Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Notable Quotable: A perspective on Honduras

The real problem is that the apparent success of the election lets the orchestrators of the coup get away scot-free after casually kicking out an elected official. It is one thing to convince the international community to turn a blind eye to a crass deposition of a legitimate president; it is quite another to achieve that without paying any price whatsoever for it. The coup team has now accomplished both. And so the shortcomings of the Honduras's rotten political system have simply been crystallized.
---Former Costa Rican vice president and current Brookings Institution senior fellow Kevin Casas-Zamora gave his two cents on Sunday’s Honduran elections.

In the roughly two days since the ballots closed president-elect Porfirio Lobo has called for unity in a very deeply divided, volatile, and impoverished Honduras. He will have to work fast to earn international recognition of the elections; the latest Ibero-American Summit ended on Tuesday with a lack of consensus over the legitimacy of Sunday’s elections.

Should the elections be recognized regardless of the nature of Manuel Zelaya’s ouster? Are coups (military or civilian) justified in a democracy? Will Porfirio Lobo survive his term in the Honduran presidency? Could the political problems in Honduras manifest themselves in other Latin American countries?

In short, what do you think?

Image- Guardian UK (Supporters of Porfirio Lobo celebrated his victory in the Honduran presidential elections).
Online Sources- Foreign Policy, BBC News, The Latin Americanist, Xinhua

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