Wednesday, October 14, 2009

'Coup' Brought No Chaos to Honduras

Subject: txt intl - DeMint:
Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he is mystified at the hostility the Obama administration is showing to Honduras since that long-time U.S. ally removed President Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with Vice President Roberto Micheletti.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the South Carolina senator recounts how the White House revoked the U.S. travel visas of Micheletti, his government, and private citizens — refusing to talk to the government in Tegucigalpa.

“It's frozen desperately needed financial assistance to one of the poorest and friendliest U.S. allies in the region,” DeMint argues. “It won't release the legal basis for its insistence on Mr. Zelaya's restoration to power. Nor has it explained why it's setting aside America's longstanding policy of supporting free elections to settle these kinds of disputes.”

Bottom line: DeMint wants the administration to lighten up.

“America's Founding Fathers — like the framers of Honduras's own constitution — believed strong institutions were necessary to defend freedom and democracy from the ambitions of would-be tyrants and dictators,” he writes. “Faced by Mr. Zelaya's attempted usurpations, the institutions of Honduran democracy performed as designed, and as our own Founding Fathers would have hoped.”

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