Gwynne Dyer

Venezuela‘s president, Hugo Chavez, has declared that any attack on

his country's embassy in Honduras will lead to war between the two nations,

and I can't help wishing that the Hondurans would call his bluff. The

Venezeluan blowhard is getting tiresome.

In the first of the "Dirty Harry" movies, thirty years ago, Clint

Eastwood achieved immortality with a single line. Pointing a very large

pistol at an evil-doer (as George W. Bush might have put it), he addresses

the miscreant, who is thinking about reaching for his own gun, as follows:

"You've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya,

punk?''

Hugo Chavez is more a well-meaning idiot than an evil-doer, but the

question is the same: will he really go for his gun? The answer is no. He's

not a complete idiot, and his threats to attack other Latin American

countries whose behaviour offends him (the most recent was Colombia, last

year) always fade away after a while.

What provoked Chavez's threat was the removal of the president of

Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, who had become Chavez's close ally. Zelaya was

arrested by the Honduran military, bundled into a plane and flown to Costa

Rica on 28 June.

Elected to a single term as president in 2006, Zelaya astonished

friend and foe alike by turning out to be not the centre-right,

business-friendly politician he had seemed. Instead, he began moving

steadily to the left in his domestic policies, and linked Honduras

diplomatically with the other socialist governments in Latin America.

There is no doubt that he caused deep annoyance to the conservative

elite who have traditionally dominated Honduran affairs, but they made no

move to overthrow him. Why bother? The constitution limits Honduran

presidents to one four-year term in office, and Zelaya's term comes to an

end next January.

No other leftist candidate was likely to win the presidential

election that is due in November: recent opinion polls suggested that

Zelaya's support nationally is down to around 30 percent. Even Zelaya's own

party was unlikely to nominate another leftist as his successor, and many

of its members no longer supported him. So all the major political forces

were content to wait for the clock to run out on him -- until he started

trying to change the constitution.

Zelaya's bright idea was to end the one-term limit so he could run

for president again himself. It's exactly the same tactic that Chavez has

used in Venezuela to prolong his rule indefinitely (he now talks about

being in power until 2030), and Zelaya believed, rightly or wrongly, that

he could make it work for him in Honduras. So he set about organising a

referendum on the subject. It was scheduled for last Sunday.

Alas, the president of Honduras does not have the right to organise

a referendum all by himself, and the country's Supreme Court ordered him to

stop. Congress also condemned the manoeuvre, but Zelaya plowed ahead

regardless. When the army, obedient to the Supreme Court's orders, refused

to help Zelaya run the referendum, he fired the army's commanding general

and got his own party activists to distribute the ballot boxes.

At that point, Congress voted to remove Zelaya because of his

"repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of

orders and judgments of the institutions," and the Supreme Court ordered

the army to intervene and arrest the president. It was a mistake to put him

on a plane bound for Costa Rica, as that made it look like a traditional

Central American coup, but apart from that everything was done within the

law.

The speaker of the Congress, Roberto Micheletti, who has taken over

until the November elections, insists that he has become interim president

"as the result of an absolutely legal transition process." Chavez and his

Bolivian, Ecuadorian, Nicaraguan and Cuban allies claim it's a military

coup, and insist that the United States is behind it.

Washington, which wasn't paying much attention until last Sunday,

has been bounced into backing Zelaya too, as has the Organisation of

American States, whose secretary-general, Jose Miguel Insulza, has promised

to accompany Zelaya in a grand return to Honduras. US Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton has condemned the events in Honduras as a coup, and for all

we know she might accompany Zelaya too.

If Chavez decided to go along too, they would have enough people

for a game of celebrity bridge, but all this posturing won't change

anything. It might be different if the next Honduran election were years

away and there was time for diplomatic and economic pressures to wear the

legitimate Honduran authorities down, but it's only five months until the

29th of November.

So long as that election is conducted properly, other countries

will have no grounds to reject its outcome -- and Zelaya is

constitutionally barred from running again. End of story.

Unless Chavez actually attacks Honduras, that is, but it is a long

way from Venezuela and Chavez's forces are not really equipped or trained

for amphibious assaults or long-range air-drops. You can almost hear the

Honduran soldiers muttering "Go ahead, make my day."

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