Constitutions matter, bad ones in particular. Never in the 180-year history of the Republic has that of Honduras been subjected to such close and widespread scrutiny as over the second half of 2009. This was because of the forceful removal of President Manuel (‘Mel’ to his followers and to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) Zelaya from office (and the country) by the military on the night of 28 June. That act, which involved troops forcing their way into the presidential compound, extracting Zelaya at gunpoint, and obliging him, clothed only in pyjamas, to be flown to neighbouring Costa Rica, was immediately defended as ‘constitutional’, and not only by the country's new head of state, Roberto Micheletti. Like Zelaya, a member of the traditional Liberal Party, Micheletti was joined in short order by the country's Supreme Court, which had ordered Zelaya's arrest, the Congress, which had overwhelmingly supported the issue of the arrest warrant, the high command of the armed forces, which executed the arrest, and their supporters in the United States.

Most prominent amongst the latter were John Negroponte (US ambassador to Tegucigalpa under Reagan, and principal organizer of the anti-Sandinista Contras); Otto Reich (ambassador to Venezuela under Reagan, and assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush, at the time of the 2002 attempted coup against Chávez); John McCain (Senator, R-AZ, 2008 presidential candidate, and with AT&T as his second biggest corporate backer, a discernibly interested party in the privatization of Hondutel, which Zelaya had blocked); and Lanny Davies (fellow Yale Law School student of Hilary Clinton, and Bill's spokesman on legal issues as well as the leading, paid lobbyist for the Micheletti regime in Washington).Footnote ¹ Even with such dramatis personae, which puts one strongly in mind of the late 1980s, one might still ask, why openly support the removal of an constitutionally elected president through the use of armed force? Especially if, as Consuelo Cruz puts it in Diamond et al.'s Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, ‘the concept of consolidated democracy as “the only game in town” applies only too literally to the Honduran case’ (p. 272).

Despite much talk of ‘international institutional regimes’, not one of the 379 articles of the Charter of 1982 (the 14th in Honduras's history) addressed the issue of impeachment of the head of state. Accordingly, when Zelaya, who was approaching the end of his term, sought to add on to the upcoming general elections a consultative referendum to ascertain popular support for constitutional reform, his many opponents in the system were stymied as to how best to halt him and yet retain a plausible claim to democratic process. Fearing that Zelaya's was but the first step to securing a mandate to stand for and serve a second term, as Chávez had recently managed in Venezuela, the other powers of the state eventually charged Zelaya with ultra vires activity when he removed the army commander, who had refused to distribute ballot boxes for the referendum.

So far, so procedurally typical of a ‘banana republic’? Certainly, it is possible to disparage such an imbroglio as simply the parochial machinations of a very poor, backward state dominated by a small, feuding oligarchy untrammelled by a strong democratic culture or robustly independent institutions. And yet domestically and regionally, the crisis in Honduras soon came to complicate a number of comfortably received beliefs about democratic transition, US–Latin American affairs, and the balance of power in the western hemisphere over the last 25 years.

In the first place, whereas the Constitution – described with some schadenfreude by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias as ‘the worst in the world’– failed to emulate that of 1787 in the USA with any concern about presidential treason and impeachment, it does explicitly outlaw the summary expulsion of any citizen from the country. Accordingly, in January 2010 six military officers were formally charged by the Attorney General with abuse of power, even whilst Micheletti still held power (and office). Although these charges would be heard by the very Supreme Court that initially ordered the arrest (but not the exiling), and so could hardly be expected to flourish, some display of due process was deemed necessary; the matter even made an appearance in the New York Times.Footnote ²

This was important both at home and abroad. The opening words to the blurb of Latin America's Struggle for Democracy run, in perfectly orthodox style for the genre and the zeitgeist:

It is sometimes said that the very thing that so attracts US political scientists to Latin America – a complex diversity prone to both failure and comparative categorization – is the same one that positively puts practising politicians off the region. Whatever the case – and as we shall shortly see in the examples of Arturo Valenzuela and Jorge Castañeda, there are those who energetically embrace both professions – the State Department and Obama administration as a whole knew that if they employed the apparently obvious term ‘military coup’ to the Honduran experience they would, by their own rules and regulations, be obliged not only to sever diplomatic relations but also economic and military aid. As a result, the final months of the year saw senior diplomats resorting to an ever-expanding repertoire of euphemisms, eventually settling on the suitably equivocating term of ‘de facto regime’ for the Micheletti administration. This allowed no enduring ‘sanctions’ to be imposed. None, in fact, were by any state, other than the US withdrawal of visas from the leading figures of the regime, which was in purely logistical terms completely vulnerable to the USAF base at Palmerola.Footnote ³ Indeed, there is some compelling evidence that the US encouraged Honduran participation in the Panamax 2009 regional military exercises.Footnote ⁴

Let us stay with this example for a while longer, for it also serves to make a wider point about the ‘intermestic’ qualities of US–Latin American relations as well as the division of powers in Washington. The key figure in this regard was Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), who, explicitly in support of the Micheletti regime in Tegucigalpa, single-handedly blocked the ratification of Professor Valenzuela as assistant secretary of state and head of the Bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs as well as of Thomas Shannon, the career diplomat who currently held that same position and whom the Obama administration now wished to serve as ambassador to Brasilia.Footnote ⁵ It was only when Shannon, in a complete U-turn, reassured DeMint that Washington would unconditionally recognize the result of the Honduran elections – held late in November 2009 under the ‘de facto regime’, boycotted by Zelaya's followers, and refused recognition by the Organization of American States – that the conservative senator relented, permitting one of the most accomplished political scientists working on the region in North America to practise what he professes (at Georgetown University).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Valenzuela, who is of Chilean origin and has particular expertise in the systemic weaknesses of ‘presidentialism’, made a pragmatic case for recognition that met the ‘realist’ requirements of the Republicans and the short-term needs for a diplomatic end-game.Footnote ⁶ The poll had been organized by an autonomous electoral tribunal before the coup had taken place, it had the support of the outgoing Congress and the Supreme Court, with almost all of the original candidates keen to pursue their campaigns amongst a populace that, whilst occasionally subject to curfews and police repression, was plainly divided in opinion. Micheletti and his cabinet would be gone anyway in weeks. Why not accept the fait accompli? After all, as Valenzuela writes in one of the two chapters under his name in Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, between 1930 and 1980 the 37 countries of Latin America underwent 277 changes of government, with 104 of those (37.5 per cent) being by military coup, whereas in the following decade to 1990 only seven of the 37 changes of administration took place through military intervention (p. 3).Footnote ⁷ If, as Cruz states, liberal democratic institutions are ‘the only game in town’, one may presumably countenance the occasional foul? After all, that is precisely what the Clinton White House (in which Valenzuela was a special adviser) did in the 1990s – most conspicuously in the case of the Fujimori regime in Peru – and no state was expelled from the OAS then, as Honduras was now.

The logic to such reasoning could certainly have derived from the residual clumsiness of a hegemon for which this was an annoying distraction in a region of secondary importance. US ambassadors in Latin America were not conspicuous for the diplomacy of their language in the well-scrubbed twenty-first century of democratic governance; and precisely what measure of sovereign respect did Mrs Clinton employ when she described Zelaya's (successful) effort to return to the country of which he was constitutionally president as ‘reckless’? Alternatively, with Obama detached, an impatient Clinton could well have indulged the machinations of those who found in Hugo Chávez a suitably rowdy whipping boy for their revanchiste appetites at a time of rising fortune for the regional left.

Here the sort of long-run perspective adopted by Paul Drake is of value since Central America and the Caribbean have long tended to attract such activity, from the filibustering of William Walker in the 1850s, to the Spanish-American War in Cuba (and Puerto Rico as well as the Philippines) to the gunboat diplomacy of the early twentieth century that debouched into military occupation of Honduras as well as Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to the CIA-backed intervention in Guatemala in 1954, the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, the counter-insurgency campaigns of the 1970s, and the nasty, unconstitutional efforts of the Iran–Contra conspiracy against the Sandinistas. With the Castro regime entrenched for fifty years as the hemisphere's sole communist government, one might reasonably expect if not open interventionism, then at least some species of acquiescence in procedural short-cuts, suitably scaffolded with the liberal democratic language that is the civilizing discourse of our day.

This was not the view of the bulk of Latin American governments, which, led by Brazil and often headed by presidents who had suffered direct repression in the 1970s, saw an exceptionally bad example that, in circumstances of continued inequality, ideological polarization, arms races, declining citizen security and rising drug-running, should not be allowed to stand. Moreover, Brasilia, which had begun to take up a new, more energetic regional and global role at the WTO meeting of September 2003 at Cancún, Mexico, was now prepared to exercise influence beyond its traditional sphere of South America, following up its lead role in the peacekeeping effort in Haiti with a second, most unusual foray into pan-Caribbean affairs.Footnote ⁸ What Messrs Shannon and Valenzuela secured in their short-term fix was likely to carry a substantial price with regard to relations with Brasilia, no longer the eternal ‘country of the future’, but now a substantial international power. Moreover, President Lula da Silva stood as a paragon of almost everything advocated by the ‘post-Washington Consensus’ that prevailed in the chancelleries of the West (and not a few chapters in the volumes under review here).

Lula's cautious management of the economy was, in fact, not simply a continuation of the structural adjustments undertaken by another former leftist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It was also deeply influenced by the traumas inflicted by the financial crisis of 1998, not to mention the natural aversion to inflation that you might expect of a man who was previously a poorly paid sheet-metal worker. Export-led growth – not least to China, a subject well discussed by Nicola Phillips in Which Way Latin America?– favourable commodity prices and huge finds of natural gas enabled the realization of innovative public policies such as the Bolsa Familiar, which effectively targeted the very poor in a country of widening inequality. Yet the PT government was plausibly and legitimately seen as of the left, and Lula effectively as well as instinctively engaged with the Castros, Chávez, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and the Kirchners from Argentina as a strategic ally.

Thirty years earlier one might have expected Mexico to have made its presence felt in the Honduras crisis, in pursuit of a longstanding ‘non-interventionist’ ethic which can be traced back to the War of 1846 against the USA and which was fortified in the years of the Revolution. Now, though, Mexico, which after 15 years of NAFTA sold 86 per cent of its exports to the USA (in 2005 only 19 per cent of Brazilian exports went to the States), was effectively nowhere on the diplomatic map (although one should recall that, along with Chile, in March 2003 Mexico steadfastly resisted US pressure in the UN Security Council over the invasion of Iraq).Footnote ⁹ If anything symbolized the shifting balance of regional power, it was the fact that Manuel Zelaya, having inveigled his way back into Honduras in September 2009, sought protection in the Embassy of Brazil in Tegucigalpa.

One senses that Jorge Castañeda would only be partially understanding of such a choice since as foreign minister of Mexico he had, through a much vaunted Plan Puebla-Panamá, sought to restore national influence in the Isthmus. Now a professor at New York University, Castañeda has followed up on Utopia Unarmed, his 1993 signature critique of the Latin American left of the Cold War era, with a steady stream of writings that distinguish ‘two’ lefts in the region and expressly criticizes that which he has dubbed ‘populist’– notably Chávez, but also (the often surly) Morales, President Correa of Ecuador (who has nonetheless kept the US dollar as the national currency – perhaps because he has an Illinois PhD in economics), and, with less consistency (perhaps because Nestor so single-mindedly ignored ‘abroad’), the Kirchners.Footnote ¹⁰ On the safe, social democratic side of the divide, as Castañeda reads it, stood Lula, the Concertación governments of Chile (notably that of Michelle Bachelet) and those of the Frente Amplio (notably Tabaré Vásquez) in Uruguay. It is hard to know from Castañeda's work – he has chapters in both Which Way Latin America? and Latin America's Struggle for Democracy– where on this spectrum he would have placed Zelaya because, like almost all the books under review, he pays scant attention to Central America, still less Honduras (Zelaya took office in January 2006 but makes no appearance in these titles).Footnote ¹¹ However, one senses that he would allocate the stagey Honduran to the Chávez camp because, despite his deeply right-wing past and successful ranching operation, and notwithstanding his latter-day attachment to constitutionalism, Zelaya is still a talker before he's an institutionalist.

For Castañeda, Chávez has become such a threat to the political health and regional security of Latin America that his (now decade-long) prominence expresses a strategic loss of US authority. Castañeda is quite prepared to countenance the merits of ‘benign neglect’ towards the region on the part of Washington, and he has entered into a polemic over this with Michael Shifter, another contributor to Which Way Latin America? and now president of the Inter-American Dialogue, which lobbies for enhanced US engagement with the region.Footnote ¹² For Shifter, a practical and progressive policy would be a continuation of that adopted by the Obama administration in its early days through to the Port-of-Spain Summit of April 2009 – a smiling but studious refusal to be provoked by Chavista rhetoric, not least because while it plays to a traditionally buoyant anti-imperialist motif, all the polling data from a region not used to polls suggest that Obama and ‘American values’ are still highly popular.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, regardless of the taunts, Venezuela continues to supply 15 per cent of US oil imports.

In a characteristically idiosyncratic and suggestive appropriation of the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Laurence Whitehead's opening chapter in Which Way Latin America? – the most analytically and empirically varied of the collections under review – identifies three ‘metanarratives’ in and around Latin America: Marxist; liberal internationalist/‘end of history’; and ‘civilizational’ narratives of war on terror. Each, he sensibly finds, is more than partially flawed and unable to provide a viable map for the contemporary region, which is, as a consequence, ‘navigating in the fog’. Perhaps it is not surprising that so many social scientists, particularly in North America, have homed in on narrow institutional matters or, betwixt the rigours of the Washington Consensus and the born-again Keynesianism of the sub-prime recession, took pious pot-shots at ‘economic populism’ as if it were little more than reheated protectionism or not urged by a confluence of widening inequality and increasing democratic participation.

In his introduction to Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, the Paraguayan political scientist Diego Abente both recognizes the pressing challenge of poverty and upholds a pretty regular behaviouralist definition of ‘populism’, which has rarely lost favour in the analysis of politics in the western hemisphere. But Abente's prime categories are ‘common-sense’ gradations of what Whitehead would call a liberal internationalist agenda – degrees of democratic depth or civic and institutional culture: ‘electoral democracy’ (now installed everywhere but, as Honduras makes clear, an insufficient condition); ‘liberal democracy’ (broadly, an operable separation of powers and the rule of law); and ‘inclusionary democracy (where all the above apply, in tandem with significant distribution of public goods and social cohesion). As with Paul Drake, who deploys somewhat different criteria, Abente can only find space for Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay in this last category (although one might note that the first has recently employed anti-terror legislation to contain a property-rights challenge from the indigenous Mapuche people; the second has had more former heads of state indicted for malfeasance than any other republic; and the third – like Brazil – has yet fully to confront the moral and legal residue of dictatorship). Abente's ‘second tier’ of countries includes Argentina, Brazil and Mexico – the largest states in the region – on the grounds of the record of their domestic institutional record rather than any wider, transnational assessment of political economy. From this perspective, Brazil is more backward than Costa Rica, which is assuredly true if you're landless in the backlands of Maranhao and not a manager at the Intel plant in San José, but that is only one, pretty limited point of view.

Eschewing discussion of the small countries of Central America as well as the Caribbean – an approach shared by Drake (who nonetheless includes those polities in his very useful statistical tables) – Abente's final, rather bedraggled group are ‘the troubled Andean countries’, including Colombia and Peru, which have modern constitutions and, at the time of publication, conservative (or at least post-populist) governments. Here we should note that the editor is dutifully summarizing the work of contributors to a volume drawn from the Journal of Democracy and so is understandably focused on a rather formal range of variables (although Eduardo Posada-Carbó's insightful identification of an ‘authoritarian attitude to time’ shared between President Uribe and the FARC narco-guerrilla suggests the potential of a wider interpretative compass).

The contribution to this volume on indigenous politics by the late Donna Lee Van Cott is very modest in length, and, being originally published in October 2007, predictably reflects the mobilizational temper – particularly in Ecuador and Bolivia – of majority populations for whom two centuries of insufficient elite striving for European-style liberal democracy looked more like a combination of anarchy and tyranny, rather than the dichotomy of Drake's title. A decade into the twenty-first century these – more than the essentially caudillo-led experience in Venezuela – are the sites of the strongest ‘populist’ experiences although one should note that they also combine deep-seated aversion to inflation as well as to recent neo-liberal privatization of goods held in public under a variety of modes of production stretching back to the pre-Columbian era.

Amongst Van Cott's many gifts was a sweet singing voice, particularly for folk and country-and-western music, the performance of which took her well away from the rarified concerns of the seminar-room. She was not a professional ethnographer and spoke no Andean languages, but she had a fine knack of finding fresh social science perspectives on phenomena deemed by her mainstream colleagues as simply problematic. Her last book develops an earlier interest in deconstructing some of the sacred cows of the Washington Consensus, like the path-breaking work of Charles Hale and Deborah Yashar on ‘multiculturalism’ and that of Jean-Paul Faguet on ‘decentralization’.Footnote ¹⁴ It is a fitting memorial to a fine scholar in that it never flatters to deceive as it questions the paradigms that promise a comfortable critical reception at home.

In my own view the new Bolivian Constitution which emerged at the end of 2008 from the public trials and tribulations itemized by Van Cott is almost as bad a charter as is that of Honduras because of its internal contradictions and vacuous pieties. That, of course, matters a great deal, but it is by no means the end of the issue. The mobilization in support of the charter (which cost hundreds of lives and brought down three presidents), the process of public articulation and education, the rising sense of indigenous cultural valoration, and the creativity in managing the interface between property and usufruct rights in powerful liberal and communitarian idioms that this eight-year experience involved is too rich a human historical experience to be consigned to some third-class definition of democracy. But, of course, different it is, populist it also is, and unresolved it undeniably is. The Bolivian Constitution is a contemporary pow-wow; it continues to uphold, albeit under somewhat altered tenancy, World Bank commandments alongside Andean cosmologies. This is less a meta-narrative than a ‘conversation’– in polite North American parlance – without the pretence that prevails, for instance, on the miserable reservations of the Dakotas.

Invoking Ernesto Laclau's original understanding of populism as an outcome of the fracturing of a ‘dominant bloc’, Joe Foweraker has made a point not dissimilar to that of his Oxford colleague, Laurence Whitehead – that ‘much modern democratic theory of Latin America…fails to take sufficient account of the protean immanence of oligarchy, and takes democratic politics to be the whole of a political system of which it is in fact just a part’.Footnote ¹⁵

Nobody dealt that hand with greater assurance than Samuel Huntington, probably the only political scientist to make Latin America popular in the profession as a whole – Guillermo O'Donnell surely made it respectable – as well as moving shed-loads of hardbacks purveying the idea of civilizational melt-down at the hands of Hispanic immigrants as well as Arabian bombers. In truth, Who Are We? was composed with such flawed methodology and logic that the young author of Political Order in Changing Societies would surely have charged it down without let or hindrance.Footnote ¹⁶ For Huntington, Latin America was indeed a homogeneous bloc, mysteriously rendered alien to Western civilization because it was a teleological off-shore evolution of Habsburg Spain.Footnote ¹⁷

This was a pretty traditional ‘exceptionalist’ rap, which as Greg Grandin has engagingly shown, links Cotton Mather to Louis Hartz as well as to lesser historio-cultural determinists, like Howard Wiarda and Glenn Dealy, who swamped the US textbook market of the late twentieth century with their magic bullet explanation of a trans-epochal absolutist inheritance.Footnote ¹⁸ However, a long-range explanation of ‘how Latin America fell behind’ (almost all of our titles are of this ilk) has enjoyed something of a renaissance at the hands of practitioners of New Economic History, dead-set against the nostrums of dependency theory, curious about long-range patterns of growth, and pluralist in their understanding of the constituent features of political economy.Footnote ¹⁹

As with Paul Drake's long narrative survey, which almost adopts a path-dependency approach but sustains sufficient respect for rupture to make its treatment of history interesting, Francis Fukuyama's collection seriously considers this notion of a profoundly prejudicial endowment from the past. Yet, as one might expect from the author of The End of History, that option is duly considered, only to be discarded.Footnote ²⁰ The answer is much more agency-driven and essentially remediable by post-Washington Consensus ‘smart social policy’, in which a quotient of tolerance of non-US/multilaterally-generated ideas is generously displayed. The volume contains chapters written by some of the most distinguished historians and social scientists working in the field, but it has the feel of rapid, sound-bite construction for a rather filigree policy agenda.

Although Russell Crandall's third book has been issued by Cambridge University Press as a monograph and gets good puffs from Richard Feinberg, Riordan Roett and Michael Schifter – all serious players in the policy world – a third of its chapters are co-written and most have the feel of an opportunist cut-and-paste assembly of recent reportage. That might be occasioned by Professor Crandall's secondment to the Pentagon or possibly by second thoughts about his previous volume, Gunboat Diplomacy: U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, which must surely constitute the quintessential liberal interventionist study of the decade and which one ardently hopes is not the only item on the relevant reading lists of West Point and Annapolis.Footnote ²¹ Still, Crandall here inveighs against Washington's ‘tutorial reflex’, which is not an unenlightened response to recent developments and, as every reader of Government and Opposition well knows, is a habit best indulged quietly at home and resisted assiduously abroad.