Clinton’s seeming shift on coup may backfire
WASHINGTON — Seven years ago, soldiers burst into the bedroom of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Still in his pajamas, the president was forced at gunpoint onto a waiting jet and flown to exile.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among many officials around the world who condemned the ouster of the democratically elected leader as a coup. Last month, the Democratic presidential front-runner appeared to hedge her position. She suggested that the Honduran army had acted legally because theywere carrying out orders from the country’s supreme court.
“The national legislature in Honduras and the national judiciary actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya,” Clinton said in response to a question during an interview with the New York Daily News editorial board.
“Now I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it, but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedence,” she added.
Clinton, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state, also said the administration could not officially label the ouster a coup because that would have triggered a suspension of U.S. aid to a poor nation facing political upheaval.
Under U.S. law, however, only declaration of a “military coup” stops aid to a foreign government. The Obama administration repeatedly called Zelaya’s removal a coup, while carefully avoiding the military coup designation.
Clinton may have meant to say “military coup” in the interview since that was how the question to her was phrased. But she repeatedly said only “coup,” according to a transcript.
The appearance of shifting her position on the Honduras coup may expose Clinton to criticism on the far left, where she already has faced attacks from rival candidate Bernie Sanders. It also could hurt her with some Latino voters, whose support she needs to win in November.
The June 28, 2009, coup in Honduras — the first in Central America in nearly two decades — revived an ignominious practice that promoters of democracy in the region thought was dead. It also highlighted the then-new Obama administration’s seeming neglect of Latin America as the White House focused on other priorities. The fallout threatened to drive a wedge between Washington and Latin American countries that wanted to see more unequivocal U.S. support for democracy.
The Clinton campaign denied that she changed her position on the coup and argued that she helped isolate the post-Zelaya government in Honduras to force democratic reforms. Clinton accepted elections in Honduras several months after the coup, which gave the country a new president but never restored Zelaya.
Soon after Zelaya’s ouster, wealthy Honduran businessmen and politicians who had opposed him mounted a campaign to defend his removal. They used much of the same language Clinton used last month — that the coup plotters had acted with legal authority.
Neither the Organization of American States, the main regional governance body, nor former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace laureate brought in to mediate the Honduran constitutional crisis, saw the ouster as legal.
Zelaya, a populist who took a turn to the left, prompted a constitutional crisis when he began efforts to hold a referendum on whether voters supported allowing presidents to run for re-election. Honduran law allowed only one term. His critics feared Zelay awas trying to change the law to hold power indefinitely.