For those of you not accustomed to digging 12 pages into the "World" section of the news, Honduras has been in a "political crisis" since the end of June 2009, when President Zelaya was removed from power by the Honduran Supreme Court, Congress, military, and other parts of the Honduran government, including members of his own party, because Zelaya violated constitutional article 239, which expressly forbids President from attempting to change the constitution so the President can serve more than one four-year term, as well as stating that any President who does so should be removed from office. The trouble is that it doesn't seem to have specified how.
A small fraction of the U.S. media coverage has acknowledged that Zelaya violated the constitution, but none seem to recognize that he committed an impeachable offense by proceeding (over the objections of the Supreme Court, the military, and the Honduran Attorney General, and others) to push for a public referendum to change articles related to Presidential succession in the Honduran Constitution that are expressly forbidden from change by the Constitution itself.
According to the Wikipedia entry on the crisis, the Honduran Congress discussed impeaching him, but due to a disagreement, there were not enough votes. So, members of his own party, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and other aspects of the government had the military arrest him and put him on a plane for Costa Rica.
In hindsight it would have been better had they shot him dead, because this crisis would not be going on now. But the Honduran political establishment knew Zelaya has cultivated some support in the horribly impoverished Honduran population, as well as powerful friends like Hugo Chavez (virtual dictator of Venezuela, having ruled there since 1998), as well as other Central and South American countries, like Nicaragua and Brazil. So fearing rioting and chaos in the streets, and a power play from these other more powerful and much larger nations, and perhaps not wanting to summarily execute a man (even one demonstrating aspirations of becoming a tyrant like Chavez), most of the Honduran government ejected Zelaya from the country.
Sadly, despite their effots, they are now in the situation they most feared. Zelaya is back in the country, there is rioting in the streets, and even reports of Venezuelan soldiers in Nicaragua along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border. All primarily because the "neutral" foreign governments who have sided with Zelaya.
What has surprised and incredibly disappointed me has been the reactions of the governments (and media) of almost all of the world. The UN, EU, OAS, United States, and seemingly all of the EU and OAS member states have condemned Zelaya's removal and demanded he be put back in power. Virtually none of these governments or groups seem to have publicly acknowledged that he committed a crime that expressly requires his removal from office.
And so i must wonder, what the hell? Why are the U.S., UN, EU, and all of these other countries trying to put Chavez's lackey back into power, when most of these countries oppose Chavez's attempts to politically dominate Central and South America? Honduras was a loyal ally to the U.S. during the Cold War ("anti-communist") years, and many if not most people there now feel suddenly abandoned by Obama. They're calling him a "communist" and buddy of Chavez, which i really doubt he is. (I think Obama is much more mainstream than most people acknowledge, but that's a rant for another time.)
So if the U.S. and all of the other governments don't really want to help out Chavez by reinstating Zelaya (who has clearly violated the highest laws of his country), then why are they doing this? Why cut off aid, and ignore Chavez and Brazil announcing they have smuggled Zelaya back into Honduras and put him up in the Brazilian embassy where he can incite violence... all of which violates international treaties and laws?
The best explanation i can come up with for this is that all of these governments are complicit in these crimes because they are more concerned about an abstract threat to their personal survival in power than for the laws that they themselves have written and sworn to uphold and defend. They see Zelaya's sudden and immediate ejection from Honduras like they see the French or American revolutions, where the corrupt, but established oligarchies were overthrown and the world changed virtually overnight. Power was taken by new individuals, and if you believe the stories they taught us in school, these new "democracies" took to heart the concerns and fundamental rights of the common people.
Well, in my opinion, the extraordinary pressure these governments have steadily applied over the last three months to the Honduran government to try to force them to reinstate a power-hungry, dictator-wannabe like Zelaya has show quite clearly that we can just forget all that crap they told us about democracy, just rule, and freedom. The established governments of this world are more worried that the people they rule over will realize that the governments routinely violate their very own constitutions and trample the freedoms of it citizens. And these governments worry that perhaps they too, will be woken up in the middle of the night by a group of soldiers, put on a plane, flown to a foreign country, and told to never return. And this terrifies them, because what they love more than anything, everything, and everyone else can only be power, and dominating other people.
In this entire thought process, right about here is where i decide that perhaps the hot-headed 18 year-old Anarchist version of myself was right: governments cannot help but become corrupt and put their own concerns over the well-being of the people they are supposed to serve. Over the last two decades, i had been come to think that perhaps some governments were better than others; that they could be moral and act within the bounds of their oaths; serve the people they had pledged to defend. But looking at the world's governments reaction to the events in Honduras, i can't help but think that as long as there are rulers or "authorities" of any kind, the masses are guaranteed injustice at the hands of the few who seem to inevitably rationalize that they are above whatever laws or morals we thought we had all agreed to live by.