So in case you didn’t hear, there was a coup in Honduras yesterday.  President Manuel Zelaya, an ally of Hugo Chavez, was hustled out of the country (while still wearing his pajamas, apparently) by the military.  Shortly thereafter, the Honduran Congress voted unanimously to remove Zelaya from office and replace him with Roberto Micheletti, the president of Congress.

This is the result of an extended constitutional crisis, during which Zelaya attempted to extend his rule through a referendum (that was scheduled to take place on Sunday) that would have eliminated presidential term limits.  Both Honduras’s Supreme Court and Congress had called the referendum unconstitutional.

Earlier today Venezulan blogger Francisco Toro offered his perspective over at TNR:

Seen in context, Sunday’s military powerplay was different in important ways from the traditional Latin American putsch. The generals move came at the unanimous–yes unanimous–behest of a congress outraged by Zelaya’s not-particularly-subtle attempts to extend his hold on power indefinitely. It followed a series of clearly unconstitutional moves on Zelaya’s part, including his attempt to unilaterally remove the chief of the army, which, according to Honduras’s Constitution, can only be done by a congressional super-majority.

And congress’s request had been seconded by the nation’s Supreme Court, which is sworn to uphold a constitution that explicitly makes the act of “inciting, promoting or backing the continuation in power or re-election of the President of the Republic” punishable with the loss of Honduran citizenship.

So while we wince at the image of soldiers kidnapping a president, it’s important to recognize that the move against Zelaya was, if not strictly speaking constitutional, certainly institutional.

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.

This underscores a harsh reality for Latin American believers in liberal constitutionalism.  Deep down, only Presidential Power is considered real power in Latin America, which is why only moves against the president are considered actual coups. Our constitutions generally define all branches of government as equal, but it seems some are more equal than others.

Toro is suggesting that efforts by Latin American leaders to undermine other branches of government are not regarded as coups in the same way that those toppling Presidents are.  But that’s simply not true — the term for such a move, at least in Latin America, is autogolpe, or self-coup:

A self-coup or autocoup is a form of coup d’état that occurs when a country’s leader dissolves or renders powerless the national legislature and assumes extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances. Other measures taken may include annulling the nation’s constitution and suspending civil courts. In most cases the head of state is granted dictatorial powers.

One of the modern examples of the self-coup is elected Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s takeover of the government on April 5, 1992, ostensibly to exercise absolute authority in annihilating Maoist Shining Path insurgents, though political opponents and journalists were arrested by the military.

In addition, I think Toro is on a pretty slippery slope here.  Saying a coup against a sitting President is okay because Congress authorized it is hardly that different than saying that a coup against a sitting Congress is okay because the President authorized it.

As my mother taught me, two wrongs don’t make a right.  Zelaya’s efforts to pull a Chavez in Honduras certainly were unacceptable and most likely unconstitutional.  But the military’s decision to toss Zelaya out of the country — even if subsequently sanctioned by a unanimous vote of the Honduran Congress — is just as unconstitutional (if not more so).  If the people of Honduras wanted  to oust Zelaya, there were much better ways than sticking him on the next plane out of the country.

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