When the mainstream media, academia, the state department, senior civil servants, and the leading politicians (the Cathedral) get behind an issue, they win, no matter how stupid, evil, or simply insane that position is. And if they are temporarily stalled, there will be some compromise, followed, when no one is looking, by a compromise on that compromise, until they have what they were determined to get.
It is interesting therefore that so far, neither president Zelaya, nor anyone resembling him, is president for life of Honduras.
In a free and fair election, conducted with lots of international observers, the candidate the Cathedral did not like, won.
Quietly, furtively, and shamefacedly, the US has announced it will recognize the result, despite previously ranting that if free and fair elections were permitted, it would legitimize a coup – the “coup” being the procedures that the Honduran constitution prescribed to prevent free and fair elections from being subverted by political power.
The Honduran Constitution prescribes swift, simple, informal, public, and drastic solutions to such problems. This seems to work against the Cathedral, which likes a cloud of complexity, compromise, and secrecy to conceal its shenanigans. It was a “coup” because it was not the kind of process that the Cathedral could manipulate without anyone understanding what was going on.