform that blasted the rich and promised to fight crime, corruption and poverty.
Once in power, Mr. Zelaya, who said he had been ignored by the U.S., made a sharp left turn, becoming a close ally and confidant of Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro.
Mr. Chávez sent tractors and provided Honduras with financing to buy Venezuelan oil. Last year, as Mr. Chávez promised to supply $300 million in aid to Honduras, Mr. Zelaya made the country a member of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas, known by its Spanish acronym ALBA, a trade and political bloc formed by Mr. Chávez to counter U.S. influence in the region. Honduras also has been a member of the U.S.-sponsored Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, since 2005.
Mr. Zelaya's friendships with Mr. Chávez, Mr. Castro, and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, coupled with his apparent desire to continue in office by rewriting the constitution --
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
...but ther O’zer embraced. Imagine that!
Castro killed 100K; Chavez is in bed with narcos subverting Colombia; Hussein is the DICK [Doper Islamo Commie Kenyan], and Daniel Ortega is a serial daughter-raper.
And they all think Manuel Zelaya is a lollipop.
No, they only have one President, one was impeached and a new one was installed, legally and according to the Honduran constitution. The WSJ should know better than to write this type of crap!
I haven't seen that on the threads I have read...
Honduras Tense After Army Coup
"...Congress voted Sunday to remove Mr. Zelaya, and appointed Mr. Micheletti as the new chief executive, as is mandated by the constitution..."
I used the term because it is shorter than going through the whole spiel about how the other two branches of the Honduran Government voted to throw the guy out because he was trying to set himself up as dictator by overturning the term limits of the country. The Supreme court of Honduras said he had to leave the office. He refused, the Supreme court then ordered the army to arrest him. Before all this occurred he illegally fired high ranking members of the military,illegally, they were restored to their jobs during the vote to toss the pres out.
Now, do you see why I said impeached? They went by their legal proceedings and did what they had to do to protect their country from a communist wannabe dictator, what ever the name it serves the same purpose as our impeachment. Most countries have legal means of diposing of a leader. This was not a coup, it was a legal action taken by the government as a whole, not just the army.
On post #9, diposing = deposing
Great links - I think I finally have a decent geo-political grasp of the situation in Honduras.
To wit: the Hondurans have definitely shown themselves to have some serious stones; and our president is not just useless - he is dangerous.
Coup in Honduras - Correction: This is NOT a coup
"The Honduran Congress has officially ousted Zelaya “for repeated violations to the Constitution” and has now named the Congress President Roberto Micheletti as president of the country."
Complete timeline of events at that site.
I agree on both counts. The Honduran congress, SC and military all deserve a big round of applause for standing up for the rule of law in a really nasty situation. They will need to stay strong too with a psychotic Marxist POTUS joining the forces of darkness against them.
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12:10PM
Dan Collins sends a link to the Honduran Constitution:
Title VII, with two chapters, outlines the process of amending the constitution and sets forth the principle of constitutional inviolability. The constitution may be amended by the National Congress after a two-thirds vote of all its members in two consecutive regular annual sessions.
That is what Zelaya tried to bypass.
That makes perfect sense to me. First the SC rules Zelaya's actions illegal and orders him to cease. That order extends to the military who are in charge of setting up elections. The mil-chief tells Zelaya he can't do the referendum election. Zelaya fires him. The SC reinstalls the general. Congress votes to remove Zelaya. Congress asks (I'm assuming here) the SC to validate their article of removal and issue a court order for Zelaya's physical removal. They do. (It is not an assumption that the SC issued the order of removal. That does not mean that they initiated it.)
A few people have been questioning why the military would remove Zelaya if everything were on the up and up. The reason is that Zelaya had his own personal security forces and they in fact did put up a fight. They seem to have stopped short of a fire fight AFAIK.
Yes it is. He had ballots printed by Hugo Chavez and smuggled over the Nicaraguan border. He had Nicaraguan nationals coming across the border in good numbers to support what has been called a quorum for his referendum. He defied the SC rule to desist. His general refused to defy the SC order and he fired him.
Manuel Zelaya defied every authority that exists in Honduras and had his security forces fight his physical removal.
THIS IS THE KIND OF SCUM 0BAMA SUPPORTS!
That’s because Zelaya and Ice Cream are two peas in a bright, red pod.
I wish I could read Spanish. I screwed up and never applied myself in Spanish classes.
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The organization of the Honduran state, national territory, and international treaties are covered in Title I of the constitution. As stated in Article 4, "The government is republican, democratic and representative" and "composed of three branches: legislative, executive and judicial, which are complementary, independent, and not subordinate to each other." In practice, however, the executive branch has dominated the other two branches of government. Article 2, which states that sovereignty originates in the people, also includes a provision new to the 1982 constitution that labels the supplanting of popular sovereignty and the usurping of power as "crimes of treason against the fatherland." This provision can be considered an added constitutional protection of representative democracy in a country in which the military has a history of usurping power from elected civilian governments.
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