Closing the Veins of Latin America

At 5:30 in the morning of June 28, 2009, the sitting President of the Republic of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was arrested in his Tegucigalpa home by the Honduran armed forces. Still in his pajamas, the soldiers took him to Soto Cano Air Base – jointly operated by the Honduran and U.S. Air Forces – where he was put on a presidential jet and flown to Costa Rica. Before Zelaya’s family knew what had happened, the President of Honduras’s Congress, Roberto Micheletti, was named Provisional President. Within hours the Honduran people took to the street with chants of “¡Queremos a Manuel!” – “we want Manuel!" The following months saw the removal of virtually all of Zelaya’s allies, including the mayor of San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city. In response, every Latin American state refused to recognize the new government and labeled the military’s actions as a coup d’état. Intergovernmental organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS) quickly followed suit. Only the United States’ veto prevented the OAS from expelling Honduras. The coup was the culmination of an internal power struggle between President Zelaya and the military and its right-wing civilian supporters, sparked by the President’s call for a referendum to rewrite the nation’s constitution. The Honduran military acted without explicit support from the United States, but, despite publicly backing Zelaya’s return, Washington did nothing to change the situation. According to one of Zelaya’s private secretaries, Enrique Reina, “the Honduran military doesn’t do anything without the U.S. approving it.” Indeed, the United States was more involved than its public stance would indicate. Despite its public condemnation of the coup, its tacit approval of the outcome, decades of precedent, and the close relationship between U.S. and Honduran armed forces reveal a deeper relationship between the United States and the 2009 coup