Could Honduras Crisis
Prompt A Power Grab In Nicaragua?
By Tim Rogers
MANAGUA - As Honduras begins to return to
normal under democratically elected
President Porfirio Lobo, who took office
Jan. 27, the political crisis sparked by
last summer’s military ouster of President
Manuel Zelaya appears to be fading into
history as another chapter in Central
America's tumultuous past.
But Honduras’s seven-month experiment with
de facto governance under conservative
interim President Roberto Micheletti may
have lasting political repercussions in the
region, even after Honduras has healed and
moved on.
In neighboring Nicaragua, for instance,
critics charge that President Daniel Ortega
is using the Honduras episode as a cudgel –
and a justification – for eroding the checks
and balances of his country's fragile
democracy.
“What happened to President Manuel Zelaya
could happen to [you] next,” Ortega warned
the opposition following Honduras’s
presidential elections on Nov. 29, 2009.
And like the case of Honduras, he warned,
international mechanisms for dealing with a
democratic crisis, such as the Democratic
Charter of the Organization of American
States (OAS), have already proven
ineffective.
“With what authority are you going to
complain?” Ortega said. “With what
Democratic Charter? The Democratic Charter
has fallen to pieces… there is no Democratic
Charter that means anything in Latin
America; decisions are now made by the
people.”
Scrapping democratic norms?
Like Micheletti's former interim government
in Honduras, Ortega has recently made a
series of legally questionable moves that he
claims are intended to protect the
Constitution.
When judges aligned with Ortega's Sandinista
Party overturned a constitutional ban on
consecutive reelection in October to allow
Ortega to run again in 2011, they justified
the move by claiming that they were
protecting people's “constitutional right”
to vote for whomever they want as their
president. And when Ortega passed a Jan. 9
decree to extend the periods of 23 top
judges and magistrates whose constitutional
terms are set to end in the coming months,
the president said his decision was based on
his constitutional obligation to provide
stability to the country and prevent chaos.
In both cases, the opposition, civil
society, and legal analysts argue Ortega’s
moves are illegal attempts to consolidate
his power and undermine the country’s
constitutional democracy.
“I'm afraid Nicaragua has already crossed
the threshold into a failed state,” said
Nicaraguan lawmaker Francisco Aguirre,
national secretary of the Liberal
Constitutional Party. “It's no longer a
potential category, we're already there.”
The left-wing opposition Sandinista
Renovation Movement agrees, arguing that
“Ortega has put himself above the
Constitution and the laws” to forward his
“dictatorial project,” while “the Nicaraguan
people in general have no judicial security
[to protect] their liberties and rights.”
Former Supreme Court president Alejandro
Serrano said Ortega’s constitutional moves
have effectively pushed Nicaragua in the
category of “de facto government.” And
right-wing opposition lawmaker Eduardo
Montealegre has started collecting
signatures to introduce a bill calling for
Ortega’s impeachment.
The US government is also expressing growing
concern about the situation in Nicaragua.
On Jan. 22, Carmen Lomellin, the US
Ambassador to the Organization of American
States (OAS), urged the hemispheric body to
take stronger measures in countries such as
Nicaragua and Venezuela, where democracy is
being undermined.
"It is not secret that we are experiencing
an erosion of democracy in the region …
little by little, in countries such as
Venezuela and Nicaragua, were are witnessing
how democratic values are being undermined,"
Lomellin said in a forum of US ambassadors
to Latin America hosted by the Chamber of
Commerce, according to EFE wire reports.
But some question how much moral ground the
US government has to criticize other
democracies in Latin America, after
flip-flopping on Honduras. By recognizing
the presidential elections in Honduras,
left-wing critics such as Ortega and
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez say the US
effectively legitimized the military ouster
of Zelaya, despite earlier coming out
against the Micheletti government.
Analysts say the US wobbling on Honduras has
set a dangerous tone in a region where
several governments and other powerful
interest groups were already looking for
excuses to consolidate their own power.
“I think that Washington's acquiescence to
Micheletti's coup government has set a
terrible precedent for the Hemisphere. I
have no doubt that other elites who have at
best a tenuous commitment to democracy will
try to replicate the Honduran example,” said
William M. LeoGrande, dean of American
University’s School of Public Affairs. “If
the United States is unable to effectively
defend constitutional democracy in Honduras,
what chance does it have of do so anywhere
else?” he added.
Michael Shifter, vice-president of policy
for the Inter-American Dialogue, a
Washington-based think tank, says the cases
of Honduras and Nicaragua are “rather
distinct,” but are part of a larger trend of
weakening checks and balances in the region.
“The separation of powers principle, and the
rule of law, are often defied and not taken
seriously,” Shifter said. “Increasingly in
the region, when it comes down to might
versus right, the former tends to prevail.
What matters is where the power lies, not
what the laws say.”
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