Feint Left

Poor, hot, and fractious, Honduras—the original banana republic—rarely draws a second look from the global community. But on June 28, when President Manuel Zelaya was yanked out of bed by the military and bundled onto a plane for exile, the world took notice. International leaders were unanimous in decrying yet another Latin American assault on democracy. In a vote that united Barack Obama and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, the Organization of American States expelled Honduras, the only nation since Cuba to be so disgraced. Caracas even threatened to send in troops to reinstate Zelaya. Never again, cried the wallahs and pundits of international diplomacy, could Latin America be allowed to fall under the heel of men in epaulets.

Yet in the rush to judgment on Honduras, regional heads of state showed selective zeal for democracy, at best (Zelaya, a lame duck, had been plotting to rewrite the Constitution, presumably to allow him to run for a second term). Their elision could be felt around the world: Latin leaders from reliable democracies like Mexico, Chile, and Brazil have been strangely silent as a growing number of populists and autocrats in Latin America have, in recent years, leveraged their charisma to open the door to permanent reelection and quash the other impediments of democracy—legislatures, courts, and constitutions.

Chávez has been the most widely recognized abuser, and not just because his transgressions were the worst; his politics and rhetoric simply drew the most international attention. During his rise, he has become a master of using the ballot box to concentrate his power and cow his rivals. Since coming to power in 1999, he has wielded state media and largesse to stand in 10 elections and plebiscites, the last of which, in 2008, struck down presidential term limits, allowing him to stay in power indefinitely.

Chávez's example has spread across the region, where a potpourri of Bolivarian allies emulated the comandante's mix of muscle and populist hubris. Both Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, and Rafael Correa, the U.S.- and Belgian-trained economist, parlayed their cachet among the poor and forgotten ethnic minorities into sweeping new charters. In Ecuador and Bolivia, the new constitutions will soak the rich and middle classes, radically redistribute property, and grant indigenous regions far more power over local and national affairs. Bolivia has even set up autonomous indigenous courts in which local groups trump national laws.

Inspired by his Andean compañeros, Daniel Ortega, the former Cold Warrior, has announced plans to do the same in Nicaragua. And the left doesn't hold a monopoly on tailoring constitutions to personal ambitions. Colombia's Alvaro Uribe, the poster boy for U.S.-Latin entente during the Bush administration, is gladly allowing his political allies to conjure a constitutional amendment allowing him a third term. Zelaya would have been next if he'd stayed in power.

Thankfully, the Hondurans were a step ahead of him. In 1988, lawmakers in Tegucigalpa had armor-plated their Constitution with a few "untouchable items"—clausulas petreas—such as Article 239, which sets the presidential mandate at a single four-year term (with no reelection) and declares that any leader who even proposes to amend the Constitution to end term limits will be automatically disqualified from the job and banned from politics for 10 years. Amazingly, Zelaya pressed ahead anyway, ignoring explicit orders by the Congress and the attorney general. When Gen. Romeo Vasquez, head of Honduran armed forces, refused to carry out the plebiscite, Zelaya fired him. And when the Supreme Court restored Vasquez to power, Zelaya ginned up a mob to seize the bundles of ballots (which had been sent to Tegucigalpa courtesy of Chávez) that voters were meant to fill out on voting day. All the while, the earnest, democracy-minded statesmen dripping with outrage over Zelaya's ouster said nothing.

This is not just byzantine Third World politics. The Bolivarians have also exacerbated the region's class and race pathologies. Morales muscled through a radical new Constitution in 2007 and 2008 that ignored the voice of Bolivian opposition members, who at one point were physically barred from the constituent assembly by pro-government mobs. Not surprisingly, the Morales charter plays to the highland indigenous groups that back him while curbing the power and revenue of his rivals in the mostly white and wealthy lowlands. Correa did much the same in Ecuador, pitting the indigenous majority of Quito and the rural regions against the middle classes of Guayaquil.

Along strictly ideological lines, the Ortega government has raided Nicaragua's opposition newspapers and intimidated opponents. In elections last November, the Managua government disqualified two rival political parties and blocked the work of international voting monitors. And when journalists found that thousands of ballots had been destroyed, pro-government protestors trashed the independent radio stations. Meanwhile, no one has done more than Chávez, who, in the last few months alone, has chased a political rival into exile, stripped an opposition mayor in Caracas of his authority, and threatened to close down Globovisión, Venezuela's last independent broadcast network.

Just a few years ago, the word was that Latin America was poised to take a hard left, putting both open markets and political freedom at risk. In fact, that didn't happen. Many of the region's soi-disant leftists, like onetime Brazilian union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and socialist Michele Bachelet of Chile, turned out to be paladins of the free market, as well as champions of moderation and political plurality. And for all the wind blowing down from the Bolivarian revolution, three quarters of the region's 500 million people and two thirds of its $4 trillion GDP are still in the hands of stable constitutional democracies, such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. And yet the new generation of populist leaders is an uncomfortable reminder of how democrats and demagogues can flourish on the same soil—that democracy is not always a liberal force.

In the negotiations now under way in Costa Rica, Zelaya and de facto president Roberto Micheletti may yet work out some agreement that restores Zelaya to power and allows Honduras to return to democratic normalcy. The outcome will have implications for the hemisphere. From Santiago to Mexico City, the region's most influential leaders roundly condemned the Honduran coup but said nothing about the assault on the law, the legislature, and the courts that preceded it. The tumult in Tegucigalpa is a cautionary tale: Latin America's real problem may not be the power of the man on the balcony, but the silence of its statesmen.