Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, though not to office.  Unfortunately, press accounts still manage to mangle the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain what happened. In today's New York Times (9/22/09):

At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his opponents said would have been the first step toward allowing him to run for another term in office, which is forbidden under the Honduran constitution. Mr. Zelaya has denied any attempt to run for re-election.

An Associated Press report appearing in today's USA Today (9/22/09) was much worse:

The legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and tried to alter the nation's constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran Constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office.

This is inaccurate, not to mention strange (ousted for a Chavez "alliance"?).  As economist Mark Weisbrot put it shortly after the coup (7/8/09), these pro-coup arguments makes no sense--and the media should say so. By the way, the example he cites is also from the New York Times....

Unfortunately much of the major media's reporting has aided this effort by reporting such statements as "Critics feared he intended to extend his rule past January, when he would have been required to step down."

In fact, there was no way for Zelaya to "extend his rule" even if the referendum had been held and passed, and even if he had then gone on to win a binding referendum on the November ballot. The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country's constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis -- although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.

Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Conn Hallinan (8/6/09) has yet another debunking of "the story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup" in Honduras, being "that Zelaya--an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez--was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power."

Calling this dominant media narrative "a massive distortion of the facts," Hallinan patiently explains that "all Zelaya was trying to do is to put a non-binding referendum on the ballot calling for a constitutional convention"--which, Hallinan notes, was "a move that trade unions, indigenous groups and social activist organizations had long been lobbying for," since the country's current "one-term limit allows the brass-hats to dominate the politics of the country."

But things get really interesting when Hallinan spots a "U.S. Connection"--via one of our largest media conglomerates:

While Zelaya is indeed friendly with Chávez, he is at best a liberal reformer whose major accomplishment was raising the minimum wage....

One of those "little reforms" was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry, which may well have been the trip-wire that triggered the coup....

One of the charges that [right wing Latin America operative Otto] Reich levels at Zelaya is that the Honduran president is supposedly involved with bribes paid out by the state-run telecommunications company Hondutel. Zelaya is threatening to file a defamation suit over the accusation.

Reich's charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance, as he is a former AT&T lobbyist and served as Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) Latin American advisor during the senator's 2008 presidential campaign.

Writing that "AT&T, McCain's second largest donor, also generously funds the International Republican Institute, which has warred with Latin American regimes that have resisted telecommunications privatization," Hallinan perceives the seeds of Zelaya's fate in the fact that he "was known to be a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization."

The L.A. Times has published a commentary from Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Marc Weisbrot (7/23/09) furthering recent exposés on the damaging influence of U.S. lobbyists hired by unlawful regimes throughout the world.

Under a headline about "The High-Powered Hidden Support for Honduras' Coup," Weisbrot invites us to

meet Lanny Davis, Washington lawyer and lobbyist, former legal counsel to President Clinton and avid campaigner for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid. He has been hired by a coalition of Latin American business interests to represent the dictatorship that ousted elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in a military coup and removed him to Costa Rica on June 28.

Davis is working with Bennett Ratcliff, another lobbyist with a close relationship to Hillary Clinton who is a former senior executive for one of the most influential political and public relations firms in Washington. In the current mediation effort hosted by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the coup-installed government did not make a move without first consulting Ratcliff, an unnamed source told the New York Times.

Davis and Ratcliff have done an amazing public relations job so far. Americans, relying on media reports, are likely to believe that Zelaya was ousted because he tried to use a referendum to extend his term of office. This is false.

Weisbrot reminds us that "Zelaya's referendum, planned for the day the coup took place, was a nonbinding poll," "only asked voters if they wanted to have an actual referendum on reforming the country's constitution on the November ballot," and "Zelaya would be out of office in January, no matter what steps were taken toward constitutional reform" Zelaya even "has repeatedly said that if the constitution were changed, he would not seek another term."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/07).

Citing a Committee of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared in Honduras report "detailing hundreds of cases of human rights abuses committed by the coup regime, including four political assassinations," Ogg Blog's Chuck Ogg (7/17/09) notes that "the situation is getting worse in Honduras...but you wouldn't know this reading the New York Times":

In fact, the story no longer merits front-page headlines. If you dig deeper, you discover that the chief negotiator said Thursday a series of compromises had been achieved between the two "camps" claiming the right to rule Honduras. We are given a sense of optimism with the caution that tensions remain high and conflicts remain--particularly about who will be president. But this agreement is presented as progress. Still they repeat the lies of the coup leaders "fears" about President Zelaya seeking another term and subvert the Constitution. And in the name of "objectivity," the criminal gang of coup leaders are referred to by the more clinical term "de facto government."

Ogg asks you to support U.S. congressmembers Bill Delahunt, José Serrano and Jim McGovern's resolution 630, which "condemns 'the June 28 military coup in Honduras, led by graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC).'"

Just Foreign Policy national Coordinator Robert Naiman has a follow-up (7/15/09) on his July 13 catch of major U.S. new outlets relying solely on Honduras' La Prensa, "a pro-coup newspaper, with a history of publishing inaccurate information," to falsely "indicate that a plurality of Hondurans support the military coup against democratically elected President Zelaya."

Naiman looks at the first question in the poll cited by the paper--"Rough translation: Do you consider that the actions that Mel Zelaya took with respect to the fourth ballot justified his removal from the office of President of the Republic?"--responded to affirmatively by 41 percent, negatively by 28 percent and "Don't know/No answer" by 31 percent. And at the results of the second query--"Rough translation: How much do you agree with the action that was taken last Sunday that removed President Zelaya from the country?"--being "Support 41 percent, Oppose 46 percent, Don't know/No Answer 13 percent."

To Naiman, "the difference between the two questions seems fairly clear":

The first is a hypothetical: Do you think that President Zelaya's actions with respect to the referendum justified his removal from office? The second describes the events that actually took place: Do you agree with the action that removed President Zelaya from the country?

And the difference between the responses also seems fairly clear. 18 percent of the sample were "Don't know/No answer" on the hypothetical but opposed to the actions that actually took place.

Apparently, La Prensa only reported the first result....

And then, it appears, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post and Reuters reported what was in La Prensa without doing any independent checking; whereas the Voice Of America, the New York Times and AP reported the poll result directly, without relying solely on La Prensa--thus strongly suggesting, to say the least, that independent checking was quite feasible.

Furthermore, Naiman notes, "the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor compounded the error by using the word 'coup' in their reports, which clearly refers to the actions that actually took place, to which 46 percent were opposed, not 28 percent." Which means, he explains, that "with the benefit of hindsight--having access to both questions and the responses--there is still no defense of the original CSM and WSJ reports as accurate."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup"(7/3/09).

Newsweek has a rather curious take this week (7/20/09) on the Honduras coup in a short piece headlined "The World Goes Bananas Over Honduras":

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 into exile, the world took notice. International leaders unanimously decried the "assault on democracy." The Organization of American States expelled Honduras, the only nation since Cuba to be so disgraced. Venezuela even threatened to send in troops to reinstate Zelaya. But in the rush to judgment, heads of state showed selective zeal for democracy, at best. "It's odd that world leaders have determined that coups can only be committed against presidents, [but] not against Congress or the courts," says Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan diplomat. In recent years, executives in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have stacked their benches and legislatures with yes men and muzzled the media--while international leaders looked the other way. And unlike those aspiring autocrats, the Honduran military could reasonably argue that it was acting in good faith by ejecting a leader hellbent on seeking re-election--despite an ironclad constitutional clause preventing such a move. Of course, it's a good thing when world leaders stand up for the people. But if it's going to mean much, they should try to be consistent.

Actually, it's not odd at all that world leaders are condemning Honduras as a coup but not Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua; generally, coups are state takeovers by a small group with military/police backing, which hasn't happened anywhere in Latin America besides Honduras since...oh right, the anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela by folks on Arria's side.

And the Honduran military can't justify its coup by saying the leader they ejected was "hellbent on seeking re-election" for a number of reasons. First of all, it's clear that Zelaya wasn't even seeking re-election, since the actual advisory vote on amending the constitution was to happen in the same fall election that would choose Zelaya's successor. But the very word "election" in that excuse should give you a hint that perhaps there's something wrong with the logic involved. Asking voters if they want to vote on whether to change the constitution can hardly be considered such a threat to democracy that the military has to suspend that democracy in order to defend it.

It's notable that all the countries Newsweek listed have leftist governments aligned with Venezuela, while right-wing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who not long ago engineered a change to his country's constitution in order enable his re-election, didn't merit a mention--or much coverage at all when it happened, for that matter--nor did Venezuela's anti-Chavez coup, which U.S. media heartily endorsed. Perhaps the issue Newsweek ought to be probing is U.S. media's "selective zeal" for Latin American democracy.

Author and blogger Nikolas Kozloff has a BuzzFlash posting (7/1/09) about how, if you "read or listen to the mainstream media these days,"

you get the impression that [last] Sunday's coup in Honduras was all about a simple disagreement over the constitutionality of presidential term limits. But as the coup unfolds, it's becoming clear that the authorities want something more: the restoration of Honduras' conservative political order and an end to President Manuel Zelaya's independent foreign policy that had reached out to leftist countries such as Cuba and Venezuela.

As part of their effort to consolidate power, officials have moved quickly to restrain the free flow of information, in particular by cracking down on progressive-leaning media. Only TV stations sympathetic to the newly installed coup regime have been left alone, while others have been shut down. The climate of repression is similar to what we have seen elsewhere in Latin America in recent years. Specifically, there are eerie parallels to the April 2002 coup in Venezuela when the briefly installed right-wing government imposed a media blackout to further its own political ends.

Not that you would have read anything on that from prominent U.S. reporters. They reserve their free speech defenses exclusively for outlets helping the fight against official U.S. enemies--deserving or not. See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs: Distorting the Venezuelan Media Story" (5/25/07).

Looking at a June 28 New York Times report that the "Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup," A Tiny Revolution blogger Bernard Chazelle (6/28/09) writes that "from the byline alone, you know this is going to be good": "Elisabeth Malkin, in Mexico City, with reporting by Simon Romero from Caracas." To Chazelle this all "makes perfect sense since, as we all know, Mexico City and Caracas are the two major cities in Honduras. (Too bad they had no reporter in Bangkok. I hope the Pulitzer committee doesn't notice.)"

Moving on to the piece's actual content [since altered by the Times], Chazelle responds to the peculiar opening line stating that "The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum":

A referendum? OK, but for what? "... a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election"

OK, so we ask his opponents what the referendum is about. How about asking a more neutral observer? Like? "Mr. Zelaya pressed ahead with plans for a nonbinding referendum that opponents said would open the way for him to rewrite the constitution to run for re-election despite a one-term limit."

Yes, I think we got that point. Opponents of the referendum really don't like that referendum. But what's the referendum about? I'll go out on a limb and, on the basis of what our crack reporters have told us, I'll take a wild guess: "Can I, el Caudillo Zelaya, run for president again and again and again? Yes or no?"

Let's check with Dr. Wikipedia to see how well I'm doing: "Incumbent President Manuel Zelaya wanted to hold a non-binding referendum on whether to convene congress to modify the constitution."

So, "it's non-binding, meaning that it has no enforcement power," and "it's not a referendum to change the constitution," but only "a referendum to convene a constitutional assembly to modify the constitution." No wonder the Times lede has Chazelle reduced to this: "Hmm... me very confused."

One thing Chazelle is sure of: "There's no way this would have happened if the U.S. had said no. And if anyone doubts there's bad blood between Honduras and the U.S., one has to go back only nine months for Honduras' decision to delay the accreditation of the U.S. ambassador in solidarity with Bolivia."