Why would soldiers at gunpoint awaken Manuel Zelaya, president of Honduras, and take him to Costa Rica in his pajamas?

Zelaya was facing the end of his one-time, four-year presidential term. He liked the job and wanted to extend his term of office by calling for a public referendum to change the constitution’s limit of presidential terms.

The Honduran constitution contains 379 articles, all which can be changed by laws that allow for constitutional rewrites. These are not within the president’s powers and may only occur by a constitutional assembly called through a national referendum approved by Congress. The exceptions are seven articles known in Spanish as “articulos petreos”, meaning that they cannot be altered or reformed in any way. These define the form of government, the national territory, and the extent and limit of presidential terms.

Breaking the law, Zelaya declared the referendum on his own, even after Congress informed him he could not do this and Zelaya had his chum, Hugo Chávez, (Yes, THAT Hugo Chávez!) ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Honduran Supreme Court ruled Zelaya’s referendum unconstitutional and instructed the military NOT to carry out the normal logistics of the referendum vote.

Honduras’ top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told Zelaya that he would have to comply with the instructions of the Supreme Court. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Zelaya refused to recognize this and confident that many Hondurans would take his side, decided he would run the referendum himself and decreed that it would go forward. Zelaya then led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the admonitions by the Attorney General, Congress and the Supreme Court’s order.

THAT’S why the morning when the referendum would have taken place, soldiers at gunpoint awoke Manuel Zelaya, President of Honduras, and took him to Costa Rica in his pajamas!

Chávez and his sock puppets, the Socialist leaders throughout the region, called ‘”chavistas”, claim Zelaya was the victim of a military coup. These Socialist sock puppets want to hide the facts that the military was acting on a constitutionally backed court order from the attorney general, the Congress and the Supreme Court who asserted themselves for the purpose of defending the rule of law and the Honduran constitution.

Now, my questions are: Why are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and President Barack Obama backing the return to power of Chávez’ anointed sock puppet, deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya? Why, despite the visit of Sen. Lugar and his ad hoc committee to Honduras, his report to Congress and his call for Clinton to explain in detail the United States’ policy on the Honduran political crisis, do we STILL not have coverage by any major English speaking news, other than the Wall Street Journal, or by television’s editorial pundits?

It’s clear that in the United States, the death of an entertaining, crotch-grabbing, wealthy, alleged pedophile is preeminent to the struggles of a neighboring democracy to keep itself from being toppled by “chavistas” with the apparent aid and abetment of Clinton and Obama. My conjecture is that Hugo Chávez’ petroleum and/or his cocaine connections in the region now dictate U.S. foreign policy and run the U.S.

Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will NOT get my votes in the future and I will encourage others not to vote for Chávez’ sock puppets. I’ve never liked Chávez’ politics, even if my first cousin, Manuel Zelaya, deposed president of Honduras, embraced them.

By Carlos Barrientos.