Prophetic memo about Honduras predicted "difficult" year for Zelaya one year before coup

A year before popularly elected President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a coup, Charles Ford, the U.S. ambassador in Tegucigalpa, sent a memo (LINK) to Washington that stated: "The last year and a half of the Zelaya Administration will be, in my view, extraordinarily difficult for our bilateral relationship."

In words that now seem prophetic, on May 14, 2008 Ford wrote: "Honduran institutions and friendly governments will need to be prepared to act privately and in public to help move Honduras forward."

On June 28, 2009, Honduran soldiers stormed the presidential palace, disarmed the guard, and put Zelaya on a plane to Costa Rica. Roberto Micheletti, the next person in the presidential line of succession, then assumed power.

Although Ford did not explicitly recommend destablizing the Honduran government, he underscored the idea that "Zelaya has no real friends outside of his family, as he ridicules publicly those closest to him" and that "strategically he stands alone."

Manuel Zelaya was born into a wealthy Honduran family and started out as a centre-right politician with the Liberal Party of Honduras but moved steadily to the left over his political career.

In an article in New Statesman magazine published shortly after the president was ousted, Xiomara Zelaya, his daughter, claimed that her father "achieved free education for all children, guaranteed school meals for more than 1.6 million children from poor families, reduced poverty by almost 10 per cent during two years of government, and provided direct state help for 200,000 families in extreme poverty, supplying free electricity to those members of society most in need."

The U.S. ambassador interpreted Zelaya’s legacy differently. "Zelaya’s principal goal in office is to enrich himself and his family while leaving a public legacy as a martyr who tried to do good but was thwarted at every turn by powerful, unnamed interests," wrote Ford. "Various public statements over his tenure suggest he would be quite comfortable as a martyr who tried but failed honorably in his attempt to seek out social justice for the poor."

Right wing Latin American analysts went further. "The gravest threat to liberty comes from elected populists who are seeking to subject the institutions of the law to their megalomaniac whims," wrote Alvaro Vargas Llosa, son of the famous Peruvian writer Maria Vargas Llosa, in an op-ed published in the Washington Post, referring to a referendum that Zelaya held to change the constitution that barred him from re-election.

Llosa also attacked Zelaya for bringing Honduras into Petrocaribe, which Llosa described as "a mechanism set up by Hugo Chavez for lavishing oil subsidies on Latin American and Caribbean countries in exchange for political subservience" and for joining the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA), a trade alliance that Llosa described as "a political conspiracy that seeks to expand populist dictatorship to the rest of Latin America."

The ambassador’s June 2008 memo makes it clear that Ford was frustrated that Zelaya was not supportive enough of the U.S. "He made no attempt to disseminate his "(M)ay photo ops with President Bush after the June 2006 meeting in Washington," wrote the U.S. ambassador. "Most noticeable to me has been his avoidance of public meetings with visiting US officials. Zelaya always is a gracious host, but never comes out of the meeting to have his picture taken publicly with our visitors, as he is so anxious to do with other visitors from Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. Almost all of our meetings take place at my Residence rather than at the more public setting of the Presidential Palace."

Ford’s cable to Washington concluded that Zelaya was "not a friend" of the U.S. "His views are shaped not by ideology or personal ambitions but by an old-fashioned nationalism where he holds the United States accountable for Honduras, current state of poverty and dependency," wrote Ford noting: "There also exists a sinister Zelaya, surrounded by a few close advisors with ties to both Venezuela and Cuba and organized crime."

The failure of Zelaya to be more obseqious to the U.S. may have been one of the reasons why the U.S. government was lukewarm in its immediate response to his ouster in June 2009. Although President Obama eventually condemned the coup, he did not immediately throw his support behind Zelaya.