Honduras Coup: Opposed by America, supported by the Independent.

First off, I must say that I have been genuinely surprised and impressed by Obama’s forthright opposition to the military coup against the elected president of Honduras. Over the past hundred years Democrat and Republican presidents have been somewhat alike in supporting anti-democratic action against left leaning regimes in Latin America.

The response of the independent, meanwhile, has been appalling. In yesterday’s leader they argued that that the military – in kidnapping and exiling the elected president -”might have done democracy a service”. The rational they give is empirically erroneous and politically confused. The Independent states that the referendum would have ‘given president Zeleya  the power to alter the constitution’ but  ‘the proposed alterations were perilously vague’. The referendum would have done no such thing. As every decent source makes clear, this was a non-binding referendum. If the president had won, Honduras would have convened an elected national assembly to consider alterations to the country’s – frankly ridiculous – current constitutional set up.

A key argument by the Independent is that Zeleya was suspected of wanting to scrap the single 4 year term limit on presidents. This would, they suggest,  be comparable to Hugo Chavez’s “dubious measures to retain power”. Chavez, we hear ominously “won a referendum in February altering his country’s constitution and abolishing term limits. He now talks about ruling beyond 2030.”

So basically Chavez is now in a similar position to a head of state in many a democracy including Britain. He can remain in power as long he keeps getting elected. I really do not know when the Indepedent decided that presidential term limits were some kind of crucial pillar of democracy. Personally I would prefer it if the people were allowed to decide whether a president had been in power too long. I certainly have no memory of the Independent running any grand campaign to introduce term limits to Britain.

Yet perhaps the Independent does not consider Hondurans sufficiently sophisticated to make such a judgement.  In another article the paper explains that “With his moustache and taste for cowboy hats, Manuel Zelaya won the 2005 presidential election in Honduras by a margin of barely 70,000 votes”. Yes that really is the pertinent fact about Zeleya’s electoral success.

So I will, for the moment, be boycotting the Independent. This will not be particularly difficult. With its screechy sloganising, it really is a liberal tabloid.