When is a coup not really a coup?

I had a hard time believing what I was hearing on the radio. An NPR reporter was interviewing the Honduran ambassador (or ex-ambassador, depending on whom you believe) to the United States about the military action that sent President Manuel Zelaya on a one-way trip to Costa Rica. The ambassador, Roberto Flores Bermudez, insisted that the rousting of Zelaya from his bed by armed men and flying him to exile was not a military coup. It was a legitimate constitutional action, he said. Huh? The ambassador, who had returned to Honduras for consultations with the new government, said that Zelaya had violated the constitution and that a legal order had been issued for his arrest, and the arrest was carried out. The new government was constitutional and legitimate, he said.

Wow! I thought. That is certainly a new way to justify a military coup. The coup — few people have called it anything else — has been roundly condemned by everyone from Venezuela's socialist Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama. But it turns out that there's more to the story than can be seen at first glance. Details have begun to emerge from other media sources.

Zelaya, it seems, had sought to extend his power beyond the single four-year term allowed by the Honduran constitution. He called for a national referendum to allow him to change the constitution. Under the constitution, the president does not have the authority to call for a referendum or amend the constitution. The Honduran congress condemned his unilateral action. Honduran courts ruled that he could not hold a referendum without the concurrence of congress. Congress began impeachment proceedings. Zelaya said, essentially, "the hell you say!" and had military officers under his control confiscate and distribute ballot boxes for his illegal referendum. The Honduran Supreme Court issued an arrest order for Zelaya, who was thumbing his nose at every legal authority in the country. It was this arrest that Ambassador Flores was defending as legitimate.

Imagine, by way of comparison, if Richard Nixon had chosen to fight to the bitter end in 1974. What if he had refused the turn over the White House tapes and had been impeached by the Senate and then refused to leave office? Suppose he cited the threat of nuclear war or the delicate situation in the Middle East and ordered military commanders to protect him from insurgents at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Would the removal of Nixon from the Oval Office by a military contingent be a coup de etat? Would what Zelaya's opponents did be any different than forcibly removing Nixon?

The background of the Honduran military action has received little attention in this country, and probably in others as well. The Organization of American States has called for Zelaya to be reinstated. Honduran opponents feared that Zelaya would, like his friend Hugo Chavez, set himself up as a perpetual president, essentially a dictator who would turn Honduras into a socialist haven without the oil wealth of Venezuela, that is, a wretched "workers' paradise" like Cuba. Zelaya had been elected as a conservative but declared himself a socialist in 2007.

Zelaya's opponents botched the arrest of the president by attacking in the dead of night and spiriting him out of the country instead of holding him for trial. It's hard to know from this distance whether impeachment of Zelaya is warranted or whether he should be allowed to serve out the remainder of the one term to which he was legitimately elected, but it's obvious that this was not a typical military coup, and the United States and other countries should see beyond the initial appearances.