So in the end, it would appear that the Honduran "business class" (the euphemism most commonly used in the corporate press) has succeeded in simply removing an inconvenient president - inconvenient because he had an attack of scruples and social solidarity. Granted, it wasn't like the good old days, when such a leader would simply be killed, but effective in the long run. Send the military to carry the man out of the country in his pajamas, refuse to seriously negotiate with him or his representatives, a bit of the old "mano duro" applied to his supporters, and then a sham election that supposedly "brings back democracy". Impressive.
More impressive still was the Obama administration's (and State Department's) handling of the issue. Not heavy-handedly pro-coup as in the past...no, now we are supposedly in a new epoch. But even with mild pressure from Washington, the coup organizers would have had to yield. The Administration's utterly disingenuous response? - "you call the US imperialistic all these years, and now you want us to intervene in the internal politics of a sovereign nation...this is a problem for the Hondurans".
Right. For one of the first times in history, Washington has a chance to truly and effectively apply pressure to "defend democracy" in Latin America, and they are suddenly overwhelmed with concern for a nation's sovereignty.
And so does history once again outdo parody. The great "defender of democracy", the country that cynically and falsely employed that rationale for decades in support of tyranny, suddenly loses its taste for democracy-defending when the use of such a term could legitimately be applied. And this under Obama.
¡Hay que joderse!
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