North: Wrong-turn Obama

It took the Obama administration less than eight hours to side with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega over the ouster of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras.

As we have come to expect, Mr. Obama got it wrong again, but this time, nobody noticed. The U.S. news media, preoccupied with the sudden demise of Michael Jackson, ignored the event in Central America.

For those who care about things more important than the passing of a “pop music legend,” here’s the rest of the story:

Manuel Zelaya, a wealthy rancher and agribusiness executive but self-described “poor farmer,” won a four-year term as Honduran president in November 2005 with 49.8 percent of the vote. Article 374 of the Honduran Constitution bars the nation’s chief executive from serving consecutive terms. Apparently, one term wasn’t enough for Mr. Zelaya, a protege of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s phobic anti-American leader, Daniel Ortega.

Late last year, as the Honduran economy tanked and unemployment grew to nearly 28 percent, Mr. Zelaya forced Elvin Santos, the country’s elected vice president, to resign and began holding conversations with Mr. Chavez and Mr. Ortega on how to hold onto power. In lengthy Chavez-like populist speeches, he denounced the United States and wealthy landowners and linked himself with leftists in the Honduran labor movement. On March 23, he issued an executive decree directing a national referendum on a Venezuela-style constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution in time for presidential and legislative elections in November. The Obama-Clinton State Department was mute about all this.

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