On Sunday morning, masked, armed soldiers disarmed the presidential guard at the official palace in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, woke President Manuel Zelaya at gunpoint and bundled him off to the airport for a flight to Costa Rica in his pyjamas, where he has been summarily exiled. Later that day, the Honduran Congress voted him out of office in absentia, replacing him with the Congress president, Roberto Micheletti.

Condemnation of the action came swiftly. T&T’s Prime Minister Patrick Manning immediately denounced the overthrow of the elected President in a statement on Sunday, calling for the immediate restitution of the constitutionally elected Honduran leader. US President Barack Obama called on the Honduran political leadership to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez decried the action as “a troglodyte act of the 19th century.”

President Chavez is known to be a supporter of the populist policies of Mr Zelaya, and the incident that led to the Honduran President’s ouster has some telling parallels in recent Venezuelan history. At the core of the armed action against the elected President of Honduras is a simmering issue that has been fermenting for months in the Central American nation. President Zelaya has been trying to change the Honduran constitution through a non-binding referendum to extend term limits on the presidency. The Honduran Supreme Court, its electoral officials and Ombudsman have rejected the referendum, describing it as illegal. The Honduran President then ordered the army to distribute ballots for the referendum, a requirement of the electoral process in that country. The army’s chief, Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, refused the order and was fired. The heads of the navy and air force resigned in quick succession.

On the eve of the opening of polls for the referendum, soldiers, acting on as yet unannounced authority, took action. The almost universal condemnation of the action is unsurprising in the region, where armed overthrow of elected governments remains an all too recent and bitter memory for many countries. When President Chavez pursued the scrapping of term limits for his presidency in 2007, the national referendum was put to the population after significant debate and defeated by a vote of 51 per cent. In February, however, Chavez won another referendum on the matter and can now continue to face the electorate without constitutional restraint. It can be argued that in Venezuela term limits have been scrapped with the endorsement of a majority of the people.

The reaction to President Zelaya’s ouster may be couched in terms of electoral democracy in the first world, but in Latin America, the strained relations between populist presidents who appeal to a large base of voters and the interests of institutions and corporations who rose to success in an era of far more constrained popular participation in the electoral process remains a vital and ongoing factor in the politics and governance of these nations. For much of the 20th century, nations in Latin America struggled with this balance, which in far too many cases veered in favour of the powerful and well armed. Many of these military incursions ended up having a negative net effect on the economic growth of not only the countries that endured them, but the unsettled nature of these regimes affected neighbouring nations, who were their closest and most natural trading partners.

Honduras is bounded to its west by Guatemala and El Salvador and to the southeast by Nicaragua, and the idea of military force prevailing over the elected will of the people must be deeply unsettling to these nations as well as to others in the region. The bloodless but nonetheless violent removal of the elected Honduran President was a rash, desperate action in response to an issue that should have been managed through the democratic instruments available to the Honduran Congress. Sunday morning’s invasion of the presidential palace was a failure in the Honduran political process that favoured the immediate strength of the military sword over the lasting power of the legislative pen.