Introduction. 4. The Current Situation
This section of this multi-part series reviews the forces at work in Honduras. In particular, it examines the roles of the US, expatriates, the oligarchy, the resistance, and foreign governments. The larger political situation in Latin America is described in the context of whether Honduras can expect international recognition. A footnote provides a detailed discussion of the evidence that Roberto Micheletti may suffer from a mental disorder, which may complicate the transition of power. This analysis sets the stage for Conclusions, which will draw together the discussion of the preceding parts for the purpose of making predictions.
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
4. The Current Situation
a. Two divergent worldviews; five antagonistic factions
Two fundamentally different views of the situation predominate in the debates that rage around the Honduran situation. It is argued by supporters of the coup that no matter what the legal deficiencies of the case against him, the removal of Zelaya was justified, necessary, and beneficial. Following that, they say, there was no alternative to elections to re-start the heartbeat of democracy in Honduras. Besides, Honduras is a small and unimportant country, the dissenters are few and mostly Venezuelan, and so many other places need the tender ministrations of the United States.
This appeal to realpolitik deserves a careful hearing, since international law is only enforceable when the world community wants to enforce it. There are many wrongs in the world, too many for the weak international bodies to address, so causes have to be chosen case by case based not only on the numbers of persons affected and by the risk of contagion, but also by the likelihood that the world community will respond.
Opponents of the coup appeal to international law and note the dangerous precedent that would be set by validating a coup. If it is allowed to stand, what is to stop another leader from being removed by a coup? We in the United States should not imagine that this is just a topic for distant banana republics. The United States has already endured an attempt to remove President Bill Clinton from office by quasi-legal but entirely specious means. That effort was replete with farcical allegations regarding a torrid love affair between Clinton’s adviser Vince Foster and his lesbian wife Hillary, drug smuggling at Mena, and other lies too numerous to mention. The character assassination of Barack Obama has falsely alleged that he is not an American and that he’s a Muslim terrorist, and it’s just warming up.
In short, the precedent established with Manuel Zelaya, in which wild allegations are made against a leader and he is not permitted to answer, could just as easily be used to justify a military coup against Barack Obama. Should that happen, who in the hemisphere would not say that there was a certain rough justice in it for his handling of Honduras? This appeal to international law and precedent also deserves a careful hearing, because the consequences of a breakdown in international law are so grave.
What the Pentagon calls the human terrain of Honduras is as dense and complex as the jungle. Like much of Latin America, it is a deeply divided society, with the primary fracture between the dueños (owners) and those who work for a living. There are small businessmen and professionals, but they tend to identify with one side or the other. Superimposed on this primary fracture is further division imposed by the US civilian government and US corporations; the US military, drug, and intelligence agencies operating quasi-independently of civilian authority; as well as by expatriate Americans who have settled in Honduras, either as retirees, entrepreneurs, or technical assistants to the oligarchy. While the dueños have to a considerable degree absorbed the values of the oligarchy of the United States, human relationships remain much more important than in the US, where ideology is supreme.
Within these factions, there are multitudes of competing interests. The resistance to the coup, for example, brought together small farmers whose lands had been misappropriated, environmentalists, trade unionists, indigenous peoples, Garifunas, urban intellectuals, the poor of many backgrounds, gender and gay rights activists, and many more. Some were leftists, but many more were progressives in the Teddy Roosevelt mode or populists ala Ross Perot. The resistance had the effect of bringing together people who previously would have found it impossible to work together, which was the reason it was so dangerous to the rulers of a society based on inequality.
The expatriate community, many of whom are American, is a complex mélange of personalities, including economic refugees seeking to extend a failing bank account; caterers to those tourists who want to visit a geography but not its people; missionaries of many sects; technicians servicing the offshoring of American manufacturing; fugitives from the law; petit entrepreneurs; informers for any number of intelligence agencies; and traffickers in guns, drugs, and human beings. There are also foreigners who followed Honduran spouses home. Many expatriates share a quiet contempt for the Honduran people, seeing them as fit primarily to serve the desires of their betters. But in this, they are no different from the government of the land which they left behind, since that government has intervened on average every two years in Latin America, shedding human blood for national security interests as venal as cheap coffee and T-shirts.
The dictatorship is comprised of the normal elements of any Latin American oligarchy: the Armed Forces, the business elite, and the Catholic Church. Yet within even this group, there was some dissension. General Vásquez Velásquez warned about a coup in autumn of 2008 and joined it in summer 2009. Aside from that vacillation, however, and despite rumors that some senior officers were loyal to Zelaya, there was little evidence of dissent in the military. In the oligarchy, Jaime Rosenthal alone chose to let his news outlet, Tiempo, report events with minimal spin. The dictatorship, as mentioned, sabotaged Tiempo’s presses in response. There were times when coverage in Tiempo ceased to be germane to events, as if the newspaper were trying to let things cool down. Adolfo Facussé proposed solutions to the crisis that, if not practical, were at least not the brusque dismissals of the San José Accord that Micheletti consistently delivered.
The choice of Micheletti as the face of the coup was an interesting one. He may have been regarded as expendable, since he appears to be an outsider to the oligarchy, having begun his career as the manager of a bus line in El Progreso [108]. His rise to power was remarkable, particularly since he was on the wrong side of a coup in 1963 and lost a number of bids for power. As president of the Congress, he was clearly primus inter pares in the Legislature. But what stood out about Micheletti was his frank and unassuming sociopathy (used in the colloquial rather than the clinical sense; see Footnote), exemplified by a "contained rage" [108]. Thus he was able to assert that he was preserving constitutional freedoms such as freedom of the press and of association even while issuing decrees that revoked them, then asserting that he was revoking them even as he was doing no such thing. Understanding this point is critical to understanding how the situation is likely to play out.
The leadership of the Catholic Church, apparently due to being sold the idea that the coup was legal by the Supreme Court dossier was, at first, unified. As the deception unraveled, one Bishop (L. A. Santos [26]) split off, as did Padre Andrés Tamayo, Padre Fausto Milla and a number of other junior clerics. Tamayo was ultimately stripped of his citizenship, possible under Honduran law because he was a naturalized, rather than a native citizen of Honduras.
Higher levels of the Church may have been involved in the coup through the organization Opus Dei [109], which has been instrumental in politicizing the Church and forcing it to the right. Named in the article is Martha Lorena Alvarado, daughter of Ambassador Andrés Alvarado Puerto who was forced to resign when it emerged that he had used a diplomatic passport with a false name to allow José María Ruiz-Mateos, a noted Opus Dei supernumerary and Spanish businessman to enter Honduras. Ruiz-Mateos was later charged by the Spanish government with tax evasion and other crimes. Martha Lorena Alvarado and her husband Leonardo Casco Fortín and Mauricio and Gracia de Villeda are, according to the article, the face of Opus Dei in the Liberal Party. Zelaya advisor Nelson Avila believes that Opus Dei was instrumental in the coup.
The role of the US in the coup is still poorly understood and should be the focus of a major congressional investigation. The US government, military, and corporations have been involved in coups in Latin America for over a century, intervening on average at least every two years. These interventions have earned us long-standing enmity in the region, weakening US power, both soft power and military power. Even among very conservative Latin Americans, Fidel Castro is (very discreetly) admired for sticking it to the Yanquis.
Crosscutting the factions inside Honduras is fervent religion, with evangelical Protestantism and traditional Catholicism representing the major tendencies. Reliable statistics are not available, but authorities agree that the Catholic Church is the larger. Evangelical Protestants, however, are growing in strength, dovetailing with the strong evangelical tendencies within the US military. Also crosscutting the factions is political party, to which families have strong ties. There are rough parallels to the Democratic and Republican parties of the US, with civil libertarians, progressives, and minorities being concentrated until this year in the Liberal Party, and regressive forces in the Nationalist Party. As it was in the middle of the 20th century in the US, political affiliation in Honduras is inherited.
The fifth force is international opinion and non-governmental organizations. Although there is some diversity of opinion, the only countries which have fully endorsed the US position of accepting the tainted elections are heavily dependent on US goodwill. Those which lean toward the US position are dependent on the US. A remarkable number of countries, even traditional allies of the US, have rejected the elections and are refusing for the time being to recognize the dictatorship. The press has made a great deal out of the nuanced position adopted by, for example, Brazil, but the damage is done. Quiet agreement has been reached that whatever was done in Honduras reeks of US meddling, and that the State Department is both incompetent and mendacious. The US probably lost almost as much trust over its handling of Honduras as it did over all the lies it told to justify the Iraq invasion.
b. The elections and their aftermath
The objective of the elections was to whitewash the coup, to pretend that democratic control had returned. This was, of course, implausible at even a superficial glance, since the next president would know that he too could be arbitrarily removed. Indeed, the State Department had explicitly stated, as schoolmaster, that what had been done to Zelaya was "a good lesson [77]." To create the illusion of the restoration of democratic process, the dictatorship needed to produce a high level of turnout and to avoid severe, or at least visible, human rights violations. Conversely, the opponents of the coup needed to depress turnout and to highlight any human rights violations that did occur.
Neither side fully succeeded in its goals. The claims of the Zelaya camp of participation rates of under 35% [110] are possible, but difficult to believe. However, even more implausible was the claim by the dictatorship that turnout was 61.3%. The firm that was actually responsible for estimating turnout, Hagamos Democracia, said that turnout was 47.6% [111]. On December 6th, Mariano Castillo of CNN put out a number for turnout that the network surely knew to be false, 56.6%, with a total vote of 2,600,000—half a million greater than the Supreme Electoral Tribunal had announced on the night of the election. And, Castillo said, if one excluded all the Hondurans abroad from the rolls, this raised participation to 76.8% [112]!
Not mentioned was the fact that polling places were created in Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Washington, D.C., and New York City and that voting was very light, with just 500 out of 40,000 Hondurans in Los Angeles, for example, voting before noon. Some said they voted only because otherwise the dictatorship wouldn’t give them necessary papers [113]. In Miami, only 2,500 were expected to vote. The dictatorship only sent 18,000 ballots to the entire United States, despite the presence in the US of half a million Hondurans of the supposedly 1.3 million abroad [114]. Also not mentioned by CNN was that many of the reported votes were blank or spoiled.
It should also be remembered that there were factors both elevating and suppressing turnout. Honduran embassies, staffed by Zelaya loyalists, certainly did not facilitate the elections, which they said—in agreement with the United Nations and the Carter Center—were being held under conditions that were neither free nor fair. Hondurans outside of major population centers were out of luck if they wanted to vote. However, the dictatorship coerced people to go to the polls through threats both from the government and from private employers [115]. There was certainly an atmosphere of intimidation. Laura Carlsen described being surrounded in the Marriott Hotel by a shouting mob of "independent election observers"—itinerant "Teabaggers," perhaps— who abused her and demanded that she be thrown out of the country [116]. The press idiotically reported that she was Venezuelan, an agent of Hugo Chavez. There was even a report that the people of the Isla de Zacate Grande, east of San Miguel de La Frontera, were marched to the polls by a paramilitary group [115]. Yet, contrary to fears expressed on both sides, there was not mass violence.
The dictatorship also offered positive inducements to vote. The National Association of Industrialists, headed by Adolfo Facussé, offered cash inducements for voting [117], a practice that was called corrupt when practiced by Mayor Richard Daley. The dictatorship held the public purse, which it apparently used to make payments of huge sums to the candidates to conduct their campaigns [118 or 118alt]. The dictatorship also held open polling places an hour after the normal closing time [119], a practice that might call into question the legitimacy of the elections. Contrary to US claims that the election process was "transparent," the performance of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal was comically bad. It was impossible to view results for many hours after counting began, and then the system apparently crashed. On December 1st, the website showed 10% completion of counting. Even as of December 5th, counting was only 89% complete with 1.9 million votes—and it progressed glacially to 92% complete as of December 9th and 94% by December 11th. As noted, CNN reported that the total vote count has mysteriously inflated from 2.1 million to 2.6 million.
The key point that the State Department apparently does not understand is that elections are not democracy. Democracy is the respectful hearing of all voices. Elections are a means for a nation to listen to itself. Ideas for solving problems can be debated openly and bad ones swatted down. Unless the people are genuinely heard, elections are meaningless. Indeed, when the press is nothing more than mills for propaganda, candidates are owned by special interest, and voting is held under threats and military repression, a parody of elections such as the US inflicted upon Honduras inflames the situation and discredits peaceful debate.
So, the elections will settle nothing. The world concluded months before the voting that conditions were not appropriate for democratic elections. The US and the dictatorship used questionable reports of high turnout, pushed by CNN, to try to persuade the world that the Honduran people had expressed a preference for moving on rather than reprimanding the participants in the coup. The US has also undoubtedly used its influence to coerce Latin American governments into accepting the election. But the reality of what took place and is taking place is more complex, with the people of those countries who are condoning the coup probably not in agreement with their government. It is difficult to believe, for example, that the people of Panama—a country that was brutally bombed and invaded by American troops under George H. W. Bush—is enthusiastic about American-sponsored coups and sham elections.
c. The internal political system
"...I don’t think you can interpret either the election itself, which was a sound defeat for the Liberal Party, the party of the coup, a resounding defeat – perhaps its worst defeat in its 120-year history – sent a very clear message from the Honduran people that they’re looking for new leadership..." –unnamed senior State Department official [120]
In the universe inhabited by the State Department, the elections represented a severe rebuke to the Liberal Party. True, Micheletti made himself the lightning rod for all resentment about the coup. Also true, the opponents to the coup were disproportionally Liberals, so abstention handed numerous mayoralties and congressional seats to Nationalists that they could have gained in no other way. But it’s shameless to frame abstention as aimed at Liberals. It was a protest against the dictatorship.
Still, just as the abstention of followers of Robert Kennedy in 1968 allowed Richard Nixon to win, opening a path for the radical right to ascend, the Liberal Party is split and has no prospect of healing. Its opportunists and money people may switch away to the Nationalist Party (just as in the US Southern and corporate members of the Democrats switched to Republicans in the 1970s), leaving the remaining Liberals to form a new party. Either they will do so by drawing in those of all classes who feel disenfranchised or they will, chastened, sell themselves as a less abrasive version of the Nationalists. If the Liberals do as good a job at reunification as the Democrats in the 1980s, they should be in the wilderness for many years.
But if the Nationalists hold unprecedented power, it’s unclear what they can do with it [121, 122]. They were elected by default, not because they are wanted. The economy is in crisis. Drought from global warming is diminishing yields, and Micheletti sold off the grain reserves. The national mood is sour, remensas (remittances from abroad) are down and likely to stay down, and tourism will not thrive with the elevated levels of violence and the weak world economy. Granted, the IMF dividend will soften the blow, and doubtless the US will pump in funds that had been suspended, but Honduras is on the brink of a real disaster.
It would be unsurprising if the Nationalists turned to the mano dura (iron hand) style of government, made token examples of prosecuting corruption and human rights abuses while becoming even more corrupt and more violent, and trumpeted economic improvements due to the recovery of the world economy as their doing. This is the course that the Republican Party of the US followed from Reagan to Gingrich to DeLay, and represents the path of least resistance.
Suppose, though, that the Micheletti wing of the Liberal Party remains ascendant among the Liberals. Could a minor party such as the UD or an independent force such as that represented by the candidacy of Carlos H. Reyes serve as an alternative? The problem that all left-wing parties face is the need for leaders strong enough to survive the right. It is the direct result of US policies that leaders in the mold of Hugo Chávez Frías have arisen on the left. Zelaya, Aristide, Arbenz, Allende—none were strong enough to withstand coups. Leaders promising modernization, like Carlos Saúl Menem, have too often been willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable on the altar of free markets. It’s doubtful that a popular leader from outside the oligarchy could hold power against the elite of Honduras, much less against the US.
d. Zelaya and the resistance
At this writing, Manuel Zelaya remains in the Brazilian embassy. An agreement that was reached between Mexico and Micheletti’s office was breached by Micheletti’s office, who demanded that Zelaya sign a renunciation before he would be allowed to leave. Micheletti attempted to claim that there had been some kind of a trick, upon which the letter by which the agreement was reached was released to the press, exposing Micheletti as a liar [123, 124]. However, as soon as Micheletti is out of the way, it’s almost certain Zelaya will be released, so that Honduras can claim to be fulfilling the requirements of the San José-Tegucigalpa.
In the meantime, Zelaya issued a letter naming the resistance as the new "fuerza beligerante" in Honduras [125]. This phrase framed the situation as a state of cold civil war, in which ideas are the weapons. He stated the causes: a lack of democracy, an institutionalization of the coup, a lack of separation of powers, and a continued state of impunity among those institutions that co-authored the coup. He also named devaluation of the currency and tax increases and other burdensome measures (paquetazos) as complaints. Still, the language represents an escalation of the rhetoric and a decreased likelihood that Zelaya will negotiate.
The larger themes of what the resistance requires for Honduras to be governable were described by Leticia Salomon in a presentation at the Wilson Center [126]. Chief among these were punishments for human rights violators and coup participants; depoliticization of the police, military, and national institutions; structural reform of the Supreme Court; separation of Church and State; elimination of media concentration; and a Constitutional Convention, presumably as the means by which these goals would be accomplished. However, understanding the means by which these are to be achieved is less clear. As of December 9th, the Frente said that they rejected the elections and the government, and promised to renege on any debts incurred by the dictatorship [127]. The overall goal, as for any dissident movement based in civil disobedience is to achieve, as rapidly as possible, ingobernabilidad (a state of ungovernability) so that the dictatorship will be forced to acknowledge the grievances of the dissidents. No specifics have been mentioned.
Certainly some of the silence has to do with the need for people to rest and recharge, as well as the need to let even the slightest justification for violence by the regime dissipate. The regime has not rested in its terrorism, however. Among other incidents, men clad in camouflage and believed to be police gunned down five young men who had done organizing for the resistance, and narrowly missed executing a young mother of four, Wendy Molina. She escaped only because she played possum when they lifted her by the hair [128]. And now, five people have been kidnapped, presumably by police. Four were ordered never to return to their homes, and the fifth, Santos Corrales García, was decapitated [129]. The State Department, which has always labeled such acts to be barbaric war crimes when committed by Muslims, is silent now that this despicable deed has been committed by the government it birthed.
Prior to the elections, Ismael Moreno sketched out a series of potential outcomes [121]: election of Lobo under a reinstated Zelaya, a win at the polls by the resistance, civil war, the installation of a unity candidate such as Jaime Rosenthal of Tiempo as president, or reconciliation. None of these scenarios came to pass, but the first is closest to what actually happened. Moreno believed that the election of Lobo would leave the old conflict in place, with the government forced to rely on authoritarian measures to repress the resistance. Given that the failure to reinstate Zelaya deprived the elections of the slightest legitimacy, one can expect the resistance to grant the new figurehead for the oligarchy an even shorter honeymoon than otherwise.
e. International forces
Harassing the staff of the Brazilian embassy may have been the single most self-destructive act of the Micheletti dictatorship. Decision-makers are human beings, ambassadors are often chosen for their personal loyalty to and friendship with decision-makers, and so offending an ambassador all but guarantees long-standing enmity from the emissary’s home country. In addition, the harassment of the embassy violated the treaty of Vienna [130], which states in part:
Article 31 Inviolability of the consular premises
- Consular premises shall be inviolable to the extent provided in this article.
- The authorities of the receiving State shall not enter that part of the consular premises which is used exclusively for the purpose of the work of the consular post except with the consent of the head of the consular post or of his designee or of the head of the diplomatic mission of the sending State. The consent of the head of the consular post may, however, be assumed in case of fire or other disaster requiring prompt protective action.
- Subject to the provisions of paragraph 2 of this article, the receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the consular premises against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the consular post or impairment of its dignity.
Needless to say, throwing tear gas over the wall; having dogs sniff Zelaya’s food; blocking free passage of press and guests of the embassy; and denying the timely passage of most food, a pillow, and other normal gear [131] did not fulfill the provisions of Vienna. Any attack on an embassy is tantamount to an act of war. The Permanent Council of the OAS, speaking in the name of the United Nations, condemned the harassment of the embassy, saying that the dictatorship might be endangering the very life of President Zelaya and others in the embassy [132].
The consequence has been a nearly clean split between the countries of North and South America, with Canada, Costa Rica, and Panama supporting the US position and Mexico and El Salvador likely to get on board eventually. In South America, only Peru and Colombia are likely to support the US position in the near term. There is a significant possibility that differences over the handling of Honduras will end with South America withdrawing from the OAS and forming a competing organization. The Venezuelan Ambassador to the OAS, Roy Chaderton, punctuated that possibility by asking what point there was in belonging to such a sclerotic organization. Europe is similarly split, with Spain strongly opposing recognition of Honduras, and other countries less focused on the issue. In an unconfirmed report by pro-coup La Tribuna, there is a claim that the European Popular Party will force through the recognition of Honduras [133]. It’s not congruent with reporting by the Spanish press [134] and is very likely to be yet one more lie, but the possibility of European recognition—to the very great irritation of Spain—cannot be discounted.
Again, formal recognition is less important than the State Department seems to imagine. True, it will allow more sustenance to be pumped into the dictatorship through normal pipelines like the Millennium Corporation. But if Honduras had genuinely agreed to become democratic, no one would have opposed recognition of its leadership and, as long as it is a dictatorship, some countries will refuse recognition and many people will express their disapproval through silent boycotts and similar actions. Most people, of course, will probably remain oblivious, at least until such a time that Honduras re-enters crisis through, for example, a new seizure of power. At that point, the international recriminations will be enough to send anyone who supported diplomatic recognition into hiding. Should there be another coup in the hemisphere, the US will be held accountable, and the damage to US soft power will be irreversible. By signing off on the Lobo regime, the State Department assumed a very large liability on a very minor asset.
The only ray of hope for the State Department is that elections in other countries of Latin America will bring in right-wing governments. Uruguay, of course, just swung left. Correa will be in office through mid-2013. Kirchner’s term ends in 2011, with her performance presently not regarded highly. Paraguay went to the left in 2008, but the president has been enveloped in scandal. Lula enters his last year in office in 2010, as does Evo Morales. Chile could see a swing to the right as soon as this March. Hugo Chávez’s popularity is at low ebb and, in any case, his influence outside of Venezuela is slight. In short, the political terrain is more favorable for the right than it has been in many years.
But the victory, if that is what one chooses to call it, in sustaining the Honduran dictatorship is likely to be short-lived, at least in historical terms. The US economy has been so badly weakened that it can no longer provide Latin America with either guns or butter. The right has nothing to offer to solve the problems of poverty and underdevelopment. The inevitable economic recovery will ease the situation to some degree, but the US economy is likely to experience prolonged weakness. Growth for Latin America will come from other markets, meaning declining US influence. In summary, the Honduran dictatorship is probably already a failed state, rife with corruption and destined to fall under the grip of international narcotics trafficking. It may receive additional international support in the coming years, but in an environment in which the American client state regime is in steep decline.
By such victories are we undone.
f. The new "government"
The government is in the hands of the right-wing National Party under Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa. Lobo Sosa is a well-known quantity in Honduran politics, having served as president of the Congress under Ricardo Maduro and run for the presidency in 2005. Like Zelaya, he is from Olancho. He has negligible if not negative charisma, losing five points in the polls between July and November even as support for the opposition Liberal Party collapsed. Only 37% of Hondurans wanted him to be president [135]. A former communist who has cast his student years in Moscow as a flirtation and moved to the right, Lobo was a coup supporter, but not an inner member of the oligarchy [136]. In 2005, he lost on a heart-warming platform of reintroducing the death penalty and offering the mano dura to criminals [137].
Normally, there are courtesies extended by a departing government to a rising one, particularly in diplomatic ventures. But this is a dictatorship. One face is leaving as another is installed. And so Micheletti is committing murder on a significant scale, presumably so that Lobo Sosa will look gentle by comparison.
To be continued in part 5, Conclusions.
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Footnote
As an extended aside, the characterization of Micheletti as sociopathic, even in the colloquial sense, has been challenged by people whose opinions I respect, one on the grounds that there we cannot be sure which actions taken in the name of Micheletti are his and which are those of his subordinates, and the other on the basis that the sort of intransigence exhibited by both Zelaya and Micheletti is normal rather than pathological in Central America. In that regard, it is alleged that both Zelaya and the dictatorship have caused deaths of the other’s subordinates.
The points are taken, but not agreed to. First, subordinates have the positions that they do because they are skilled at divining what the boss wants. Whatever happens should be assumed to be the intent of the superior. In the rare cases in which a subordinate has erred, there are clear markers, such as firings. Second, it’s true that one has to be aware of cultural bias in interpreting political events. Feuds in Latin America can take on personal, death-cage aspects that would be unusual in the US, in part because violence in Latin America is (or, at least, historically has been) less class-restricted than in the US. When the stakes are serious, the players are as well. Therefore, cultural issues do need to be addressed.
However, allegations of violence need to be carefully marked back to reality. The dictatorship controls the major means of violence, particularly through paramilitary and irregular groups it has imported or convened. Also, the dictatorship controls the means of controlling and investigating violence. It is difficult to believe that supporters of Zelaya have been able to conduct political assassinations under the very nose of the dictatorship without detection. It is, however, not difficult to believe that the dictatorship has conducted political assassinations with impunity, since human rights groups have submitted evidence to the effect that it has. It is also not difficult to believe that at least some of the victims connected to the oligarchy, such as Enzo Micheletti and Colonels Osiris O’Connor and Concepción Jiménez Gutiérrez, might not have crossed someone in the drug trade, or been the objects of satisfaction in an affair of honor.
What remains is the larger question of whether it is possible and desirable to psychoanalyze politicians. Trained clinicians know that without direct contact with a subject, it’s very difficult to diagnose a mental disorder. Certainly the glimpses of their behavior that we see through the media in no way resemble the orderly examination of the physician or psychologist. So, diagnosis of sociopathy in a clinical sense is not possible. Certainly one does not want to medicalize politics, as the Soviets did. However, as a matter of simple self-protection, ordinary people need to reach informed judgments on whether their leaders are acting within the normal parameters of fulfilling the obligations of holding power or whether they are suffering from a mental disorder. It is through an excess of partisan loyalties and a lack of skepticism that dangerous demagogues and murderous authoritarians are given the keys to power. For the purposes of this paper, reaching a reasoned judgment on whether Micheletti is or is not sociopathic is important to understanding how the Honduran situation will play out.
In this regard, it’s worth considering what constitutes sociopathy (also known as Antisocial Personality Disorder [A1]) in either its clinical or colloquial sense. Violence per se is not sociopathic. Absent context, neither are other individual elements of the diagnostic criteria. A non-sociopath can lie, commit assaults, be arrested, and even rationalize his/her deeds if genuine necessity exists. What distinguishes the sociopath is the recreational aspect of his/her activities and the accompanying lack of genuine emotion attached to their consequences.
There is another aspect of this that is poorly understood because, unfortunately, so few people have the opportunity to hold a position of high responsibility. If the routine decisions of the day can deeply affect—can even cost or gain—lives, when even the decision maker’s life is a chit in a much larger game, one’s perspective shifts. To people who have never held power, politicians can seem sociopathic. It’s often said that all politicians lie, for example. But there are very different ways of lying. Leaders must often misdirect questioners without actually lying to them. The classic example of misdirection is responding to a reporter’s question whether troops will attack a certain location. Any leader who answered with an honest "Yes" or "No" would be justifiably accused of giving information to the enemy. A good leader parries by means of misdirection.
Also, there’s tremendous hypocrisy in holding leaders who regularly have to make difficult decisions to standards so high that their moral judges could not meet them. A poor man who swindles his wife out of ten dollars has, proportionately, stolen as much as a millionaire who takes a thousand, or a billionaire who steals a million. Leaders who commit wrongful deeds need to be judged within the context of how needful the deed was to accomplishing the legitimate objectives of the leader and how serious are its consequences in comparison to those of alternatives.
Consider the claim by the dictatorship that their actions were necessary to prevent a "bloodbath." A search the words "baño de sangre" (bloodbath), "Venezuela," and "Honduras" turns up well over 100 articles by El Heraldo alone! Since the dictatorship was the only party with the ready means to inflict a bloodbath, the line that the resistance acting under Venezuelan direction was plotting mass murder was not particularly persuasive. A secondary lie was developed, that Hugo Chavez or Brazil or the United States was planning to invade. Nonsense of psychotropic hues was circulated about Venezuela’s intentions to invade Honduras [A2, A3, A4]. El Heraldo claimed that UnoAmérica had informed them of a plot called "Plan Caracas" to "create a massacre." [A5] All of these fever dreams were based on a reasonable if inartfully phrased demand by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez that the Venezuelan embassy not be violated and, even more tenuously, a later statement by Argentine president Cristina Kirchner expressing a wish that blood not be spilled. The resistance early on announced a strategy of non-violent civil disobedience, so it could only "create" a massacre if the dictatorship obliged by firing the weapons they held.
But there were more invasions, indeed, invasions from all sides. Micheletti declared that he could only be removed from power by a US invasion [A6]. Nicaraguans were reported to be invading [A7]. The UN was said to be invading [A8]. Even the press was invading [A9]. Oddly, Barack Obama himself propagated the absurdity that some among opponents of the coup wanted the United States to invade. All of these claims of attacks and violence from outside Honduras except, of course, the last were made by the dictatorship and amplified by its media purely for reasons of propaganda.
Taken alone, the cries of "invasion" and "massacre" weren’t necessarily sociopathic. They had an arguably legitimate purpose: to terrify Micheletti’s faction into surrendering the civil liberties of the nation so that the dictatorship could hold power and whitewash the coup with elections. If there had been any basis to them, hyperbole might have been justified. They were, however, simply lies, lies that promoted fear and violence purely for the benefit of Micheletti and his patrons.
Other clues are consistent with the view that Micheletti is sociopathic. There were other instances in which Micheletti lied in manners that did not even seem to have a purpose, such as the granting and then withdrawal of permission to Zelaya to leave. He is alleged to have a criminal record [A10], is said to have a barely contained rage [108] and, in a purported psychological profile [A11], is said to exhibit a number of symptoms of sociopathy, borderline personality disorder, and paranoia. This analysis is posted so widely on Honduran and other Latin American sites that it is very plain that cultural factors are not mitigating in reaching the conclusion that Micheletti may be mentally ill. However, since the credentials of the "multidisciplinary team" writing the assessment are unknown, the diagnosis is uncertain.
What is relevant is that the analysis claims to have engaged in extensive interviews of Micheletti’s associates. It reports:
• Sexual violence, even against his family
• Verbal and physical violence, including an assault on an elderly congresswoman
• Terrorization of associates and even their families, who are in awe of him
• An arrest in the 1980s for irregularities in pricing
• His violation of the articulos petreos in 1985, which could have led to his jailing
These are all consistent with a sociopathic personality.
The writers of the report conclude that Micheletti will not leave power through negotiation. And this is the reason that understanding Micheletti’s mental state is a valid, even vital point of inquiry.
Sources
A1. Unsigned, 1/2/04, DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic Criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (301.7), Psychiatric News
39 (1) 25 http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/...
A2. Unsigned, Piden a ONU actuar contra Venezuela, 7/16/09, El Heraldo, http://www.heraldohn.com/...
A3. David Usborne, Chavez threatens to invade as Honduran army stages coup, 6/29/09, London Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/...
A4. Tamara Pearson, UN Dismisses Honduran Accusations of Venezuelan Scheming, 7/19/09, Venezuela Analysis, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/...
A5. Unsigned, "Plan Caracas" para crear masacre es real, 7/17/09, El Heraldo, http://www.heraldohn.com/...
A6. Unsigned, Presidente Micheletti dice que EE UU sólo lo sacaría con "invasión", 9/15/09, El Heraldo, http://www.heraldohn.com/...
A7. Unsigned, Alerta policial por invasión de "nicas", 7/4/09, El Heraldo, http://www.heraldohn.com/...
A8. Unsigned, El Heraldo, 9/11/09, No hay presencia de cascos azules en Palmerolahttp://www.heraldohn.com/País/Ediciones/2009/09/11/Noticias/No-hay-presencia-de-cascos
-azules-en-Palmerola
A9. Unsigned, Invasión de prensa internacional, 7/11/09, El Heraldo, http://www.heraldohn.com/...
A10. Unsigned, Micheletti, vinculado al cartel de Cali, en una lista de "narcos" de la Secretaría de Defensa, 7/23/09, El Libertador, http://ellibertador.hn/...
A11. Sandra Sanchez-Unidad de Inteligencia Política, Análisis siquiátrico: Micheletti sufre tres trastornos de personalidad, 9/30/09, http://www.tercerainformacion.es/...
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Blogs you ought to be reading and probably aren't:
http://www.hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com
http://www.quotha.net
For a church perspective, see:
http://www.hermanojuancito.blogspot.com
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References
- Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, The short story of the Coup (a lecture presented at Harvard), 10/3/09, http://quotha.net/...
...
- State Dept. briefing, 7/20/09, http://www.state.gov/...
...
- David Mayorga, Roberto Micheletti, el hombre de rabia contenida, 6/30/09, El Espectador (Bolivia), http://www.elespectador.com/...
- Arturo Cano, El tema de la píldora anticonceptiva de emergencia, ‘una de las causales’, dice Nelson Ávila. Opus Dei, determinante en el golpe: ministro asesor de Zelaya, 12/4/09, La Jornada, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/...
- Unsigned, Frente de la Resistencia hondureña confirma alto nivel de abstención en comicios, TeleSur, 12/1 http://www.telesurtv.net/...
- Unsigned, Tribunal declara ganador a "Pepe," Tiempo, 11/30/09, http://www.tiempo.hn/...
- Mariano Castillo, CNN analysis: Majority of eligible Hondurans voted in presidential election, CNN, 12/6/09, http://edition.cnn.com/...
- Paloma Esquivel, Honduras' presidential election, 11/30/09, Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/...
- Trenton Daniel, Hondurans in Miami cast absentee ballots, 11/30, Miami Herald, http://www.miamiherald.com/...
- Unsigned, Monitoring the Repression, 11/28 et seq., Vos El Soberano, http://www.voselsoberano.com/...
- Laura Carlsen, 11/30/09, Honduran "Electoral Observers" Launch Verbal Attack on Americas Program Director, http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/...
- Unsigned, Empresarios ofrecen descuentos para votantes, 9/9/09, http://www.latribuna.hn/...
- Campaña política con fondos nacionales, 11/12/09, La Búsqueda, http://rubenescobarerazo.wordpress.c... (or see http://www.youtube.com/...
- Mindy Belz, Hondurans Vote, 11/30/09, World Magazine, http://www.worldmag.com/...
- State Department briefing, 12/3/09, http://www.state.gov/...
- Ismael Moreno, ¿Después de Zelaya, qué?, Oct. 2009, Envío (331), http://www.envio.org.ni/...
- Greg Grandin, The Honduran Standoff: Desperation and Violence on the Right, November/December NACLA Report on the Americas 22(6), https://nacla.org/...
- Unsigned, México solicitó salida de Zelaya en su condición de "Presidente," 12/11/09, Tiempo, http://tiempo.hn/...
- Unsigned, Micheletti: Se nos engañó desde embajada de Brasil, 12/11/09, Tiempo, http://tiempo.hn/...
- Manuel Zelaya, Carta del Presidente a la Resistencia, 12/7/09, http://voselsoberano.com/...
- Leticia Salomón, Notes for Honduras: Golpe de Estado, Elecciones, y Desafíos para la Gobernabilidad Democrática, 12/8/09, Wilson Center, http://quotha.net/...
- Frente Nacional de Resistencia Contra el Golpe, Comunicado No. 42, 12/9/09, http://contraelgolpedeestadohn.blogs...
- Unsigned, Se hizo la muerta para sobrevivir a la masacre,12/7/09, Tiempo, http://www.tiempo.hn/...
- Unsigned, Muere decapitado miembro de la Resistencia hondureña de manos de la Policía, 12/12, TeleSur, http://www.telesurtv.net/...
- Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1930, http://untreaty.un.org/...
- Arturo Cano, Prohíben el ingreso de bolígrafos a la embajada brasileña; los consideran arma mortal, 11/26/09, La Jornada, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/...
- Condemnation of the Acts of Intimidation Against the Brazilian Embassy, 11/21/09, CP/DEC. 43 (1723/09), Permanent Council of the Organization of American States, http://www.oas.org/...
- Unsigned, Partido popular de Europa reconoce elecciones hondureñas, 12/11/09, La Tribuna, http://www.latribuna.hn/...
- Unsigned, Rajoy apoya a la UE frente a las prisas de Zapatero sobre Afganistán 12/11/09, ABC.es, http://www.abc.es/...
- Unsigned, Lobo Sosa Leads Before Honduran Ballot, 11/7/09, Angus Reid Global Monitor, http://www.cidgallup.com/...
- Oscar Estrada, 2+2=100, and We, the True Resistance, 12/6/09, http://quotha.net/...
- Unsigned, Porfirio Lobo, el ex comunista captado por la derecha, favorito, 11/28, AFP, http://www.larepublica.com.uy/...