Honduras did not promise to reinstate its aspiring dictator, contrary to earlier press reports

The small country of Honduras did not agree to return its authoritarian ex-president to power after all.  Press reports said it did, but the Wall Street Journal says it merely agreed to submit that request to Honduras's Congress and Supreme Court, which previously backed the ex-president's removal, in exchange for an end to U.S. sanctions and recognition of its upcoming elections. Under continuing U.S. pressure, they may soon allow his return to office, but it hasn't happened yet.

The Washington Post admits that the ex-president, Manuel Zelaya, was trying to make himself into a dictator, like his mentor, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.  But the Post demands that he be returned to power anyway because he was "illegally deported" by the military after being removed from office.  (Never mind that many legal scholars have said that his removal from office -- unlike his subsequent exile -- was perfectly constitutional and legal).  

The Wall Street Journal notes that Honduras's current interim president did not agree to reinstate his predecessor, but merely agreed to a process that leaves the decision about whether to reinstate the ex-president to Honduras's Congress and Supreme Court .

But the ex-president is busy spinning the agreement as an unqualified recognition of his right to rule, which it isn't.  And Obama Administration officials, like the State Department's Thomas Shannon, are busy threatening Honduran legislators with sanctions if they vote against reinstating Zelaya, in a manner at odds with the agreement itself.

Earlier, the press had reported that under U.S. pressure, Honduras's leader had agreed to return to power its authoritarian ex-president, Manuel Zelaya, in exchange for an end to U.S. sanctions and U.S. recognition of its upcoming election results, and Zelaya's agreement to turn over control of the military to a tribunal.   (The Washington Post  incorrectly reports that control over the military would be turned over to the Supreme Court when in fact it would be turned over the supreme electoral tribunal).

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers: he sought to circumvent constitutional term limits, used mobs to intimidate his critics, threatened public employees with termination if they refused to help him violate the Constitution, engaged in massive corruption, illegally cut off public funds to local governments whose leaders refused to back his quest for more power, denied basic government services to his critics, refused to enforce dozens of laws passed by Congress, and spent the country into virtual bankruptcy, refusing to submit a budget so that he could illegally spend public funds on his cronies.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama Administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen. 

Even before the current crisis, the World Food Program noted that “One out of  four Honduran children under 5 years old falls  to chronic malnutrition. In some rural communities to the west of the country, chronic malnutrition can reach 48.5 percent.”  Since the crisis, things have gotten much worse: "A woman caring for six grandchildren can no longer afford milk. A bricklayer who used to work six days a week now is lucky to get two. A shop manager has seen his earnings evaporate."

The Obama Administration insisted that Zelaya's removal was illegal, although many legal commentators said that Honduras's removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was legal -- and thus, not a coup.  The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many lawyers and foreign policy experts, including attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.  Former Secretary of State James Baker, a lawyer, says that Honduras's removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

While attacking Honduras' democratically-elected Congress and Supreme Court for their role in removing and replacing the country's ex-president and would-be dictator, the Obama Administration has paid little attention to human-rights abuses in countries ruled by dictatorships.  Those countries include Guinea, where troops recently committed mass rapes against women in broad daylight; Niger, where the president recently turned himself into a dictator; Iran, where vast numbers of pro-democracy demonstrators have been tortured or killed; and Nicaragua, right next door to Honduras, where the unpopular president, who routinely engages in vote fraud, is busy trampling on constitutional term limits in order to turn himself into a president-for-life.

Honduras's erratic ex-president, Zelaya, recently claimed that he was being "subjected to high-frequency radiation" by "Israeli mercenaries."  One of Zelaya's most vocal supporters is a vicious antisemite, who recently said, "Sometimes I ask myself if Hitler wasn't right when he wanted to finish with that race, through the famous holocaust, because if there are people that are harmful to this country, they are the Jews, the Israelites."