President, yes, President Micheletti has a very clear, well written, explanatory column in the Wall Street Journal today about what Zelaya did wrong and why what he did was wrong.
• The Supreme Court, by a 15-0 vote, found that Mr. Zelaya had acted illegally by proceeding with an unconstitutional “referendum,” and it ordered the Armed Forces to arrest him. The military executed the arrest order of the Supreme Court because it was the appropriate agency to do so under Honduran law.
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• The constitution expressly states in Article 239 that any president who seeks to amend the constitution and extend his term is automatically disqualified and is no longer president. There is no express provision for an impeachment process in the Honduran constitution. But the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision affirmed that Mr. Zelaya was attempting to extend his term with his illegal referendum. Thus, at the time of his arrest he was no longer—as a matter of law, as far as the Supreme Court was concerned—president of Honduras.
Many have argued that Zelaya should have been impeached. Many don’t have a clue what the law is in Honduras. Michelletti notes that one could argue whether Zelaya should have been removed from the country or not, but because he was, does not in fact make this a “military coup”.
President Micheletti is one admirable man.
In the meantime Mr. Zelaya is now whining about lack of US support. wah, wah.
But Zelaya hit back at Clinton saying she had stopped using the term “coup” to describe his removal from power by the military last month.
“The position of the Secretary Clinton at the beginning was firm,” he told reporters. “Now I feel that she’s not really denouncing [it] and she’s not acting firmly against the repression that Honduras is suffering.”
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“Secretary Clinton needs to confront the dictatorship with force so we will be able to speak well about President [Barack] Obama,” Zelaya said.
