Stuff everyone knows, but nobody's allowed to say...

Quico says: Be sure to check out this fascinating column on the Honduran crisis by IAD's Michael Lisman in, of all places, The Guardian:

As Honduras enters its second week of political crisis, the international community is beginning to take a second look at the murky circumstances under which the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was removed from office and exiled from the country on June 28.

Until last weekend, world leaders were unanimous in their condemnation of the so-called military coup. But having been forced to watch the spectacle continue for a second straight week, the world has now become painfully aware of two things they had not anticipated.

The first is how ardent, unanimous, and organized the interim government in Honduras is against any sort of reprieve for Zelaya, much less his reinstatement.

The second is how erratic and unfit for leadership Zelaya has become. Both realisations have caused diplomats to rethink their strategies in the push for Zelaya's immediate and unrestricted return to power. As the standoff continues this week, the international community would be wise to bite its tongue and instead, push for what world leaders initially called a "Honduran solution" – even if it's not the one they had in mind.

One of the most interesting things about this Honduran crisis is the way chavismo's rhetorical crouch - together with the US's colossal rabo'e'paja when it comes to military coups - have conspired to make it strictly verboten for regional leaders to say, out loud, thigs that a-they obviously think and b-are central to the crisis.

Lisman gets props for breaking some of that silence. Still, in the longer run, it cannot be good that the implicit rulebook for kosher political discourse accepted by all the hemisphere's leaders leaves whole provinces of reality effectively out of bounds.

Fiscal Crisis Watch

Quico says: Still don't think the government's having trouble paying its bills? Check this out:

Caption Competition

Quico says: Do your worst...

Rafael Caldera, still alive

Juan Cristóbal says: - Sometimes, bloggers make mistakes.

I got a Twitter feed from a friend saying that Rafael Caldera, former President of Venezuela, had passed away. I checked Google News and there was a note attributed to Tal Cual, saying the same. I then checked Wikipedia, and it had listed as the date of death July 7th, 2009.

So I figured: one, two, three independent sources, all of them flimsy, hmm: should I post? Should I not post?

I went ahead and posted. Turns out - he's not dead!

I'm wiping the egg of my face. My apologies to the Caldera family. They must be furious, rightly so.

Blood in Tegucigalpa

Quico says: It's hard to know where to start to pick apart yesterday's extraordinary air-borne telenovela over Tegucigalpa, but it's only right to start with Isis Murillo: the 19 year old anti-Micheletti demonstrator shot dead by soldiers just outside the airport as Zelaya circled overhead.

I was having a drink with my own 19 year old nephew when it happened. And I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach: stung and furious and dismayed. As we reflect on an afternoon positively brimming with farce, we should bear in mind that at its center was a genuine tragedy. Nobody should die the kind of death Isis Murillo died.

I don't know who was in command of the soldiers who fired on Isis. I don't know why those soldiers were packing live ammo at a civilian rally. I don't know why the Honduran army doesn't stock plastic buckshot. I don't know what military planning genius failed to grasp the dangers of this entire situation. I can't begin to fathom the chain of criminal decisions that lead up to a bunch of soldiers shooting live rounds at an unarmed political march.

Even if those who made this decision were evil enough not to care, their sheer stupidity is staggering: how could they fail to see that handing Zelaya and Chávez the bodies they so desperately needed would disastrously undermine their own position?

One thing I do know: what's at stake in Honduras right now goes well, well beyond that godforsaken little country's destiny.

Hugo Chávez made sure of that.

Honduras has turned into a screen onto which our continental psychodrama is projected, the place where the hemisphere symbolically works out its mess of contradictory attitudes towards democracy and what it means and what its defense entails. Because the fight over the meaning of that word is the ideological struggle of our time, and that struggle has to be waged anew in each successive generation.

Will democracy come to mean, to the next generation of Latin Americans, nothing more than uninterrupted rule by a Big Man who is elected every few years but otherwise gets to govern above the law and beyond the control of any alternative power? Or will democracy come to mean something more real, something with deeper roots in our societies and our selves: constitutional rule by office-holders who are no less subject to law for having been elected to lead the republic?

That, in the end, is how the battle lines have been drawn in Honduras, and it's a testament to Hugo Chávez's skill that he's managed to line up all of the hemisphere's leaders behind a vision that conflates democratic legitimacy with the right of a ruler to do whatever the hell he feels like, in every situation, the constitution be damned.

That is what he has shown us, again and again, he believes in. And that, in the end, is why he is fighting for Zelaya's return.

Which is why even many who could not - for diplomatic reasons - say so openly have been quietly rooting for Micheletti, hoping his stand against chavista aggression would succeed. Because, lets face it, those of us who reject Chávez's visiom of caudillismo-cum-democratic-legitimacy really could've used a win in Honduras this week.

Any such hope has now died, alongside Isis Murillo. Having started off with a weak but not impossible hand, Micheletti's government has now completely relinquished any residual claim on the conscience of the hemisphere's real democrats.

Because it's simple, really. Democrats don't order soldiers to fire into unarmed demonstrations. They just don't.

---

Now also on TNR's blog, The Plank.

Tegucigalpa Chronicles

Quico says: Folks, I'm sorry this blog has gone Honduras-crazy over the last few days. No era para menos. I'll return to blogging to stuff I know something about shortly, but I just needed to get this one last thing off my chest.

Buried in this absolutely fascinating piece in the Miami Herald interviewing Honduran army attorney Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, where the guy straightforwardly admits the ejection of Zelaya from the country was illegal - but justifies it anyway - we find this hallucinogenic passage that seems to encapsulate OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza's bizarre behavior throughout the crisis:

Zelaya has said he will try to stage a brazen comeback on Sunday. The Organization of American States' secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, arrives in Tegucigalpa Friday to try to lay the groundwork for Zelaya's return. Insulza refuses to meet any member of the new administration led by the former head of Congress, Roberto Micheletti.

Wait, wait, wait...how do the last two sentences in that paragraph even make sense together? Does Insulza intend to "lay the groundwork for Zelaya's return" by negotiating with the hot dog hawker in front of the presidential palace? What exactly is the plan here?

Pardon my rampant Teodorismo here, but you don't need to be a ranting anti-OAS fanatic to say Insulza's not exactly covering himself in glory here. At times of crisis the continent needs serious diplomacy from the head of the Inter-American system, not this kind of permanent grandstanding.

(Seriously, though, check out that Miami Herald piece. It's a blockbuster. This Bayardo Inestroza guy's a piece of work.)

Hugui Go Home

Quico says: Here's a question worth pondering: how come Roberto Micheletti woke up this morning in the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa instead of across the hall from Carmona in whichever flea-bag hotel in Bogotá he lives in now?

Having led a universally reviled military coup in one of the smallest, weakest, poorest, most aid-dependent countries in the Americas, how the hell has Micheletti managed to hang on through thick and thin as a head of state recognized only by Israel and Taiwan?

The answer, my friends, has a first name and a last name: Hugo friggin' Chávez.

Think about it: without Chávez to use as a foil, what plausible legitimation strategy did Micheletti have?

Without Hugo's incredibly unsubtle meddling in Honduran affairs, what imaginable combination of words could have allowed Micheletti to rally an important part of Honduran public opinion behind him? Without the preposterous saber-rattling, the hypertrophied gas-baggery, the unending stream of unadulterated bullshit streaming out of Caracas, how could a guy defy all of international public opinion and stay in charge of a country so aid dependent, it basically lives off of the kindness of strangers?

Seventeen years on from his own coup, Chávez is still the Latin American coupster's best friend: the one way people in Micheletti's position get to approximate some kind legitimacy. Without Chávez, the idea that Zelaya's powerplay fit into some larger international plot to do in Honduras's democratic institutions wouldn't even make sense. But with Hugui - and the petrochequera, obviously- lined up behind him, the contention becomes scarily, straightforwardly plausible.

And that, when you think about it, is why the destabilization rap against Chávez sticks: not just because he makes it easier for people like Rafael Correa to get away with the stuff Correa gets away with, but because he also makes it easier for people like Micheletti to get away with the stuff he - insólitamente - gets away with.

The wolf decries the plight of the sheep

Juan Cristóbal says: -As I write this, the deposed President of Honduras is giving a speech to the UN.

As I write this, all TV and radio stations in Venezuela are forced to carry the speech live. Yes, you read right: all TV and radio stations are carrying the speech live.

Hard to believe? No. This is the sort of abuse of power that happens in Venezuela every day.

Let me be frank about this, because there's no way of making this latest outrage literary, elegant or erudite: who in Venezuela gives a rat's ass about the fate of the Honduran president? And why should Venezuela's TV-viewing, radio-listening public be forced to submit themselves to the diatribes of a deposed Juan Valdez-lookalike who, for all we know about him, violated Honduran law and simply got what he had coming to him?

Ever since this whole telenovela started on Sunday, ordinary bloggers like myself have been forced to delve into the obscure machinations of Honduran politics. I have received mass emails quoting the Honduran Constitution - four times! And now, Hugo Chávez forces Mr. Zelaya's speech down the throat of every cantina-dweller, every taguara-owner, every radio-listening truck driver in Venezuela, just because he can, just because he has unchecked power.

But the above does not constitute the biggest downside of all of this.

I said it before and Alvaro Vargas Llosa agrees: the greatest sin that Honduras' golpistas have committed is that, thanks to their actions, Hugo Chávez, Raúl Castro and Rafael Correa have transmorgified into the defenders of Latin American democracy, putting them at the forefront of the fight for the rule of law. Pretty soon, I expect Robert Mugabe will make an appearance in Managua to express solidarity toward Mr. Zelaya, and Burma's generals will withdraw their Ambassador to Honduras in protest for this grievous offense to freedom-lovers everywhere.

Somebody pass the barf bags.

Grand Theft Opinion

Quico says: So I wrote up a thing on the Honduran mess over at The New Republic's mass blog, The Plank. A taste:

If anything, the hemisphere's unanimous, outraged reaction to events in Tegucigalpa--which, for once, saw Washington and Caracas in strong agreement against the coup--underlines the region's pathologically imbalanced veneration of presidential power. After all, in 1999, when Hugo Chávez, with the agreement of the Venezuelan Supreme Court, moved to shut down Venezuela's democratically elected congress, we heard nary a peep from the OAS. And in 2007, when Ecuador's own neoauthoritarian president Rafael Correa moved to shut down congress with the Supreme Court's approval, nobody cried coup. In neither case were those closures allowed by the existing constitution, yet nobody would've taken cries of a "coup" seriously.

Somehow, though, when the Honduran Congress, with the support of the Supreme Court, moves against the president, the continent's foreign affairs ministries fly into deep crisis mode.

And, erm...if that reads to you suspiciously like Juan's take in the comment thread yesterday...well, there's a reason for that.

Two faces of Hugo Chávez

Juan Cristóbal says: - Hugo Chávez on last week's events in Iran:

"The Bolivarian government of Venezuela expresses its firm rejection of the ferocious and unfounded campaign to discredit, from abroad, that has been unleashed against Iran, with the objective of muddying the political climate of this brother country. We demand the immediate end to maneuvers to intimidate and destabilize the Islamic Revolution."

Hugo Chávez on today's coup d'etat against Honduran President and ally Manuel Zelaya:

"If they swear in (Congress President) Micheletti, we will overthrow him. We will overthrow him, it's that simple. We will do anything we need to do in order to put Manuel Zelaya in power once again."

The Trouble with Mass Expropriations...

Quico says: ...is that, these days, the world just isn't set up for that way of doing things. Take the Eastern Shore of Lake Maracaibo oil service company expropriations. Chávez never stopped to calculate that if you just grab the boats that those companies were using to service the rigs, you leave their property in some weird kind of international limbo. Which matters, because those boats are insured internationally. If you grab them, you find yourself holding a bunch of boats that somebody else has already taken out insurance on.

Not surprisingly, the international insurers weren't about to take that sitting down. The scarily named Joint War Committee - basically a talking shop London-based maritime insurers have set up to monitor conflict zones around the world - has put Venezuela on its "War, Strikes, Terrorism and Related Perils" list alongside such tourist hotspots as the Gulf of Aden, the coast of Yemen, the Indonesian island of Ambon and the Niger River Delta.

The decision activates the War Exclusion Clause on the insurance contracts covering - as far as I can tell - all vessels operating in Venezuela. Which means that nothing that floats within 12 miles of Venezuela's coastline can be internationally insured.

Peachy.

Bugbear to All

Quico says: It's remarkable to realize how much of the political life of Venezuela these days is about Globovision: an influence entirely out of proportion to the station's coverage, both geographic and ratings-wise, that seems proportional to nothing so much as the scale of its demonization at the hands of the government.

This week, The Economist reviews the little-station-that-could's travails in a write-up that brings a welcome Economist-style sense of balance to the whole affaire. Well worth a read.

Of course, in covering the issue, this blog has been basically centered on The Economist's second-to-last paragraph, much more than on the rest of the story. To wit,

Globovisión has faults. Although its reporting is professional, its commentators are sometimes shrill and monotonous. Its owners abuse their power to choose which opposition voices are heard and which not. It is not much of an exaggeration to say, as government spokesmen do, that it behaves as if it were a political party. But contrast it with the government channels, which are both turgid and inflammatory, and it is a journalistic paragon.

There is, of course, much more to it than that, and I can fully grasp why, in writing for a worldwide audience, that graf ends up pretty far down the page.

But for a more Venezuela-centered audience, I feel that speaking forthrightly about Globo's many and very serious shortcomings, from within the opposition fold, is a needed corrective against the tendency to lionize the fairly grubby, often self-defeating operation these guys run out of Alta Florida. The alternative is a kind of atavistic oligophrenia. I mean, things really have come to a head when the viejas del este start turning out en masse to be, essentially, volunteer tax collectors for the chavista state.

But there I go again, off on an anti-Globo rant. I really can't help myself, y'know. Which is why it's good, now and then, to step back and look at the bigger picture.