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 Venezuelan blowhard is getting tiresome.
In the first of the "Dirty Harry" movies, 30 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 well-meaning idiot than 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 Mr Chavez's threat was the removal of the
president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, who had become Mr
Chavez's close ally.
Mr Zelaya was arrested by the Honduran military, bundled into
a plane and flown to Costa Rica on June 28.
Elected to a single term as president in 2006, Mr 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 Mr 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 Mr Zelaya's support nationally is down to about
30%.
Even Mr 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.
Mr 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 Mr Chavez used in Venezuela to
prolong his rule indefinitely (he now talks about being in
power until 2030), and Mr Zelaya believed, rightly or
wrongly, 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 Mr Zelaya ploughed
ahead regardless.
When the army, obedient to the Supreme Court's orders,
refused to help Mr Zelaya run the referendum, he fired the
army's commanding general and got his own party activists to
distribute ballot boxes.
At that point, Congress voted to remove Mr Zelaya because of
his "repeated violations of the constitution and the law and
disregard of orders and judgements 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 within the law.
Congress speaker Roberto Micheletti, who has taken over until
the November elections, insists he has become interim
president "as the result of an absolutely legal transition
process".
Mr Chavez and his Bolivian, Ecuadorian, Nicaraguan and Cuban
allies say it is a military coup, and insist the United
States is behind it.
Washington, which wasn't paying much attention until June 28,
has been bounced into backing Mr Zelaya too, as has the
Organisation of American States, whose secretary-general,
Jose Miguel Insulza, has promised to accompany Mr 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 Mr Zelaya too.
If Mr 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 November 29 election.
So long as that election is conducted properly, other
countries will have no grounds to reject its outcome - and Mr
Zelaya is constitutionally barred from running again.
End of story.
Unless Mr Chavez attacks Honduras, that is, but it is a long
way from Venezuela and Mr Chavez's forces are not equipped or
trained for amphibious assaults or long-range air-drops.
You can almost hear the Honduran soldiers muttering: "Go
ahead, make my day".
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.
