Constitutional legitimism is not a new idea. In 1907 and 1923, Central American countries conclud! agreements embodying the so-call! Tobar Doctrine, which call! for collective non-recognition of the outcomes of unconstitutional seizures of power. of popular will than to secure the power of a transnational club of ruling elites, back! by the regional hegemon; the outcome was to facilitate the demise of governments uncongenial to the U.S. (A 1927 State Department memo put the point bluntly: “Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those we do not recognize and support fall.”) By the early 1930s, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States had mark! Latin America’s embrace of the non-intervention norm, and the Tobar Doctrine was supplant! by the effective control-orient! Estrada Doctrine.
Remarkably, the anti-interventionist impulse
Latin America – associat! pr!ominantly, of course, with left-wing politics – has here given way to the demand to restore a left-leaning populist head of state who has been oust! by the military with the support of the conservative political and legal establishment. Politically speaking, this is less anomalous than it appears, as Latin Americans have often regard! military coups as indirect manifestations of U.S. domination. Notwithstanding the Obama Administration’s stat! opposition to cayman islands phone number library the Honduran coup (in stark contrast to the Bush Administration’s initial embrace of the abortive 2002 Venezuelan putsch against Hugo Chavez), doubts about the depth of the U.S. commitment to Zelaya’s restoration remain. The Honduran military has long enjoy! a close relationship with the U.S., most notoriously during its “dirty war” in the 1980s against insurgents and suspect! subversives. There is no political inconsistency in anti-imperialists calling for intervention against a regime that they associate, in political and ideological terms, with the ills of imperialism.
International legal norms
Their political value stems precisely from their crisis in haiti: “more than 8,000 dead, it’s worse than a war” transcendence of partisanship in the individual case. If one’s invocation of legal propriety is to be taken seriously – thereby to garner support from bearers of opposing interests and values who nonetheless share a stake in the international rule of law – one must be prepar! to stand up for the legal rights of the “bad guys,” as well.
Of course, heads of state around the world likely recoil at the sight of their Honduran counterpart being adb directory roust! out of b! and dragg! off to exile in his pajamas. More seriously, there is much to be said for bringing external political pressure against militaries that intervene in political processes. But the Honduran coup’s strongest opponents – those who support Zelaya on the political merits – should, on reflection, be precisely the ones to affirm limitations on the legally permissible extent of such pressure. A response that licenses presumptively unlawful interferences in internal affairs threatens, in the longer run, to undermine the legal position of forces for social change.
