Although it may not seem so amidst the recent constitutional crisis in Honduras, Latin America is much more stable and prosperous today than almost any other time in its history. Whereas the seventies and eighties were fraught with bloody insurgencies and constant interventions by Cold War powers, today’s strife is masked in Potemkin democracy, where the current caudillos at least feign the pretense of democracy to legitimize their usurpations.

Most of Latin America’s fledgling dictators have traded their Kalashnikovs for hackable electronic voting systems and Washington-based “information offices.” That is not to say that Castro, Chavez, Ortega, Morales et al haven’t shown a penchant for violence at critical moments to suppress opposition. Bolivarian Circles, Red Ponchos and other thug groups have become the norm in ALBA countries as the “business end” of so called Twenty-First Century Socialism. But to maintain the approbation of Europe’s salon socialists and nouveau riche revolutionaries, they have at least attempted to maintain the façade of popular support, either by rigging polls or by spreading around vote-buying largesse from state coffers.

The presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and more recently Honduras, have all followed Hugo Chavez’s by-the-numbers scheme toward socialist autocracy. Their elected leaders first seek to extend their terms in office, then call for constituent assemblies that rewrite their constitutions, then use the tenets of the new constitution to steal businesses in the name of nationalization and usurp property in the name of land reform. And as a bonus for making it all possible, those that support and benefit from the process reward their benevolent presidents with life-long tenure.

Honduras’ former president and Chavez manqué, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, made the mistake of moving too quickly on step one, and the other two branches of government utilized their available checks and balances to remove him from his post. The elections this past Sunday served as the final stamp of approval by the Honduran people on the constitutionality of their former president’s ouster.

Latin American constitutions tend to be ephemeral, which should make it incumbent upon the country with the most durable and exemplary one to defend constitutional rigor wherever it finds it. Ironically, the reason that so many constitutions in Latin America contain strict impediments to successive presidential terms is because many of the same groups that support Zelaya today had insisted upon strict term limits to avoid the military dictatorships that sprung up to defeat them in their last iteration as communist revolutionaries. This is why the Obama Administration’s insistence that Zelaya’s removal was an “unlawful military coup” seemed so strange to many Latin America watchers.

To be sure, coup plotters don’t typically refer to the constitutional order of succession to decide who will preside over them after the coup. And, according to Article 239 of the Honduran constitution, Zelaya lost both his presidency as well as his Honduran citizenship the moment that he defied the Supreme Court decision that determined that his referendum was unconstitutional. His use of thuggery – calling out his supporters to forcefully recover confiscated illegal ballots and firing his top military officer for refusing to follow an illegal order – simply cemented his fate. The elections this past Sunday, free of violence and intimidation, showed what happens when thuggery is recognized and defeated, rather than given a seat at the negotiating table.

Some honorable mentions are necessary to recognize those that took strong stands to solve Honduras’ constitutional crisis, and to allow this past Sunday’s elections to achieve a peaceful solution. Senator Jim Demint, R-SC, who took the time to visit the country and talk to both sides, and who played hardball by holding up Obama nominees to head the State Department’s Bureau on Western Hemisphere Affairs and the US Embassy in Brazil, deserves special recognition for affording this crisis the seriousness that it merited. And the much-maligned Roberto Micheletti, who refused to cave in to enormous international pressure, proved his statesmanship by continually offering to resign immediately if Zelaya would also renounce his aspiration to be reinstated as president. And mostly, the Honduran people – our long time allies in the many small wars of the Cold War era that prevented a much larger war. Their stalwart resistance to the puerile politics of continental fantasists may have again prevented untold misery for generations to come.

This story would not be complete without singling out the ignominious performance of Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary-General of the Organization of American States. Insulza, who has presided over the near-complete corruption of the OAS, refused to send election observers to monitor Sunday’s historic elections, but was fully prepared to send observers to bless the illegal Zelaya referendum that started this crisis.

The Obama administration’s ham-fisted handling of the crisis will hopefully be attributed to first-quarter fumbling while the administration got its footing, rather than as a preview of future policy. But it was severely resented by most Hondurans. The economic costs of the administration’s sanctions will be felt for years to come, certainly by Hondurans but also by the many American businesspeople in Honduras that traveled to Washington to try to talk sense to anyone that would listen – usually to no avail.

One day soon, in the not-too-distant future of Latin America, when Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro are receiving condign punishment and the hemisphere has righted itself from its current leftward tilt, the constitutional stand taken by brave Hondurans in the face of international opposition may be the historical turning point that stopped the stultifying spread of “Twenty-First Century Socialism” in the hemisphere.

* Jon Perdue is a board member of the Latin America Research Group in Washington, DC. Mr. Perdue served as an international election observer for Sunday’s Honduran election as part of the Washington Senior Observer Group.

Source: Latin America Research Group