Rumor has it Hillary Clinton will be meeting with ousted President Zelaya this week. The Obama administration is ready to go ‘all in’ here. They’ve made it quite clear which fighter they’re betting the house on and the chips are about to be collected. Venezuela and Nicaragua are ramping up the rhetoric and Honduran officials claim the latter is amassing troops on the border. I haven’t heard President Obama criticize talk like this and it’s quite important that he do so. Vague demands for a ‘peaceful solution’ to the crisis just aren’t going to cut it. Unless, of course, he’s comfortable being viewed as complicit in any attempt to invade Honduras to reverse the actions of the coup. I’m not sure the administration grasps the seriousness of this problem or the irreversibility of the coup itself.

There’s no denying that mistakes have been made in the wake of Zelaya’s removal. The Honduran army should have made every effort to avoid deporting Zelaya immediately (though I understand their concerns with keeping him on Honduran soil). They should have avoided engaging the few protesters who showed up at the airport in Tegucigalpa when armed forces prevented the ousted President from returning. But they didn’t avoid either of those things. Now, Zelaya is on the outside looking in and he has the propaganda value of at least 1 dead protester to lob in the general direction of this new guy, Roberto Micheletti.

Micheletti is standing firm; not giving an inch of ground to an international community which denies him the Presidency of his country despite the views of the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress. But what exactly does the Obama administration (and all those demanding Zelaya be returned to power) wish the outcome to be? If they accept the former President’s return to power, both Court and Congress look impotent. They will have caved to the pro-Chavez, anti-Western protesters who are truly among the minority. These protesters want Zelaya to push forward reforms that are illegal and unconsitutional in an attempt to build a Venezuela-like super executive who subverts the legislative and judicial branches of government at every turn. The end goal for these folks is a socialist union in Latin America which will inevitably fail and leave them poorer and more susceptible to the growing violence in their respective countries.

Caving is not an option for Honduras. The only other option would be to agree to some sort of ‘temporary’ reinstatement of Zelaya. They could let him remain in office for the rest of his term and then hold elections for the next president. But for this method to work, it would require Zelaya to follow the rules — something he has show little interest in doing. So that method is likely off the table as well. As I stated before, the reason Honduras is in this situation is because they had to do something. So they did it. Now the international community is backing them into a corner and something has to give eventually.

This is ‘meddling’ in another country’s affairs to the extreme. The President’s line against Honduras is only making things worse for that country. There is such a thing as a good coup, and the recent coup in Honduras may just fit that mold. We can’t treat the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court as if their actions occurred within a vacuum. They had viable reasons for doing what they did. Meanwhile, Zelaya’s being made out to be some hero in the Latin American Socialist scene and Hillary Clinton’s all too ready to shake hands with this goon. It’s a bad situation all the way around.

So, what now?

Now we wait. We wait and see if the Honduran government can hold position long enough to hold elections. We wait and watch as protests undoubtedly will grow in size and violence will most certainly spread. We sit back and witness Chavez milk this for everything it’s worth. And we watch in horror as Democracy erodes in Honduras where the United States may have had a foothold against the rising tide of Socialism in Latin America. We stand by as Socialist leaders who (at times) rose to power through a military coup in their own countries — Chavez, Castro, Ortega — now drop the hammer on a country determined enough to intervene when necessary and name new leader outside of the military power structure. And as we gawk, one obvious question floats just beyond the horizon. What could possibly go wrong?

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