There's been a ton of discussion of the legality of yesterday's coup d'etat in Honduras, in which President Manuel Zelaya was deposed. A simple reading of the Honduran Constitution appears to show the coup was in fact constitutional. While researching the question further, I came across the following passage written by a Honduran politician in 1992:
the armed forces are charged with fulfilling eminently political functions: maintaining the rule of the Constitution, the principles of free suffrage, and the alternation of the office of the presidency of the republic. In any liberal democracy these are the tasks of the judicial branch. Because of the armed forces' role in judging the conduct of civilian government, Honduran democracy finds itself under the permanent threat of a coup d'etat. The armed forces determine, in fact, whether the civilian government is maintaining the Constitution.
That statement stands out for its accuracy in describing the current situation. I want to stress, it was written some seventeen years ago.
That passage came out of "The Origin and Development of Political Parties in Honduras," Chapter 9 of Political Parties and Democracy in Central America. The author was Ernesto Paz Aguilar, identified in the book as a
professor of political science at the National University of Honduras. He is a lawyer and received his Ph.D. in France. He currently serves in the Honduran legislature as a representative of the National Liberal Party.
Ousted President Manuel Zelaya was a member of the the Liberal Party, but it has been widely reported that party members in the Congress were broadly opposed to Zelaya's proposed reforms. Wikipedia names him as a Foreign Minister of Honduras, in the mid-1990s.
Here's his take on the 1982 Honduran Constitution:
Although Honduras is a country with an authoritarian past, in the 1980s there were three free and honest elections. These elections have not, however, taken place in a pluralistic framework, that is in a climate that guarantees the free play of all political parties, with all ideologies having equal opportunities. The electoral game has been circumscribed by a truncated political spectrum that extends from the right to the center. Even when legal impediments for the registration and free functioning of the political parties of the left were absent, the conservative sectors successfully thwarted their operation. They have still not learned the first lesson of democracy -- tolerance.
According to the Honduran Constitution the form of government is republican, democratic, and representative. It is exercised by three branches -- legislative, executive, and judicial -- which are complementary, independent, and not subordinate to each other. In practice, the executive branch dominates the others....
Even though the president makes power concrete and personalizes its exercise, he is also forced to share it with an institution: the armed forces. The Honduran Constitution indicates that the armed forces a permanent national institution -- professional, apolitical, obedient, and nondeliberating. The last three characteristics are simply fictitious. The armed forces of Honduras form the principal political force of the country and thus exercise a tutelary role over the other institutions of government. The armed forces constitute a de facto power, not subordinated to civilian political power.
In the first place, the armed forces are charged with fulfilling eminently political functions: maintaining the rule of the Constitution, the principles of free suffrage, and the alternation of the office of the presidency of the republic. In any liberal democracy these are the tasks of the judicial branch. Because of the armed forces' role in judging the conduct of civilian government, Honduran democracy finds itself under the permanent threat of a coup d'etat. The armed forces determine, in fact, whether the civilian government is maintaining the Constitution.
In a later essay(.pdf, in Spanish), written in 2005 before Zelaya took office, Paz Aguilar gives us further background on the political context Zelaya's reforms were attempting to address. Paz Aguilar noted that Honduras has two political parties, the National Party and the Liberal Party.
The members of the National Party see themselves on the right and those of the Liberal Party situate themselves on the center-left... one of the characteristics of the Liberal Party is its internal fragmentation and lack of ideological cohesion.
Among the conclusions of that essay he writes:
There is a crisis in the parties because there is a crisis in the ideologies. In Honduras, political polarization (in 2005) has decreased but social polarization has increased. "When the politicians become indistinguishable, the citizens become indifferent." In the majority of countries, one can see a tendency towards ideological homogeneity....
The crisis of politics and of politicians comes primarily from the divorce between what politicians say and what they do. Between theory and practice. They have turned politics into the administration of that which exists and in the administrative resolution of technical problems.