i hate my blog

I swore it'd take nothing short of a military coup to get me to write on this blog again...and in case you haven't been following Latin American news, I'm eating my words...and they taste bitter and not very satisfying.

But apparently Honduras has had a military coup, though you wouldn't know it judging by the happenings around here. Copan Ruinas is far removed from the political confusion of the major cities, and the events are little more than the topic of conversation here. I’m more worried about stray dogs and whatever keeps biting me in the middle of the night than anything to do with military and/or coups. Hondurans are pretty laid back and peace loving. Its hard to say which is the bigger headline here, the coup or the death of Michael Jackson.

Allow me to try to break down the situation here, at least as I see it.

So the (former) cowboy hat totting, moustache rocking president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya (pictured above), has been pursuing a somewhat left-wing political agenda like he pursues upper lip facial hair. He had started becoming bff's with Hugo Chavez (president of Venezuela), Danny Ortega (president of Nicaragua) and other moustache loving leftist leaders in Latin America. I guess Manuel Zelaya figured he was doing such a bang up job (he wasn't) that he should be president for a second term (he shouldn't). The only thing standing in his way was a little thing called the constitution, which clearly made it illegal for any president to run again after holding office.

What do you do when the constitution is holding you back? You just change it, like we do back home, right? To Zelaya’s credit he didn’t, but instead decided to hold a vote to see if the people want to vote on re-electing him during the next elections in the winter. Not to his credit, even just holding the vote was ruled as illegal by the Supreme Court, unconstitutional by Congress, was unsupported by the military, both the Evangelical and Catholic Church (which never agree on anything) and the vast majority of the population. You would think that all this would convince Zelaya that the vote was a bad idea.

So the leader of the military says that he’s not going to support this, so Zelaya fires him, which is also ruled illegal by Congress. Now he’s got the leader of the military angry at him, plus the entire government, most of the population and even his own party. But Zelaya thinks to himself “whats the worst that can happen?” and goes head with his plans to hold the vote the other Sunday.

Well it turns out the worst that can happen is that you wake up to the military storming your house and kicking you out of the presidential office in the first successful military coup in Central America since the Cold War. As punishment they send him to worst place they can think of…Costa Rica…in his pajamas. Which sounds surprisingly similar to a dream I used to have as a kid.

Since then, Congress has decided it’s time for someone with less 'face furniture' to run the country and assigned Roberto Micheletti as the interim president for the time being. But pretty much the rest of the whole world, including his bff Hugo Chavez, has said that they want Zelaya and his ’soup strainer’ back leading Honduras.

Continuing with this bad soap opera, Zelaya meets with various world leaders and vows to courageously fly back to Honduras in all the glory and radiance of a movie star. Micheletti vows to arrest him if he does. Unfortunately for Manuel Zelaya's plans, he told everyone when and where he was flying to, and the military easily prevented his return by lying to runway with vehicles and beard trimmers. So rejected, Manny flies back home to work on plan B.

So it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. Will Micheletti step down? Will the Honduran government bow under international pressure? Will Zelaya be Tom Selleck for Halloween? Nobody seems to know.