There have been several good takes on the crisis in Honduras. The Obama administration’s condemnation of the military take-over, and its deference to the OAS are a welcome change to the days of the Bush administration.
Process is everything in this case. As Brookings’s Casas-Zamora points out, President Zelaya was playing fast and loose with the constitution, under which the office of the president cannot be changed by plebiscite. If Zelaya were returned to office and was subsequently removed by trial, it would further institutionalize the norm of civilian rule and provide the relatively young democracy with some fruitful constitutional stress testing. (Interestingly, the Honduran constitution doesn’t include a mechanism for impeachment. The National Assembly/Congress has the right to “approve or disapprove” of the administrative conduct of the executive and other offices, but whether this extends to remove from office I’m not sure (Article 205.20).)
What’s going on in Honduras reveals the persistence of the view in Latin America that the military is (or should be) a fundamentally constabulary institution, one which in practice is geared overwhelmingly toward keeping the peace at home while remaining ostensibly concerned with fighting and winning interstate wars. The threat this conception poses to the consolidation of democracy is, by now, clear. Less obvious are the downsides this poses for military organizations themselves.
When militaries are conceived around a constabulary role, they become very skilled at staging coups, breaking riots, and running police states. In turn, they end up sacrificing effectiveness in conventional war. Of course, there are probably organizational pressures to, ahem, expand the military’s scope of operations since the threats to most countries in Latin America are minimal at worst and imaginary at best. But as Stephen Biddle points out, there is pretty good evidence to suggest that doctrine and tactics are at least as important on the battlefield as technology. In other words, maybe if the Argentinean military wasn’t also concerned with running the country in 1982, the Falklands/Malvinas War might have turned out somewhat differently.
–Brian
